Steven H. Lee, 100-025-323
Imelda Villalon, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
IDEA 2900: Creativity, Philosophy, and Identity: Reimagining What It Means to be Human
September 2022 – Assignment 02 - Reflective Journal Entry on Listening and Storytelling
I’ve been thinking about listening a lot lately, especially when it comes to how I listen to myself. In moments of stress and confrontation with people in my life, I know I tend to engage in behaviours that ignore, retreat, and crawl deeply into my proverbial shell as a means of not listening or dealing with various situations. I’ve done this repeatedly. And I feel that this issue stems from difficulties I have with Inner Listening, one of three kinds of listening that Julian Treasure, in his Udemy short course, Conscious Listening, explores (the other two being Outer Listening, and Created Listening). Specifically, Treasure describes this concept as representing how individuals listen to the voice that they hear inside themselves all the time. Treasure also explains how our inner voice (or internal dialogue) creates, feeds, and informs our experience of life and its outcomes. That is, how I listen to myself creates my experience of life and its many outcomes. As a result, Treasure does note that there are diverse ways that the inner voice can be listened to. And from these approaches, it becomes clear that one’s own inner voice is not necessarily who someone is. In other words, you are not the behind your inner voice – you are the one who is listening.
Treasure also reveals how psychologists note that our inner voice can be represented by various parts of who we are, such as our ego, habits, unhelpful expectations, and other learned reactions. In eastern philosophies such as Buddhism, this inner voice is also known as our monkey mind. Again, these things come from and make up who we are, but when we realize that we are the ones listening to our inner voice, we can gain power over it, and relate to it as if it was a child. To this end, Treasure describes how it’s particularly important to listen to our inner voice non-judgmentally, with patience and compassion (which was a strategy for good listening also explored in class, and ties into empathic listening as well). Another consideration to remember when listening to one’s inner voice is to remember how it also helps to not believe everything one hears coming from their inner voice, and to ask if what is being heard is trustworthy and helpful (asking follow-up questions was another strategy for good listening discussed in class). If what’s being said isn’t helpful, you don’t have to follow that course, which I feel is like when many psychic medium readers tell their clients to “take what resonates and leave the rest behind.”
In his discussion on inner listening, Treasure asks his students to consider the three most common things one hears in their internal dialogue by exploring what’s said the most commonly, and whether it is helpful. Firstly, my inner voice can be overly critical of myself and the decisions I make. It often raises doubts about myself, the actions I take, and the outcomes I experience. It can put myself down, it can say I’m not good enough, it can often be cruel to myself. It can feed on and bolster my anxiety and my ongoing battle with major depression. It can also have an “I told you so” attitude, combined with put downs such as “you’re so stupid.” These thoughts aren’t helpful and as mentioned in our class I find it can put me into experiencing moments of defensive or selective listening (which can turn into paralysis wherein I fall into a deeper cycle of my depression). But, by contrast when I’m not depressed, my inner voice can provide helpful encouragement. It can egg me on to get out of bed, and it can provide a loving reward of compliments when something goes right, such as getting a good grade in a course.
Secondly, my inner voice does have a dialogue about things I should do, and often these actions are tied to what I described in the last paragraph. For example, if I’m feeling down while I’m grocery shopping, it encourages me to buy comfort food that isn’t necessarily the healthiest food I could buy, like sugary drinks and cheap chocolate bars or fried goods such as donuts or French fries. By contrast, it can also encourage me to eat better. Sometimes, when I do reach for junk, it can tell me to choose fresh fruits or veggies as a snack instead of another Kit Kat bar.
Finally, my inner voice has an impact on things I do. It can feed my procrastination. If I’m feeling tired in the morning, it will tell me that it’s ok to sleep another hour instead of getting up and having an ice-cold shower. If this happens for an extended period, it can also bring my inner doubts to the forefront by reinforcing unhealthy beliefs I have about how useless I am. By contrast, it can also help push me to get out of bed, by saying something like “OK, at the count of five you’re going to get out of bed and go to the shower. Five, four, three, two, one… GET UP!”
Related to my inner voice is my writing practice. It’s a way I’m able to listen to my inner voice and explore the experiences we’ve shared in this life. Working with the mind for me involves empathic listening, and my own writing practice serves as a tool for revealing and understanding what secrets it contains. Dictionary.com defines memory as being “…the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences.” In the afterword to author Natalie Goldberg’s book, WRITING DOWN THE BONES, Sounds True founder and CEO Tami Simon asks Goldberg, “Why do you write memoir? (225), and I found Goldberg’s response ties into this idea of empathically listening to one’s own inner voice. Specifically, Goldberg teaches us how:
I like it. Memoir is a study of how memory works. It’s analogous to writing practice, to working with the mind. Memory doesn’t remember chronologically A, B, C. I was born in such-and-such a year, I went to this public school, then I did this, then I did that. We remember in flashes… It works in slices. And I love that. And when you write memoir, its structure is more analogous to the way the mind moves than a novel’s is (225).
And I really do find that to be a beautiful description of how we can remember. And writing regularly, as a practice (when I do it) is a doorway for me to do just that. It’s a way for me to capture those flashes of memories on the page in permanent ink. It’s a way for me to read and reflect on what I’ve recorded, to ask if what I wrote was helpful by being authentic (genuine) to what I experienced. And what I mean by that comes into play especially when I’m writing captions for my daily subversive selfie art project, where I try to take one photo that captures how I feel at any given point in time during the day. My caption then explores in writing my thoughts about what I captured on my iPhone’s small digital camera sensor. Sometimes I do worry that it feels performative, or that it’s contributing to my cycle of depression. I’m sometimes brutally honest about the things my inner voice tells me, and I could see how that could come off as sounding inauthentic, but people who have known me for a long time unfortunately know how it isn’t. I think if I didn’t share it, then I would be inauthentic as I’d be hiding aspects of myself and trying to paint a picture of my life that isn’t true to who I am, and who I want to be. There are some things that I don’t reveal, and I think that’s okay. I just feel I’m not ready to go there yet. But in her same response to why she writes memoir, Goldberg also noted how:
It’s important for people to spend some time digging into their past in their writing practice because there should be no place that you’re avoiding. If you avoid it in yourself, you’re going to avoid it whatever you write about, and that pollutes the writing. You need to be able to stand up with your life. Accept your mind and your life (225).
It’s a response grounded in mindfulness, and in the meditative Zazen practice Goldberg practices and discusses in WRITING DOWN THE BONES. I know when I avoid some stuff, it’s mainly because I don’t feel ready to talk about it yet. And that doesn’t mean I don’t listen to what my inner voice and experience is trying to tell me. As I do write about it in my journaling, I just haven’t revealed that to the world in writing I’ve posted to social media and my website. I think it’s interesting how cultivating conscious and empathic listening is so closely tied to concepts rooted in mindfulness. In this reflection I’ve mentioned four different concepts that are tied to what Jon Kabat-Zinn describes as forming the nine attitudinal foundations of mindfulness. Specifically, I mentioned the importance of cultivating a suspension of judgement (non-judging), maintaining patience, trust, as well as an acceptance of what is said. Psychologist Kain Ramsay directs the idea of acceptance into acceptance of self, the acceptance of thing, and the acceptance of others. Attitudinal foundations not referenced here include cultivating curiosity and openness (a beginner’s mind), non-striving, letting go (let go and let be), gratitude and generosity. Ultimately, I know I need to become more mindful of what my monkey mind says, and to embrace it with gratitude and generosity, so I won’t let it get me down so much.
Works Cited
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, Shambala Publications, Boulder, 2016.
Treasure, Julian. Conscious Listening. Udemy, 2017, https://www.udemy.com/share/101Flw3@tBLNWf_qCM8nbGdJ9uFaWdSSBgUCmmz9Tk0lUj3_nbsS52A5n32HJyhxXTZhsebm/.
