Only the Modest Need Apply

I have forty of your emails waiting for me at the same time as events are opening up on entirely new fronts, not connected with my appeal to lightworkers.

I never knew a person could be this busy and continue functioning.

I may need to read your letters through once as a piece and then respond after thought. So not the quick turnaround we’re both used to.

I did want to comment on one matter which long-time readers will know is dear to my heart, (1) that came up in an email. It’s the subject of listening.

Listening is Not Advising

One of the immediate things that shook out of my lightworker appeal was offers to listen. They are most welcome. But I also have to clarify exactly what it is I’m looking for and what not. This is a rather long article and I apologize.

Lightworkers need listening. The original lightworker, E, said in her letter of parting that she desperately wanted to be heard by someone and couldn’t find anyone to listen.  And that’s a common complaint among lightworkers.

For a lot of us, our exposure to listening is with professionals like doctors who listen for a short time and then give us their professional advice. Tell me your symptoms and I’ll recommend a treatment strategy.

We may therefore approach the idea of listening as a practice where someone tells us something until an idea occurs to us and we offer a piece of advice.

That’s not listening as I use the word. It isn’t close. It never will be. It’s perhaps the opposite of listening.

Please can we agree as we go forth in our united lightworker efforts, not to use that particular model of listening any longer? If we’re to take up communicational patterns that reflect our rising frequencies, listening should top our list.

Our Unnanounced Modus Operandi

Let me go into our current model of listening a little more deeply.

The way things are now, we approach listening with the unannounced modus operandi:  “Tell me what’s happening with you and I’ll listen up to the point that I get an idea of how to ‘make you better.’ Then I’ll give my advice to you.” (2)

As soon as I get a thought, my listening is over and you need to entertain and probably follow my advice. If you don’t, after a while, I’ll get grouchy and uninspired and stop “listening.”  “What the heck? I gave you my best ideas. You didn’t want to fix the problem. You don’t want to get better.” Does this not sound familiar from our Third-Dimensional drama days?  In actual fact we haven’t been listening very much at all, except to our own minds.

None of this is what I’m looking for when I suggest that we need listeners.

If you’re responding to the call for listeners, please, take off your counsellor’s hat. Leave advice aside and simply, only, just, please listen. Plain bare awareness. Naked consciousness. Pure, 100% listening. (3)

If we had someone who would simply listen to us, staying conscious, feeding back in very small doses what they see and hear, we’d be able to put all the puzzle pieces on the table and see the picture that the puzzle becomes.

Only the Modest Need Apply

Listening is only for people who’ve handled their ego needs to feel self-important, to have reassurance that they’re OK, etc. If listeners use the session to get their own ego needs met, well, that has little to do with listening.

Listening is only for mature and modest people. It takes a lot of humility or modesty to set one’s own agenda aside again and again and again and just be there for the other person.

What’s the purpose of listening?

The purpose of listening is to provide the speaker with a second self, a partner who can set aside their own agenda for a brief time and hear everything the speaker wants to communicate, allowing them to go where their train of thought and feeling leads them to, committed to remaining till the “Aha!” moment  of realization occurs. (4) (And exceptions do apply.)

It’s a doubly-modest task in that the minute the “Aha!” moment occurs, all the speaker usually wants to do is to run out the door to tell their loved ones what they’ve just realized, what breakthrough in understanding they just had, in their “Eureka!” moment of inspiration. All because someone cared enough to listen.

If they even know what just happened, it’s unusual. Does anyone know that this breakthrough came about as a result of listening? Not many. They simply talk about it as if they realized or saw something in a conversation.

And yet many of them, I think, wonder to themselves at night: “What just happened?”

Good Listening is Invisible

In my view, good listening is invisible. We’re leaving the person with themselves and a second self (us).

My favorite joke about listening is the number of times I’ve been called a brilliant conversationalist when all I did was listen. I may have said a few sentences feeding back to them what I saw or heard. In what way was I a conversationalist? Listening is brilliant but it’s not a conversation for the listener. It’s service.

Listening is not about me in any way, shape or form. It’s about the speaker. The rewards are small from the ego’s standpoint. Rather than being gratified or reinforced, the ego has to be set aside repeatedly.

But the rewards are great for those who actually, really do want the other person to be free of their predicament and know that their freedom can be purchased through our listening. Yes, it takes time. But that’s our investment in the having the world work.

Space doesn’t allow going into the art of listening. But that’s a whole other subject for a rainy day.

So please, if you’re absolutely terminally married to the thought that you’re going to advise the person you’re listening to, don’t listen. Perhaps seek out another line of service. No fault, no blame.

A person coming to us for listening wants just that: listening, for as long as it takes for them to lay the puzzle pieces on the table and see the picture. “Aha!” They want to be free. And listening is the best way to serve their freedom.

If I was granted one wish that I could have as the product of my entire work and reward for it, what would I wish for? I would wish that our entire planet learned how to listen to each other. I wish that listening was taught in grade schools everywhere and that people prided themselves on really listening.

Footnotes

(1) My Mother was an accomplished listener. She was also a victim of domestic abuse, which might not have happened  if my Father had known how to communicate and listen.

(2) People, especially lightworkers, are not broken and don’t need fixing. They simply need to be heard.

(3) As a spiritual discipline, listening, I think, is part of karma yoga, seva, or service.

(4)  If we’re committed to the person having a realization, then we’ll find a quiet space for listening, turn off our cellphones, decline to be interrupted, not space out, and clear the decks so we can remain until the result it produced. Goodbye to the fifty-minute hour.