Listening
Discovering Inner and Outer Awareness Through Lived Experience
Sensing myself. Sensing another. Discovering how to participate together.
Listening is often understood as paying attention to what another person is saying.
Yet listening can involve much more than hearing words.
As we listen, we may become aware of sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories, personal values, and interpretations arising within ourselves.
At the same time, we are receiving information from another person and from the environment surrounding us.
The Inside Awareness listening explorations invite a growing familiarity with these inner and outer experiences.
The intention is not to become a perfect listener. It is to discover how listening participates in our relationship with ourselves and others.
Listening to Myself
Our inner experiences are continually changing.
We may notice physical sensations, emotional responses, remembered experiences, or thoughts about what is happening.
Sometimes these experiences are recognized immediately. At other times, our responses become familiar habits that influence our words and actions without our conscious attention.
Listening to ourselves introduces opportunities to become curious about these experiences.
What am I sensing?
What am I feeling?
What is meaningful to me in this moment?
Am I responding to what is happening now, or to something I remember, expect, or believe?
These inquiries are not intended to judge or correct our inner experiences.
They provide opportunities for conscious recognition, self-acceptance, and greater choice in how we participate.
Listening to Another
Listening to another person introduces a relationship between two individual experiences.
Each person brings their own history, sensory awareness, understanding, values, and intentions into a conversation.
Two people may hear the same words or witness the same event and come away with different understandings.
Listening offers an opportunity to recognize these differences without immediately deciding which interpretation is correct.
Through reciprocal dialogue, participants can explore hearing another person’s words, reflecting what they understood, and checking whether that understanding matches what the speaker intended.
This does not require agreement.
It invites a willingness to recognize another person’s experience while remaining connected to one’s own.
Recognizing Life Experience Across Relationships
Our understanding of an event is influenced by the age, circumstances, responsibilities, and experiences we bring to it.
An experience remembered from childhood may still carry the feelings and interpretations that were available at that age.
Years later, the person remembering may speak about it with adult confidence while continuing to experience aspects of the event through their childhood perspective.
A parent or another adult involved may remember different circumstances and responsibilities that were not visible to the child.
The child’s experience remains meaningful. The adult’s circumstances may also be meaningful.
Neither perspective necessarily contains everything that occurred.
Similar differences emerge in friendships, partnerships, workplaces, and relationships between generations.
Recognizing differences in lived experience can introduce curiosity where assumptions might otherwise lead to judgment or debate.
Listening does not require us to adopt another person’s interpretation. It offers an opportunity to recognize the experience from which they are speaking.
Listening Beyond Spoken Words
Listening also occurs through movement, observation, and sensory experience.
A change in facial expression, the direction of someone’s attention, a pause, or a shift in movement may offer information that spoken words do not.
Guided movement explorations provide opportunities to experience listening without relying entirely on language.
In one shared movement activity, two participants lightly connect through an object, such as a bamboo rod, and explore leading and following.
Without needing to establish who is directing the movement, each person may begin recognizing changes in direction, timing, pressure, and response.
The experience introduces listening as a living relationship.
Sometimes one person leads. Sometimes another follows. Sometimes the exchange changes spontaneously.
These discoveries can offer another reference for understanding participation in conversations and relationships.
Listening, Acceptance, and Belonging
The willingness to listen does not require abandoning one’s own experience.
Each person has values, feelings, needs, and boundaries that deserve recognition.
Listening can include acknowledging differences, choosing when to pause, and recognizing when a conversation has become repetitive or no longer supports mutual understanding.
An invitation to listen is not an obligation to remain indefinitely in a conversation or defend oneself repeatedly.
Acceptance of another person’s experience does not require agreement with every interpretation or behaviour.
The exploration is how to remain connected to ourselves while recognizing that others may experience the world differently.
A Living Exploration
Listening can be revisited through everyday conversations, shared movement, nature, personal reflection, and relationships.
An experience that was difficult to understand yesterday may become clearer through something recognized today.
The intention is not to develop one correct way of listening.
It is to nurture a living relationship with ourselves and others through conscious recognition.
Listening becomes an opportunity to discover what is meaningful, recognize differences, and explore how we wish to participate together.
Related Explorations
- The Dance of Inner and Outer Communication
- Culture of Values
- Listening Through Movement
- Inner Labyrinth and Living Relationships
Inside Awareness | Renee Lindstrom
An experiential communication approach influenced by Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, the Feldenkrais Method, and years of exploring values, intention, movement, and relationships through lived experience.
Renee Lindstrom, GCFP – @insideawareness – Copyright 2014 – 2026
With respect and gratitude,
I acknowledge the practices and teachings that have contributed to the ground from which this work has grown: Moshe Feldenkrais and the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education; Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication; Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the Shambhala teachings; and Dyan Grant Francis, Subtle Energy Solutions and Black Sect Feng Shui.
These influences are acknowledged with appreciation for the learning they made possible, while the patterns and interpretations presented here reflect my own continuing inquiry, lived experience and educational development.
