Active listener is actually a misnomer. Your actual goal may be to help the person who talks with you feel heard and understood. That they feel connected and cared for. One needs to be an empathic listener for this rather than an active listener if active means “to act” which may involve giving the right response or the right advice to that person.
Listening is one of the most therapeutic functions we can perform for our loved ones. If only parents learn to be good listeners and simply listen to their children, it would help them grow in to more balanced adults. The primary healing happens when the speaker feels unburdened within them after talking with you and for this they need to feel safe to be able to say all that they wouldn’t normally speak out aloud.
Let us see how this can be possible. The first thing is to to switch off the thinking mind and listen quietly from the aware mind. This is the most difficult thing and we may need to practice this and learn how to switch off our thinking mind when we are alone with ourselves so that we can do this whenever we need to listen to someone.
Selvan Srinivasan · 1y
What are some ways to train your brain to be more positive?
The greatest positive attitude is the attitude of gratitude. The core nature of our mind is that of gratitude. As little babies, all of us were always in our place of joy and gratitude within. Our home within is our happy place and the energy of gratitude is available in limitless quantities there. We have simply got lost and forgotten our way back home to the grounded place within us. How did we get lost and where did we get lost? We got lost in our thinking mind by getting engaged with the non-stop mental activity in it. The following article explains this. Simply pause for a minute and practice with the following experiment and see how you feel. What is gratitude and how to return back to our natural state of gratitude is explained in the following article. After reading this, I suggest a sitting practice of gratitude meditation with the guided meditation audio link shared below. Selvans Guided Meditation – Opening the flow of Gratitude:
Switching off the thinking mind doesn’t mean that you will not be able to give appropriate advice to that person if they are seeking a suggestion from you or if it is your role to help them out. To intellectually understand what they are saying and think about a solution and give a suggestion are all subsequent activities that you can do after the person is done talking. The analytical mind is also our judgmental mind and the moment this gets switched on the talker would no longer feel comfortable talking freely. We cannot decide not to judge or criticise or form an opinion when we listen to someone, these are automatic functions that happen when our thinking mind is on.
How to remain in our Aware mind and not get carried away into our thinking mind while the person is speaking? This is a very valid question. The only way is to hold an awareness to our own inner body aliveness while listening. Be aware or conscious of the breath happening in the body as a felt body sensation of the expansion and contraction in the chest and abdomen region and a flow of air in the nostrils. Be simultaneously aware of your entire body and all the bodily sensations happening within. This is not distraction, this would be distracting only when the thinking mind is on because it cannot focus simultaneously on several things.
We first need to train ourselves to return back to our grounded state whenever we need to. Once we learn this it would be possible (although not always easy) to retain our grounding connection during a conversation. It is a long growth process and may take years of regular practice.You might have come across some aged person (usually grandmothers) or some experienced therapists who are powerful listeners and one feels light and unburdened after talking with them.
I offer an online mentoring program that definitely helps with this goal. You may be interested to read about it and enrol.http://hyderabadpsychologist.com/awareness-journey/