Answers & Responses
It is a ubiquitous challenge as we go through every day, in communication with so many people and situations: “How do I respond?”. Especially in more intimate and personal dialogue with friends or spouses, a question that may not be consciously open is: “How do I respond?” Most of us have our habitual ways of responding. We rely on these. We give advice, we tell our story that is like theirs, we say we’re “sorry to hear that”. Often we try to help solve the problem at hand, even when it is not a problem that needs our solution. Even when we are not being asked for that kind of help, we still tend to try to offer answers. We believe unconsciously that the rules of the communication are: you tell me the trouble and I will help you solve it; I will come up with an answer to help you.
Another way of responding to others in our lives may be to listen deeply, allowing the others’ words, affect, emotion, body language, and meaning to wash over us, move us, settle into our whole organism. The body is one large sensing organ, with an ability to process massive amounts of information behind our conscious awareness. It is a known neurological fact that the unconscious processes of the brain can process literally 1 million times more bits of information than can our cognitive, conscious brain center at the front of our skull. This is why you somehow safely arrive at your destination even when you weren’t paying much attention to the driving. Your brain and unconscious processes were in charge the whole time.
From a therapeutic perspective, this means that our bodies have far more information about ourselves and our responses than does our conscious sense of self. Our tissues, fluids and nervous system have vastly more knowledge than our “self”, the narrator with our name who talks in our minds about everything and anything.
TRY: Set aside some time with a partner and allow yourself to settle into your felt sense of your body. Then listen to your partner tell you something about their lives. Allow your response to come from some place other than your mind. Allow a response to percolate up from the body awareness, from the slower operation of your listening self.