A Deeper Listening

Healing Conversations - Reflections Series

Dear Friends, I greet you with care in these difficult times. As some of you know, my book Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness will be released on November 26th by Orbis Books. This month’s Reflection is a brief excerpt. May it nourish you.

As a planetary community, we are in a liminal space of collective unknowing. Conjecture, predictions, hope, and pessimism abound, but in truth we don’t know if humanity will survive or what life on the planet will look like if we do.^⁠ We must listen. Spirit speaks to us through the loving breath of Earth, the many intelligences of Nature, the whispering of ancestors and coming generations, the knowing in our bones.

Deep listening encompasses mindful compassionate attention to the world around us: to ourselves, our bodies, our own suffering and need, as well as to the suffering and needs of others and the Earth. Listening as a practice of healing; not to judge or criticize, but with the intention of connection. Such listening evokes a profound and reverent sensitivity to what lies beneath the surface. A simultaneous reaching out and receptivity from the belly of being, alert for the scent of what is behind, below, above, between the words spoken, the actions taken. Listening as a spiritual discipline. Listening to gesture, breath and tone, to passion and to grieving and to laughter, to hunger, to terror, rage, and grace. Listening for the “sound familiar” within a stranger’s voice.

During my training in clinical medicine we learned to attune our diagnostic ear to the inner chambers of the heart, to perceive the subtlest rumble or rub, to describe and even imitate the whisper-soft murmurs and whooshes of the body’s coded language. At first it was an exercise in frustration, but then somehow, with patience and persistence, a new ear was opened—one that was able to decipher the code. I am reminded of this when my acupuncturist places her fingers on my wrist to read my pulses. It’s more like a listening than a touch, as if there are special ears in each of her fingertips that “hear” the quality of chi the way I listened for the character of my patients’ heartbeat.

Now I strive to listen with that same acuity to the hearts of those who come to me for counseling and prayer . . . to attend to the diagnostic murmurs and rumbles of an often brokenhearted world. At the same time, I seek to hone my listening to discern the hum of divine connectivity within all of Life . . . to place my careful fingers so tenderly on the pulsebeat of Being that I sense even the rustling portents of its dreaming. This is listening with the mystic’s ear that recognizes the hearer and the heard are one, both part of that infinite creative Is-ness that imagined them into expression.

To listen from this place requires the cultivation of silence. As theologian Dorothee Soelle described it, “the silence of the mouth, the silence of the mind, the silence of the will.”^⁠ Through this practice, and through the intention of spiritual availability, the third ear begins to open. In silence is the spaciousness to listen deeply, to offer the fullness of our presence in service to the revelation of another’s wholeness. This communion is found not only in our encounters with other humans, but through our reverent listening to the world—to Earth herself, and to the voices of her many children.

In our high-tech society, we are constantly bombarded with information, with sensory inputs, sound and noise. We carry our computers in our hand, eyes glued to tiny screens, ears assaulted by a fast-paced cacophony both within and without. A 24-hour news cycle keeps us constantly on edge, anticipating the latest terror or tragedy. All this takes a heavy toll on our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. How can we hear the soundless voice of the deep? And how might our lives, and the world we create, be different if we explored a deeper listening? Poet Mark Nepo says, “When lost, we simply have to remember to put our ear to the earth, or to our heart, and we will hear a warmth that guides.”^⁠ Imagine doing that. What would you hear? . . . How would it change you?

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This post is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness. (Orbis Books, Nov. 2025)

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

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