ENERGY PROFILE FOR APRIL: LISTENING
Just for fun, answer the following questions regarding ‘listening’.
• Do you listen when you read, either to what the words are saying silently
or to the authors’ energies?
• Do you listen when you’re thinking about others?
• Are you listening when feeling other people’s emotions?
• Are there sounds to silence?
• Do you listen in your dreams?
• When you walk past a plant and suddenly know it needs water, were you
listening to the plant talking to you?
• When you are driving your car and you know the driver is going to do
something before it occurs, were you listening to the drivers’ thoughts?
• When you know something is going to happen before it does, what are
you listening to?
• When you listen for ‘information or content’ do you listen differently than
when you are listening to console a friend?
Listening appears to be simple, passive and takes little effort. Actually listening is complex, active and takes more effort than we realize. Listening is deceptive!
Where and when are we taught to listen? Ideally our parents would know how to listen, especially to their children, but that is only true if their parents knew how to listen and role model it.
Have you experienced someone being quiet and ‘appearing’ to listen to you but you knew they really weren’t listening? How did you know they weren’t listening? Were you listening to them? What does this mean? It means that listening is more than hearing words and sounds.
Listening is a whole body experience involving not only the physical body but also the emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. The physical body hears the words. The emotional body registers the emotions, whether evident or hidden. The mental body listens for the unspoken words and thoughts. The spiritual body hears from our heart the heart of the other person.
It is not easy to listen because if one part of us is reacting (i.e. our emotional body) it affects the ability to listen by our other bodies.
And then there are protections. Protections are ways we protect ourselves emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Some protections filter and interfere with our ability to listen. For instance, blaming, whether spoken or thinking it in our mind, separates what we hear into neat little energy packages of ‘they did this and I did this’.
There are also different purposes for listening: discriminative, comprehensive, critical, therapeutic, appreciative and soulful. What this means is that in different situations and with different people we listen for different things, for different reasons and for different content.
Men listen differently than women. From my energy research of almost thirty years, I cannot tell you why this is but it is consistent. The major factor is how men approach the person they are listening to. They tend to energetically approach straight on whereas women approach more from an angle.
Problems can arise when a man approaches a woman like he would approach a man. The woman will not feel heard or understood. The man will also have a difficult time understanding the woman. Although he may be accused of not listening, it is not that he is not listening as it is that he is not picking up the correct information. It would be similar to the man going to the wrong home and wondering where his wife is.
This also happens for a woman approaching a man like she would approach another woman. It isn’t effective and causes a lot of marital problems. We ‘need’ to feel heard because it makes us feel important, visible, valuable and loved.
Listening from the ‘heart’ is a particular type of listening that Creative Insights teaches (along with the other types mentioned above). Listening from the heart is effective and is not gender based. It approaches from the energy of the heart and extends support, understanding and unconditional love.
The above energy picture shows how to Listen from the Heart. It shows your subconscious mind how to energetically do this and like anything else it takes practice. Enjoy. Note how it makes you feel when you do it with others and even with yourself.