Pat’s Story of Love-Listening
I have come to realize that deep listening is a primary part of my original medicine. My deep listening is the space into which this book has expressed itself, and how I have accessed Nene’s wisdom and my own. To me deep listening is an absolutely essential skill for these times, for how else can we work together to resolve the world’s crises. It feels important to share how it is that I came by this practice.
Sacred Wounds
My initiation into listening began when I was five years old, when I was either assigned or took the role of confidant for my father. He was a very disturbed man, and after a day of drinking he would pour his pain and misery onto me, while I absorbed it like a sponge. Intuitively, I knew that my father was dangerous; intuitively, I was doing my best to keep that violence at bay by listening, by being of value to him. It seemed like a matter of life and death, and it became a way of life.
As I got older, I discovered that being a really good listener was also an opportunity to hide from the world. The outside world I was especially hiding from was my mother who often hit me out of the blue. To this day I don’t know why. I worked hard to be perfect for her, but when that didn’t change anything, I used my listening to become invisible and keep myself safe.
I came to see that if I was listening to other people and inviting them to share their stories, I didn’t have to express myself. And in not expressing myself, I was safe from the reactions of others. Listening became my strategy for protecting myself from the outside world.
So my practice in deep listening had its roots in real life experiences, in what I now call my sacred wounds. I listened to my parents’ dysfunctions, becoming absorbed in them, losing myself and my feelings to their pain, their risks, their experiences.
Love is present
My childhood also contained the roots of my healing. My grandfather died when I was five years old. He had been for me not only extraordinarily safe, but also extraordinarily loving. I just basked in his love, which became like a seed inside me. So when my grandfather died, I had only my father. And I knew my father was dangerous for me.
So I did a funny thing in my mind. I put my grandfather’s face on my father, so that I could love him. It was safe then to love my father because I had made him my grandfather. Despite the fact that my father’s behavior fluctuated wildly, the loving energy connected to my relationship with my grandfather came to be associated with the listening energy.
I learned how to love, and how to be loved from my grandfather. I associated my grandfather with my father so that I could see him as I saw my grandfather, rather than as the way he was, and love him. As I learned to listen to my father, I created a connection in my mind between listening and loving.
The gift matures
I’ve worked on myself diligently for the past 32 years, in therapy since I was thirty, to discover the essence of what I know from these experiences. With therapy, education, spiritual understanding, these wounds and my survival strategy of love-listening have become the foundation of a gift I offer others. The way of life I learned as a child has become a safe container in which others can come to know about themselves.
I’m a very successful psychotherapist. What deep love-listening does is offer a safe stage for my clients to express the deepest aspects of themselves. This kind of listening requires a still mind that does not judge or react, and a heart that is open and loving.
I have found that when I listen this way, people are incredibly interesting. I’m fascinated with their inner workings, the brilliance of the unconscious. “How do our experiences cause us to make certain decisions?” I wonder.
Sometimes I’ll see a lot of clients, and people will ask, “Oh, don’t you get burned out?” or “don’t you feel burdened?” or “how do you do it?” And I just don’t. I’m tired because my brain is working, but every person that walks through my office door, every session, every time they come in, it’s an entirely new experience.
I don’t know what they’re going to discover. I don’t know what I’m going to discover. I don’t know what pieces of the puzzle might reveal themselves in that particular session. It’s absolutely fascinating to me.
Part of what I do is to use my love-listening space to extend loving energy and witness energy to the person who’s sitting across from me. I think it was my study of The Course in Miracles that most matured this capacity in me. For a number of years and in many workbook exercises, I learned about extending love, extending love, and extending love. And I had a lot of experience with the power of that loving energy, that higher vibration, becoming confident in that power. I developed a felt sense of extending love… a joyous feeling inside. So it’s a mutual blessing for me to extend love. Because my therapeutic container, my office, is so often filled with this energy of love-listening-extended, I experience my office as a temple.
Listening within and becoming visible
Of course, as a psychotherapist I’m also paying attention to what comes up from within me, what my guidance or intuition reveals. Learning to listen to my own inner voice was an essential part of healing and maturing my gift. And as I learned the lesson, I was coming out of hiding, listening to and expressing my own understandings and realizations. I was building my capacity to create a field of listening/loving not only for other people, but also for myself.
Recently, some friends videotaped me, and I was able to watch myself communicate. I listened. I was absorbed, and I found it very compelling. I realized that I read the books I’m writing, to know more about myself. I watch the talks I give, to keep growing my understanding of how my experiences have shaped me.
And as I’ve understood and freed my gift, I’ve been increasingly drawn to share it. I went to Santa Fe to study with Gail Larson, because I knew that it was time to be stepping out onto the stage. My willingness and my comfort and my desire to be visible were growing exponentially. I paid $2500 plus air fare to commit to the experience of becoming visible, not only to myself, but also to others.
Given that commitment, it was so interesting that as I was heading for Santa Fe, I lost my driver’s license in the airport. Nowhere to be found. It was as though I left my identify in Michigan somewhere, and came back from Santa Fe ready for a new more visible one.
This time is a big turning point for me. In the past, I’ve been very committed to being invisible, very committed, survival committed. My willingness to take the stage now is not only the outcome of my therapeutic and spiritual processes, but also because of how valuable deep listening is for these times.
As a psychotherapist I create the stage for someone else. Now I find myself wanting to be successful as a public speaker, which is the ultimate visibility… because what I have to contribute from a public platform, my knowledge, is something important to say that I feel wonderful saying. I’ve become so effective at listening to my inner voice and hearing the intelligence that comes from within me, I can just stand on a stage or sit in a circle and let it come through me. Then I’m a conduit and it’s magical.
Prior to my therapy, I don’t think I ever felt entitled to have anybody listen to me. But for the past 5, maybe 10 years I’ve been working on this visibility piece. It’s clearly time to share what I’ve learned, for my own growth, but also because it is an offering that will help heal the divisiveness that is so prevalent today. What I’ve learned from my sacred wounds… skills of deep love-listening, listening to others, listening to myself inside, teaching others to listen to themselves… is essential information for these times.
