June 18, 2023

297: What Listening is For

36 minutes

Every experience we have of another person is first about us (our hopes, our fears, our way of interpreting, our projections). And every experience another person has of us is first about them. We live, in some very deep way, in a ‘hall of mirrors’.

So, do we have any chance of truly ‘receiving’ one another? What in ourselves might we have let go of to make that possible? And then what do we have to do, to listen in a way that meets the ‘other’ instead of meeting ‘ourselves’?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here's our source for this week:

What Listening is For

We project everything we perceive onto the world, including the world of others: their beauty, their emotions, their personalities, their hopes, and their fears... While what you perceive about another person is indeed in reference to your interactions with them, your perceptions still take place internally to you, though they arise from the space between you and them. This means that [what you experience as] their personality is in a very literal sense your personality transposed. Their fears are your fears transposed... Likewise, other people's perceptions of you are exactly the same. You too are created as a function of them. You contain all the personalities, fears, and colors of the others you perceive...

... so what we need to each our children and each other is the ability to 'just stop' when listening, not only in conflict but always - in order to listen differently. Listening is the diminishment of the answers we project onto the world.

Beau Lotto, from 'Deviate'

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

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