An Ode to Active Listening

A Bridge Between Two Souls

This post is a love letter to one of my great passions: active listening. 

The more time passes, the more my reverence grows for this deceptively simple, magical, mysterious practice.

Active listening is a key hiding in plain sight that can free people from loneliness and disconnection.

Active listening is the art of being fully, lovingly, radically with a fellow human.

Ram Dass called it being a “loving rock.”

Another fitting term is “with-ness.”

When I first used the term “with-ness,” a colleague thought I’d said, “witness.” 

What a happy accident it was to be misheard in this way. To be radically with another person is to bear witness to them, to behold their anguish and their joy, their shame and their fears, their agony and their longing, and to welcome it all with open arms. The parts of a person that may have been buried in the darkest corners of their subconscious are welcome in the fullness of the listener’s presence.

Indeed, full presence is non-judgmental. To remain compassionate, curious, and grounded in the company of another’s demons is an act of love.

If the listener can lovingly welcome those demons, the journeyer is empowered to do the same.

In a world of shattered attention and ersatz connection, full presence can be the greatest gift.

I first learned how to actively listen over ten years ago, when I began to volunteer on a support line for parents with young kids. I chose that support line in part because we offered our callers unlimited follow-up calls. This practice allowed us to build relationships that lasted for years, and it allowed me so much space to cultivate my capacity to actively listen.

At first, I thought active listening was dumb, even patronizing.

I thought: This is it? I just listen to someone talk, and if they’re sad, I tell them they seem sad? Don’t they already know they’re sad? Won’t I just piss them off, or at the very least, create distance?

But over time, the layers began to reveal themselves.

I’d start to notice the palpable release of energy that would occur when I’d get it just right, when I’d express to a caller that I had heard not just their words, but the nuanced, often contradictory feelings and meanings beneath the words, some of which the caller may not have even been aware of. 

If that release of energy were a sound, it would be: “Ahhh…”

If it were a word, it would be: “Yessss.”

Those moments were the filaments of pure connection intertwining. 

The caller had reached out longing to be seen, heard, and understood. By sharing with them my experience of what they were expressing, I was fulfilling that need. I was showing that I cared, that their feelings mattered, that they were worthy of attention and compassion.

In On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes,

Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it—no matter how small or insignificant it may be—are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. To swim when your body is made for swimming. To kneel when you feel humble. To drink water when you are thirsty.

Fittingness can happen relationally, too.

To listen when another needs to be heard is the purest form of fittingness. It is when, Zadie might say, when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful.

Even when I didn’t get it just right, when my perception of what the caller was feeling differed from their own, or was different from what they were prepared to consciously acknowledge, the filaments of connection formed nonetheless. What mattered wasn’t that I got it right, but that I had cared enough to try. Plus, my efforts were an invitation for them to explore their own feelings and express them differently or more precisely.

Beneath our words, a shared understanding emerged: we were engaged in a joint expedition to notice and explore their thoughts and feelings. 

A wise teacher once told me, “You are not your thoughts.”

What a radical idea this was! And a liberating one, too.

Active listening is a way to telegraph to the caller that they are not their thoughts or feelings, and that we can examine those thoughts and feelings, together, with curiosity and compassion.

As my experience with active listening deepened, I felt like my eyes were adjusting to the darkness.

I’d notice ever more subtlety in what my clients were expressing. I’d notice the way one client’s voice would quicken ever so slightly when he’d talk about a particular family member. Sensations in my own body, like tightness in my chest or a clenching in my stomach, seemed like osmotic transmissions from the caller that, when verbalized, served as an invitation to the caller to check in with their body and discover present-moment experiences of which they may have been unaware. 

Each moment of connection built on the ones before it. 

Those moments formed a foundation.

And upon that foundation, insights arose. 

From those insights, healing occurred. 

I’ve heard active listening called reflective listening, but I don’t like that term. For me, it conjures the idea of passively holding up a mirror to another. 

But active listening is anything but passive. 

It’s a deeply internal process. It leverages all of the inner work the listener has ever done. And it seeps into the darkest parts of the listener that they have tried to keep hidden, illuminating the work they still need to do.

But how can that be? 

How can sharing our perception of another person’s experience be an internal process?

The answer lies in the following principle, which a mentor shared with me: 

What we can’t acknowledge is what we defend against.

If the listener can’t acknowledge a particular emotion in herself—perhaps because it’s too painful or shameful—her ability to support a caller in their experience of that emotion is inhibited. The caller’s experience of that emotion activates something within the listener that, consciously or otherwise, the listener fears. 

That fear precludes the listener from being fully present.

And so she defends against it. Perhaps she subtly encourages the caller to move away from that emotion. Or doesn’t allow that emotion all of the oxygen it deserves. Or diminishes it. 

That active listening is, paradoxically, an internal process for the listener is an opportunity.

It’s an invitation to the listener to do their own inner work.

This is an alchemical process. 

As the listener dives deep into and eventually falls in love with their darkest parts, a transmutation occurs, and the listener’s capacity to support a caller experiencing that emotion blossoms. 

The listener’s pain becomes the well from which the listener draws to more fully understand the caller’s experience.

The listener’s work on their pain becomes a tool for the caller’s healing.

All of these dynamics are amplified when the caller is on psychedelics.

The caller may be experiencing certain emotions or parts of themselves for the first time. They may be, as the great lay therapist Ann Shulgin explained, experiencing their Shadow—the parts of themselves that they have been made to feel were unlovable or unworthy, and have locked deep in the basement of their subconscious.

This is one reason why active listening is particularly well-suited for the psychedelic experience.

The listener models compassion for the caller’s Shadow, and invites the caller to engage with it in the same way. 

Active listening bathes the caller’s Shadow in compassion and invites it to remain in the sunlight. No longer cloaked in darkness, the Shadow may, over time, cease to control the caller’s fate, and may, in time, become part of a whole, integrated self. 

This is the path of healing.

A final note. 

I owe my love of active listening to my teacher, Anita, who taught the four-day training that I described above. Anita’s love of active listening became my own, and sparked the creation of Fireside Project, which has trained hundreds of volunteers in the art of active listening. And they, in turn, have shared this gift with tens of thousands of callers, and probably others in their lives. I have no doubt that, moment by moment of active listening, we are creating a more loving, interconnected world.