What Is Active Listening

Active listening is a difficult art to master. It takes a lot of attention, concentration, patience and objectivity to listen well. ‘If we could all just learn to listen, everything else would fall into place. Listening is the key to being patient centered’. As, I was sitting in a community park I overheard a few conversations. Partners, Sylvia and Alison, talk to their friend Jenny about how legislation and social change over the last thirty years has changed their experiences of being lesbian. They describe how they have made a difference themselves by being activist, lesbian feminists. I had been paying a lot of attention to people, but I really hadn't been paying a lot of attention to what is all around me. It was on that day that I really discovered what it means to be alive as another animal in a natural place. That changed my life. I had one question and that was how I could be 31 years old and have never truly listened before? So I get out of my car, all right? We'll still hear the pinging of its engine. We'll hear other cars and other visitors and we'll hear the beep-beep of our modern …show more content…
You can just take it all in, all the expressions. And isn't it wonderful that, when a bird sings, that we do hear it as music? The bird doesn't sing for our benefit. So there's a lot of joy in that listening, and when we become better listeners to nature, we also become better listeners to each other so that, when another person is speaking with you, you don't have to search for what you want them to say. You can, you know, dare to risk what they really are trying to say and, you know, ask them too: Is this really what you're saying? And feel your own emotional response as they talk about risky subjects like how it is being a parent in the world that it is