listening to the liminal

What is the difference between hearing and listening? Hearing receives sound; listening receives life. Listening happens not only through ears but through skin, breath, memory, soil, pulse, the wider metabolic body of Earth sensing itself.

Who or what first taught you to listen? A parent’s sigh, the pull of wind in dry grass, the tilt before someone speaks your name. Most of us were taught to listen for correctness, to gather information, to please, regurgitate, prove comprehension. Listen close. Modernity schools us to quiet the body while amplifying the mind, to hear for meaning and not for relationship.

That training dulls and atrophies our muscles of attunement. We start listening only for what we already recognize, mistaking analysis and information for knowing, for intimacy. The colonial habit of listening is one of separation—self from others, humans from the rest of nature, listening from wider-sensorial fields of impact and memory. Yet beneath the noise of achievement and urgency, a different listening always is: receptive to the vital aliveness of it all.

Deep listening is porous. It lets perception move through us. It asks us to notice the layers of fear, vigilance, and inherited survival that shape our attention, and to meet them with tenderness. Listening then becomes less about collecting meaning and more about entering the silent conversation with the aliveness within and around us.

Learning to listen begins with listening to the shadows we inherit and may be afraid to engage with. It’s about listening to the clutter, to the contradictory voices within, with curiosity: without rushing to fix, heal, ignore, guide, judge or change. It’s about learning to encounter the complexity inside ourselves so we can even begin to hold the complexity outside. Inside out.

Thích Nhất Hạnh reminded us that mindfulness is not an opiate for retreat but a discipline of seeing clearly in the midst of the world’s pain.

Together, these practices play in the liminal space of image-worlds, inviting wider forms of listening.

They do not aim for transcendence but for return, to body, to relation, to the tangled responsibility of being alive together.

They ask us to return to curiosity and a loving suspicion of the mind’s loops of identification and disidentification.

They try to expand how and to whom we listen. And, like everything, they are incomplete.

The journey begins with the narration and sensations of the body, moves through the mind’s patterns of questioning and categorization, and opens into a texture of being beyond identity.

Here is a small ecology of practice for your sensing. Three little exercises for remembering the liminal that we all are.

lineages

Learning to Listen grows from the teachings of Zen Buddhist Thích Nhất Hạnh, Marshall Rosenberg, A.H. Almaas, and Kåre Landfald, adapted here for an online format.

Temporal Echoes adapts Toltec and Kabbalistic dreaming practices and was brought into being with REC artist Mar Mordente.

notes on beginning / traps / tips
(for those of us needing more help)

• Nothing never happens. Something is always happening. In whatever way you are arriving today is the practice.
• These invitations can be incredibly simple. Because of that, it can be easy to fall into the pattern of “I know this” or “this is stupid” and that’s totally okay! Part of the practice is to observe and deeply encounter categorization/aversion/distraction/dictation of the experience in that moment. If this happens, try to reconnect to the prompt and what is happening in my body right now—and witness that. I invite you to lean into the practice of showing up with genuine curiosity to anything that arises and witnessing/welcoming (with curiosity) resistances to the invitation, distractions, assumption of knowing, etc.
• Try to practice mapping sensations without categorizing (good, bad, painful, pleasurable, etc.) and instead with curiosity, even with gross sensations. Can we notice what is happening in us without mobilizing/narrativizing the information (to share, fix, solve, etc.)? What happens then?
• In learning to listen and attune, we are working on trusting the corporeal conversations happening within and around ourselves. Below is a stepping stone list of potential body signals to bring closer attention in order to help rebuild that conversation. The list is very incomplete but can be training wheels:

⚬ Body adjustments: Changes in posture
⚬ Breathing: Changes in rhythm and depth to the breath
⚬ Shift in Body Temperature: Changes in warmth or coolness as circulation and relaxation progress
⚬ Altered Sensation in Extremities: Tingling, heaviness, or lightness in hands, feet, or limbs
⚬ Heightened Sensory Perception: Enhanced awareness of touch, temperature, and spatial orientation
⚬ Spontaneous Movement: Natural, instinctive movements that may emerge
⚬ Spontaneous thought: welcome thoughts, images, memories that might seem unrelated and meet them with curiosity
⚬ Some Somatic Vocabulary: pulsation / vibration / numbness / softness / tension / dense / blocked / prickly / bubbly / fluid / hollow / hot / pressure

A framework or vocabulary can be helpful, but it’s easy to let the framework start defining the realm of sensation again. Let sensation lead the language. In trusting (or at least being curious enough to follow) the body’s silent conversations, what visceral ways of relating might be remembered?

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learning to listen

This is a guided somatic practice to support your capacity to listen beyond the mind, through the body, and into the liminal. It invites you to notice what is alive in you right now without needing to fix, name, or understand it. To begin, find your place of practice. This can be in your home, in a park, or in a forest. As long as you find a location where you can move, express and be comfortable without being disturbed. It is even better if you can find a place that you can return to and continue to build a relationship with.

If you are in or going to a forest: please bring an offering and perhaps ask to enter upon arriving. Maybe you can try to introduce yourself to the space through this offering (it could be an offering of a song, a plant, some food or some part of you. See what creative invocation moves you in this offering). Also, sometimes when we ask to enter the forest, the answer is no. If you feel/intuit this is the case, don’t doubt or override that sense, just listen and return another time.

What you will need: cellphone, earphones, a comfortable place

tangential spokes

This two-part practice invites you to unsettle the dominance of vision (ocularcentrism) and explore new pathways of sensing, seeing, and responding.

In Part One (audio warm up), we’ll slow down and notice how language and attention shape how we look, sense, and relate, and how photographic words like capture, shoot, and take echo extractive logics, narrowing our ways of witnessing the world.

What you will need: cellphone with camera and earphones

temporal echoes

This is a guided practice that invites you to explore the liminal through the making of a mask and a reflective encounter with yourself, using a phone as a mirror. You’ll need a quiet space, your phone (on airplane mode), and a few found objects from your environment to construct a temporary mask. This practice plays with identity, perception, and transformation, inviting you to meet “yourself” differently.

To begin, find your place of practice. This can be in your home, in a park, or in a forest—as long as you find a location where you can move, express, and be comfortable without being disturbed. It is even better if you can find a place that you can return to and continue to build a relationship with.

If you are in or going to a forest: please bring an offering and perhaps ask to enter upon arriving. Maybe you can try to introduce yourself to the space through this offering (it could be an offering of a song, a plant, some food, or some part of you. See what creative invocation moves you in this offering). Also, sometimes when we ask to enter the forest, the answer is no. If you feel/intuit this is the case, don’t doubt or override that sense, just listen and return another time.

What you will need: cellphone, earphones