This is indeed an amazing world that we live in. Working as a Shamanic healer gives me the opportunity to meet all kinds of people from all walks of life and to have some fascinating conversations with them.
Everyone has a story and the first part of carrying out a healing is to listen to that story. To hear what it is that is troubling them and why and how it is troubling them. The Shamanic belief is that a person must be heard, their story witnessed, before they can begin to heal.
Therefor the listening part is hugely important. The ability to sit with a story, not to judge or offer opinion even. Purely to witness, to let the person divulge as much or as little as is important to them. So that they are the ones guiding their own healing, directing the Shaman or healer to the right place to begin.
And so we practice listening, really listening. A skill that is often forgotten. How often do we ask someone how they are and then not really listen to their reply? Unless of course they say “fine thanks” and move on.
One of my Shamanic teachers told me that we must listen with our hearts.” The ears” he said “are but a conduit to the heart, for it is in the heart that we feel and understand a story. The mind can help, but the heart should lead.”
I struggled with this concept for a while, so he told me to sit in silence and listen to my own heart. After I while I started to feel an aching in my chest, a longing to be heard. The heart it seems is like a flower and the more we listen to it, the more it blooms. The more we listen to our own hearts the more we are able to understand the stories of others. The more they bloom too.
Recently I have witnessed doctors that are to busy to look away from their computer screen when seeing a patient. Politicians with seemingly no interest in hearing the views of those they represent, too determined to get their own point across and school teachers who tell their pupils to be quiet and listen but won’t do the same themselves.
Do patients, the electorate and children need and deserve to be heard? Yes of course they do but they very often don’t get the opportunity. This leads to young people feeling neglected. Voters feeling disenfranchised and patients feeling uncared for. A very unhappy situation in deed!
The whole situation can be improved though just by people taking time out to listen (not easy for GP’s I know, with their workload) but it can be done and I believe the patient list would get shorter if people felt that they mattered. It’s part of the healing after all.
Politicians should be listening because that way more than 30% of the population might turn out to vote for them and children should be listened to always.
Children are learning all the time, from the moment of birth or probably before. What hope is there if future generations are learning that people don’t listen? Obviously they will grow up, not listening themselves. A few thousand years of evolution and we will be born without ears. A direct conduit to the heart gone for ever! (Possibly replaced by phone sockets)
All it takes is the time to fully engage with the person in front of you, whoever they are but especially if they are young.
Like I said at the beginning, it’s an amazing world and it’s made all the more amazing when you are able to hear other people’s ideas and opinions of it.
