Listening and Speaking
Ways to Participate
Discovering Inner and Outer Communication Through Lived Experience
Listening and speaking are living experiences that continually influence our relationships with ourselves and others.
The Inside Awareness explorations offer opportunities to recognize the relationship between sensory awareness, feelings, personal values, learned interpretations, intention, and spoken expression.
Participation is not focused on mastering a communication technique or reaching a predetermined outcome.
It is an invitation to discover how we experience ourselves while listening, speaking, and participating with others.
01 — Guided Conversations
Exploring Listening, Expression, and Shared Participation
Guided conversations introduce a supportive environment for exploring the relationship between what we experience inwardly and how we express ourselves outwardly.
Participants are invited to recognize their own feelings, values, interpretations, and intentions while developing familiarity with listening to another person’s experience.
Through reciprocal dialogue, participants can explore speaking from personal experience, reflecting what they have heard, and checking their understanding without immediately correcting, defending, or debating.
Different perspectives are welcomed as opportunities for recognition rather than problems requiring agreement.
The intention is to nurture conscious awareness of the ways we participate in conversations and discover possibilities for greater understanding, acceptance, and ease in relationships.
Sensing myself. Sensing another. Discovering how to participate together.
02 — Personal Exploration
Recognizing Patterns Within Everyday Communication
Personal explorations provide individual attention to the communication patterns that emerge through everyday experiences.
These may include familiar emotional responses, interpretations, recurring disagreements, difficulty expressing personal values, or uncertainty about how to participate in challenging relationships.
Through guided inquiry, participants can begin distinguishing present experiences from memories, expectations, and learned social or cultural responses.
Attention may also be given to physical sensations, movement, breathing, and other somatic experiences that accompany listening and speaking.
The intention is not to analyze what is wrong or direct someone toward a particular response.
It is to nurture familiarity with one’s own inner experience, recognizing what is meaningful and discovering greater choice in how to express oneself and participate in relationships.
When an experience becomes consciously recognizable, new possibilities for responding may emerge.
03 — Facilitator Development
Supporting Recognition Without Directing Outcomes
Facilitator development introduces opportunities to explore the qualities of listening, observation, timing, and reciprocal participation when supporting conversations between people.
The focus is not on becoming an authority over another person’s feelings, intentions, or experiences.
Instead, facilitators explore how to create room for each participant to express their own perspective while recognizing that others may understand the same situation differently.
Learning experiences may include guided dialogue, reflective listening, first-person expression, recognition of values and needs, and distinguishing observation from interpretation.
Attention is also given to recognizing when a conversation may benefit from a pause, when a boundary needs acknowledgement, and when participants may wish to revisit an experience with new understanding.
Facilitators are invited to develop their own conscious recognition while learning to support the independence and autonomy of others.
The intention is to support understanding without deciding what another person should experience, believe, or choose.
A Continuing Exploration
Listening and speaking are not skills that people must perform perfectly.
They are living relationships that can become increasingly familiar through conscious recognition and experience.
Each participation pathway offers an opportunity to explore how our inner awareness, personal values, intentions, and expressions influence the relationships we create.
These explorations are informed by Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, and years of inquiry into the integration of values through lived experience.
Participation begins with a willingness to recognize what is happening within ourselves and discover how we wish to participate with others.
Inside Awareness | Renee Lindstrom
For information about guided conversations, personal explorations, or facilitator development, connect with Inside Awareness.
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.
