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Listening: four reasons it’s good for you

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Listening is calming. If we listen with our hearts rather than our thinking mind, something extraordinary happens. Our whole being engages with who or what we are listening to. It may imply using our ears, but we open our souls. So the act of really hearing what is being said involves little or no thought and rather than our ears, we employ our whole being.

Listening with the soul

This is soul practice. We can only engage in this miraculous act if we disengage. It involves disengaging from “who I am or how I Listening with the soulshould respond”. There is disengagement from self. With our whole being now available, we give it completely.

Half measures

Everyone knows what it is like to talk to someone when the other person is only partially listening. We know this because this is habitual mode for most people. So in most conversations, the other person is not fully present. And before we say “aha – I knew it was the other person at fault here”, we all do it. Hearing the other person talk, we work out what to say. Or we listen, perhaps, with our own agenda in mind.

Being fully present

So in the normal way of listening, we are absent. We do not fully hear. Moreover, we are absent from ourselves because part of us is closed down. The mind is cluttered and the heart is deaf. Life is less than full. We are failing to realise our potential as real human beings. Satisfaction eludes us because we hold back. We don’t switch off but we close down the mental chatter that fills our minds for much of the day.

Four reasons why listening is good for you

1. By listening fully, your body and mind relax. Blood pressure eases and tension melts way. The mind becomes clearer and sharper.
2. As mental chatter reduces, we become happier. The act of listening carries its natural ease over into the rest of life.
3. Engaging with the other person helps to heal them. Whenever we help with another person’s healing processes, the natural law of the universe inevitably triggers healing responses in us. If we do it because we think we will benefit, though, it won’t work – that’s another aspect of natural law.
4. Life becomes more satisfying and, as it does so, the ageing process slows down. Stress and unhappiness age us unecessarily. By listening, we do the opposite. We also help to make a better, happier world. So that’s not bad, is it?

More like this in Awakening Heart and The Art of Not Doing

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  4. Sex or celibacy – which is better for the soul?

Stillness: why it is vital for your health

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Stillness is with us all the time. It is not a product of meditation or Stillness Tibetanything else. We may practise meditation, yoga, or taiji, or lose ourselves in art, music or gardening. If we are lucky, we may experience some stillness. But these disciplines and pursuits are not responsible for that – they simply lead us back to our natural quietness. The quietness never leaves us. We just choose not to remain with it.

Stillness for health and wellbeing

Activity can be addictive. It is so much easier to distract ourselves by being constantly busy than to be still. When we are still, we have to face ourselves. That can be uncomfortable so we have become very adept at avoidance. If we can’t find something to do, we look for entertainment of some sort. Even the small pleasure of a cup of tea or coffee with a friend seems to require an examination of smartphones these days.

This can cause problems for our sense of wellbeing because the mind never rests. Some agitation is always there and the body constantly responds to our fluctuations in mood. Breathing, heart rate and blood pressure alter as our thoughts and emotions vacillate.

Unnecessarily, we wear ourselves out. Sleep patterns are less natural and fail to refresh us fully. Many modern diseases result from stress but we still keep piling it on. If this sounds a little bit grim, it is. But we can reverse the process.

Stillness is more than doing nothing – it’s an art

If we try to sit and do nothing, the mind will wander. From sheer habit, the mind grasps at some things and rejects others. The winds – the subtle energies of the body – reflect the chaotic patterns of thought. Emotions and feelings rise and fall. If we’re tired, we may drift off into sleep. Stillness, however, eludes us. Either the mind is too busy or it descends into fog.

Teachings abound on methods of training an erratic mind to come to a state of clarity and stillness. The modern way seems to be to keep going from one set of teaching or guidance to another. This is no good. Acquiring a skill takes time. It requires patience. The mind needs plain food, not an elaborate buffet that we keep picking at until we have too much.

Stick to one path

Find a way that suits you and stick to it. And keep on sticking to it. Don’t veer off course. We may be tempted to try something else. Someone may offer this teaching or that. When that happens, look at the mind that is thinking that way and don’t move. Gradually you will learn the art and become fully acquainted with your own innate stillness. And you will know that happiness and wellbeing are present here and now.

More on finding the path to stillness can be found in The Art of Not Doing

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Related posts:

  1. Rest: how to get what you really need
  2. Time: why keeping an eye on the clock shortens your life
  3. Stillness and clarity: here’s how they can save your life
  4. Calm the mind in a crazy world

Mindful living isn’t easy but it’s worth it

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Mindful living is not easy. It means overcoming the tendency that we all have to be partly absent from whatever we are doing.

But if we want to be really happy, we have to love and, in order to love, we have to be fully present.

Actually, although it is not easy to be mindful, it is the simplest thing in the world. Instead of doing more, we have to do less.

Most things in life require us to act. In order to achieve anything, it seems we have to do more. Then we become hooked in the spiral of doing more and more. Or we become disheartened or feel guilty because we haven’t achieved what we think we should have.

mindful living stimuliA mad world makes loving more difficult

Our modern world does not particularly support mindfulness, either. Despite technology that enables almost anything that we could wish for to be achieved or obtained, our modern lifestyle detracts from an environment that encourages mindfulness. Stimuli – advertising, radio, television, mobile telephones, e-mails, the internet and so on – bombard us at every turn. The modern mind generally works too fast because it races from one thing to another without paying a great deal of attention to almost anything. One major effect of this is that we are not generally very good at expressing love.

Mindful living means being

Fortunately, there is a middle way. Mindful living is not so much about doing things as about being. We simply have to be in order to be a full human being. Being busy can be very good, of course. Through our various occupations, we learn skills and serve our fellow human beings. This is all good. But most people are so active in their minds that they find it very difficult to be still. Even when we have the chance to sit and do nothing for a while, the majority of folk will look for something to do.

But we can (not) do itmindful living happy

All is not lost, however. No matter how busy we are or think we are, it is possible to become more mindful. It doesn’t matter whether a person has an IQ of 70 or 150. Everyone can enjoy greater awareness – and so greater fulfilment – in life. In fact, sometimes people with very active intellects find mindful living more difficult at first because their minds are always arguing, forever differentiating between this and that, and making judgements. But, like monetary wealth, more of something does not always bring greater happiness and an overactive intellect is a case in point. Nevertheless, once the purity of natural awareness is experienced, the joy – and relief – is equally great for everyone. And the loving is easy.

From the book Awakening Heart 

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Related posts:

  1. World view: why what we see has to change
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  3. Heart: why we have to listen to what it says
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