Art of Listening - Body

It is obvious that the person who does not listen to his/her inner self, cannot listen to nature and to other persons. The art of listening needs to start with us, and we need to go through the process of fine-tuning not only our sensibilities, but also our priorities. When a person begins to hear less due to old age, or due to any other ailment, the doctors may provide a hearing aid; but there is a process through which this person has to go through in order to make the best of the electronic device: first of all, the hearing aid has to be tuned according to the specific problem of the person. But that does not solve the problem; when the person starts to use the aid, he/she begins to hear all the noises, the wind, the fan; all the noises are amplified, including the sound of persons. And here begins the tedious and painstaking process of sorting out sounds from noises. That is what we need to undertake before we become good listeners.

After Windows became a household name in all offices, one of the catch-words that went rounds was 'multi-tasking'; that is to say, the computer can do several works simultaneously. You may be typing a letter, while the printer is printing yet another document, and song may be being played. It is only the human mind which is capable of multi-tasking. When we are reading, not all of us pay attention to what we read; while listening to another person, only part of our attention is given to the speaker, while the mind is elsewhere. This can create a lot of problem in getting the best out of our efforts. At least when we are with human persons, we may need to avoid multi-tasking, and give our full selves to the person, because persons deserve our full attention.

It is a problem, because it is not that easy to give our full attention to what we are busy with; our minds are too fickle, and we may find ourselves helpless before the mind. But it is not impossible to control our minds, in order to focus our attention to what we want to. That requires training, tuning, even fine-tuning. There is a need to sift the different sounds that reach our minds, taking the ones that need our concentration, and throwing out the unwanted noise. In communication process as proposed by Strauss, between the speaker and the receiver is there a medium, but over and above the medium is a noise, which is caused by the external circumstances, and this may distort the message that is being communicated. We need to reduce the noise, so that we don't need to strain ourselves to get the message.

We cannot remove the noise that the mind presents (the excuse often is that the world is full of different noises), unless we take a dip into our inner selves, and that journey can sometimes be arduous and painful. One may come to know certain bitter truths, which had been kept hidden for several years; some of the hidden motives and agenda may pop up during the process, and it may be quite embarrassing to the person concerned, to find a not-so healthy self. But every growth process is painful; it is only after pruning that a plant can grow larger, and bear more fruits. If we are afraid of the pain that is intrinsic in any growth process, then we may have stunted growth, and should be happy with partial reality that our senses present.

We can enter into our inner selves only through the body, the senses, feelings and emotions. Therefore we shall need to start with a deep awareness of our body, how it responds to different impulses, responses. I find a quiet place, where no one will disturb me for the next five to ten minutes. I take a comfortable pasture, so that I don't move my body parts during the next few minutes; close my eyes in order to gain better concentration. This is going to be an exercise on the body. I start from the head; how do I feel, feel its weight, feel the strains and tensions on the forehead; move to each of the body parts: from forehead to the eyes, eye brows, nose, lips, chin, ears... Let me move slowly becoming aware of the different parts of my body. I will not try to change them, but just become aware of them. During the day, I will try to repeat this exercise once or twice, in order to become conscious of my body. Slowly my body may open its gates, for me to enter into the inner self!