What Is Generous Listening?

Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen was a visionary in the field of healing and integrative medicine. In this talk, she describes the deeper kind of listening required for healing.

The whole thing as a group, as a process, is based on a certain kind of listening, which is different than the kind of listening that people do ordinarily. The medical students came up with a name for this. They call it generous listening.

I love it. I love this name: generous listening.

So how this works is this: usually when people are listening, they're busy inside. Sometimes, they're quite consciously busy inside, and sometimes the busyness is right on the level between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

And they're doing things like this: someone is talking to them and they have their own agenda, which goes like this: 

Do I like what this person is saying, or don't I like it? Do I like this person, or don't I like this person? Do I agree with what this person is saying or don't I agree with what this person is saying? Do I think what this person  is saying is important or do I not think what this person is saying is important?

And then we do what the students -- so funny, these millennials -- call competitive listening, which goes like this:

Is this person smarter than I am or not as smart as I am? Do they come from a better social class than I do or not as good a social class as I do? Are they more educated than I am or less educated? 

So you're positioning yourself with respect to the person who is talking. And then, of course, with a [medical or health care-related] professional situation we have another whole layer, which is:

What's wrong with this person and do I know how to fix it? And if I don't know how to fix it do I know where to look to find how to fix it? And if I don't know that, is there someone I can call in as a consultant? 

So all of this agenda is going on as someone is trying to tell you something that's important to them. And almost everything that is said in a discovery model is important to the person speaking.

So we do generous listening. We drop all that. We completely drop all that. We're not even listening to understand why the person feels the way they do or why they think the way they do. We are simply listening for one thing only, which is: what is true for this person at this moment in time?

We are there to witness it; to receive it unconditionally; simply, to know. 

This kind of listening creates a kind of rare experience for people: it creates a space of safety so radical that when you're in it with another person, you realize you've been looking for it for a long time, and you have not felt safe most of the time.  

This is what safe feels like, this unconditional listening and respect for whatever the other person is saying. 

And then something interesting happens, because in a space of safety, people can discover what's true for them for the first time. It comes from deep inside them, where they've held it protected. And then it comes into the room and they can hear it for the first time and they can recognize it for the first time, because they've been made safe enough to bring it from its safe hidden place inside.

And this does something, of course, very powerful with respect to fear. The constriction of fear, the worry is someone's going to approve or disapprove -- both of which are judgment on what we say -- is completely gone. And it allows people to become larger and stronger.

This kind of listening heals people. In fact, it's probably the basic healing relationship -- the unconditional acceptance of where someone is and what matters to them.