Proactive Mindfulness: Redefining Personal Growth

To counter the effects of social distancing and separation, we need to be sensitive to our nervous system's need to socially engage and connect.

Active Listening is a simple and effective way to improve the quality of our communications, at work and with friends and family. This 6-minute video provides step-by-step instructions and tips on how to practice Active Listening.

See also PDF of transcript.

Edited transcript:

Active Listening

I will describe an approach called Active Listening. When you first try it, you will likely feel a little awkward. This is normal because it’s different from what you’re accustomed to. After you try it, you will probably appreciate the result. Here are a few pointers on how to do it.

Taking turns

First, you need to keep in mind that the two of you need to take turns, one being the Talker while the other is the Listener. And then you’ll switch.

In ordinary life, we tend to multitask. That is, we prepare our own arguments while we are listening. This might work well enough in everyday conversations, but it is not enough when there is more emotional content. So you need to make a plan. For instance, if you’re going to be talking for half an hour, you decide that one of you is going to be the Talker for the first 15 minutes, and the other will be the Talker for the next 15 minutes. An effortless way to avoid any feelings about who starts is to toss a coin.

Focused on understanding

The second point is that the Listener needs to be focused on trying to understand the Talker. Keep in mind that, if you understand somebody, it does not mean you have to give up your own opinion. As the Listener, you are just trying to understand the Talker’s point of view from their point of view. You don’t have to agree.

Summarizing

The third characteristic of Active Listening is that, as the Listener, you give the Talker a summary of what you’ve heard. You don’t wait until the full 15 or 20 minutes to do that. You do it every couple of minutes. Sometimes it could be just a minute or so. There’s a natural rhythm that the two of you develop over time.

Taking it in

The fourth characteristic is that the Talker pays attention to the summary and takes it in. The Talker either nods in approval, says yes, or amends it by adding something that was not picked up by the Listener.

By the way, it’s quite OK if the Talker adds something to what you, the Listener, have said. Very often, this helps the Talker better understand what it is that was important to them. So, either way: either the Talker keeps nodding to what you’re saying, or it’s an opportunity for them to find something else. In both cases, it’s fine. And you continue this way: talking, listening, summarizing, taking it in, until the end of the allotted time for the Listener. Then, you switch.

Pausing

The fifth characteristic of Active Listening is that it involves pausing. This is not a rapid-fire, yackety yack, type of conversation. Pausing allows the new, the unformed, to come up. This is what this kind of communication is about.

So, as the Listener, you take a pause before giving your summary to the Talker. As the Listener, you don’t jump in every time the Talker pauses. You give them a chance because maybe they’re just waiting to say something more. As a Talker, don’t feel like you have to fill the air with words. It’s OK if you take time without words while you’re trying to sense what comes up next.

This 4-minute talk suggests a way to approach washing hands for the coronavirus as a mindful practice.

For a transcript, see my article on Medium: Washing hands as a mindful practice.

Published March 2020

Karyne Wilner talks about how cell life and neuroplasticity of the brain and body can be enhanced through work with the bioenergetic field.

This recording is different from the other recordings in this podcast series. Instead of a conversation, it features Serge Prengel talking about polarization and the Relational Implicit. You can also read this as a text (below the audio player).

What happens when we get polarized? How can we avoid polarization to engage in more enriching discussions? I would like to share some thoughts based on an experiential exploration of polarization.

The experience I am drawing upon was not a polarized discussion. It was a collaborative endeavor: Remembering experiences of polarization to better understand them. I will be bringing up a contrast between this collaborative atmosphere and the circumstances under which we get more polarized.

The initial shift

The conversation started as an interview. The roles were clear. I was the interviewer, and Kirk Schneider was the person interviewed. We were going to talk about a topic he has thought about a lot and written a book about: “The Polarized Mind.” We didn’t go very far with the conventional interview portion. Soon after the beginning, we shifted the format of the conversation.

It started with my suggestion that we proceed carefully: We were not discussing a neutral topic, but one which could emotionally touch our audience. I disclosed that I could, at times, have a polarized mind. Kirk suggested that we explore the topic experientially. Effectively, we shifted roles, with him leading me through a process of experiential exploration. Before we went any further into this process, we established some rules for safety. All of this evolved organically.

When an interview takes place, some things are so evident that it is not necessary to state them explicitly. There are specific roles: the interviewer and the interviewee. The manner of the interview may vary, but both parties share the implicit assumptions. They constitute a stable framework for the interchange—I think about it as the Shared Implicit.

Through a process of attunement, we restructured our Shared Implicit. This involved paying attention to implicit clues and resulted in making the space safe and comfortable. This early step set the tone for the possibility of further expansion during the rest of the conversation.

Embodied Experience 

An experiential exploration means paying attention to the experience from inside, as opposed to talking about it as if it were outside. Exploring inner experience involves paying attention to body sensations.

Here is what came up for me as I was recollecting polarized interactions to access my inner experience of them. I noticed the tightening of my shoulders, a shallower breath, a sense of my spine folding in. All of this, subtly, not necessarily visible to an outside observer.

These physical sensations were not random. They were the result of my whole organism reacting to the situation. They were “bottom-up,” implicit reactions, as opposed to “top-down.” Through neuroscience findings, we are keenly aware that much of our functioning is at a “bottom-up,” implicit level. Somatic mindfulness involves being in touch with embodied experience, i.e., the Somatic Implicit.

As we stay present with our experience, a felt sense forms, which is the way we experience the Somatic Implicit. In this case, my felt sense of the experience came down to a simple handle: a sense of rigidity. Conversely, as I shifted away from polarization, the experience was a sense of fluidity.

Interestingly, Kirk had defined the polarized mind as a “fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view.” The bodily sense of rigidity, the opposite of fluidity, made this concept come to life. It was not an abstract idea, but a felt experience of the Somatic Implicit.

Tracking the Somatic Implicit