No one ever listened to me!

In May, 2013, I was giving a brief workshop on Level 1 Focusing to a group of women in Islamabad, Pakistan. This group of women, all educated and most of them married, came to the workshop at the encouragement of their friend, who had a brief Focusing session with me and wanted to share her experience with others.

As we started the session in Guest House Focusing, each was invited in a group to think of a lovely, quiet and peaceful place (real or imagined) that would evoke calmness in them. With a brief body scan to quiet the mind and bring the attention into the body, each person was invited to bring that place into the center of their body and to feel what it would be like to sit there. Each woman found this to be calming and relaxing and spoke of the connection this attitude bought to her sense of the divine, within their Islamic tradition.

The next step in the training was to bring awareness around deep listening skills and how each person holds being “listened to” in her body. I started by asked each woman to close her eyes and go back into that calm place she had visited in the previous activity. And from there, I suggested that each bring into her awareness a time when she had been fully heard, listened to in a deep way. And it was at this point that one woman (a grandmother) opened her eyes and blurted:

“I have never been listened to! How can one learn to listen when one never gets to be listened to? No wonder we don’t listen—we never had this modeled to us when we were children. We never listen to children and then we expect people to grow up and somehow know how to listen! How can we do this? We give advice without hearing what needs to be heard, rapidly moving away from what might be troubling.”

Indeed, how does one learn to listen when one is never listened to and how does one learn to listen if it has never been modeled? And no wonder the mode of interaction is always the giving of advice. No wonder.

We started again, only this time I gave a suggestion to check inside to see what it would feel like to be listened to. Checking to see what the inner self wanted. And this time there was deeper connection. We followed this with the listening activity where we sat in pairs and each listened to the other while something meaningful was narrated. And then we took the time to see what that felt like inside. Listening, without advice, without judgment, without taking sides for or against what was being shared became a new experience for several in the room—the start of a new way to be with what comes.

Patricia Omidian, PhD

Co-Director

Focusing International