Deep Active Listening

A story of how my understanding of listening has deepened over the years.

My professional journey with listening began when I studied journalism and media production in college. In this context, close, careful listening and note-taking let me gather facts, quotes, and background information to support making stories for public consumption. Although I enjoyed the writing, editing, and publishing processes, I found that I kept coming back to the work for the interviews themselves: I had found a structured way to cultivate fascinating conversations with people about things that mattered deeply to them.

I got to deepen this practice during my graduate training in communication ecology and environmental studies. I explored various qualitative research methods, especially semi-structured interviewing. This approach facilitated even greater depth while in some ways constraining what the depth could be about. The process also placed significant emphasis on layered forms of listening where emotions, cultural expressions, and how people said things mattered at least as much as the specific content of what they said. I relished the opportunity to experience these rich layers with others.

After I graduated my therapist recommended the book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, which helped me hone my communication and listening. Through reading and training in this framework, I had the chance to encounter communication not for the purpose of generating knowledge but to cultivate meaningful connection and care. Using deep active listening to attune within the various relationships of my life was a profoundly rewarding and impactful practice that transformed, healed, and actively nurtured relationships. In this context, listening provides space to develop cross-cultural understanding necessary to living well across difference.

I thought I had arrived, and then I took an intensive end-of-life doula training. This training again focused on deep active listening, and something was different here: in end-of-life work there is often nothing to be fixed, produced, or even said. Through this existential spiral, I learned that listening is itself a holy form of holding, a way of creating space for awareness and self-connection to emerge and integrate in their own wise timing and manner. Considering all these experiences, I realize that by offering compassionate deep active listening, I am providing something precious to the world: a supportive space for ambiguity to work itself out. A comfort.

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