Writing a book you love depends on
LISTENING — The Key to Receiving and Creating
NAOMI ROSE, Book Coach/Developer & Creative Midwife
ENCOURAGING YOUR CREATIVE FLOWERING through Deep Listening
writing a book that you love depends on listening
When we can listen deeply and receive what is here for us, we can bring it into expression. Listening is the sacred skill, the opener of the way, the key.
“The mystery, the essence of all life is not separate from the silent openness of simple listening." — Toni Packer
“It is a wonderful thing to listen to yourself. When you listen to yourself, you write your own book.” — Sherif Baba
“When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.”―Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
The Connection Between Listening and Creating
Listening is the real secret ingredient of creating.
creativity flowers by listening
All that has been translated into a communicable form out of the ethers of potential has been listened into being. Whether the creator is aware of this or not, those pure, epiphany moments — those lightning flashes momentarily cracking open the dark night sky, or subtle whispers waking you in the night from sleep — are moments of deep listening.
Whether you want to write, or to paint, or to play an instrument, or to simply have a sweet and friendly access to the depths of yourself to live more fully and truly, listening is the master key that opens all the doors. When you can find your way through the inner noise, you can hear what's really there. And once you do, you are no longer enclosed in a little box of loneliness, hoping to write your way out. You are the whole listening field, sensing the music that bows to it.
“When you find your way through the inner noise, you become the whole listening field, sensing the music implicit in and bowing to it.”
To encourage your flowering, I share with you here some discoveries I have found about and through listening. What listening really is . . . how one might go about it . . . where it most easily lives . . . ways in which it responds to your willing attention . . . places to bring it . . . its roots and leaves and flowers . . . how its nature can show you your own.
THE SONORITY RATHER THAN THE MESSAGE
“What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message?” — Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening
When I was a little girl, little enough to lie in bed with my eyes closed and listen to my favorite records that my parents had given me, I loved to hear, again and again, the story of the dog, Muffin. It was a perfect story to take in through the ears. Because Muffin the dog was blind.
Muffin made his way through the neighborhood by recognizing the sounds that went by. The vrooom! of a car as it drove past, then its sound trailing off as it went into the distance. The sounds of traffic lights, birds chattering, boys playing, and so much more — each adventure of this blind dog became the all-and-everything through empathized sound. What Muffin heard gave him a place in his world.
And I, listening with closed eyes, saw a display of images and color through the opening of the story and the sounds themselves that became part of how I knew myself as a self, this natural ability to listen deeply into sounds for the music and images and knowledge they gave.
What is that sound I hear? It is the trumpet of the morning. / It is the slowness of the dawn. / It is the power of the cricket, / Breaking night open with its song.
What is that sound I hear? / It is the river’s rush on patient stones, / It is the heartbeat’s thrum, / It is the calling of the soul / Bidding “Come, come, come.”
Bells tinkling. Engines whirring. Birds chirping and calling. Our own breath, sighing. The shower-water plinking downwards. Someone singing a melodic song. The sound of the toilet flushing, of dishes being washed under the spurt of the faucet, of your fingers tapping on the computer keyboard. Your heart beating. Your pulse. How the voices of people around you rise and fall.
The ability to listen is ours from birth. Even in the womb, we are attuned to our mother’s heartbeat, the tonality of her voice, sounds without verbal-meaning content from the world outside her body. Then, as infants, we listen to the sounds of grownups talking, hearing the cadences and tones without yet understanding the words or their meanings. What “spoke” to us was the music: the rise and fall of speech, the pitch and volume of the voice, the length or brevity of the speaker’s breath and the pauses in between. All this connected us with the world of listening.
Now we are adept at words and meanings. We have thoughts about thoughts about thoughts. But we may have forgotten how it was when we were simply listening. This is something we might benefit from getting back. How can we hear the spaces between the words, find the sounds and rhythms that open us to receiving what is being given from within?
“You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it. . . . You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.” ― Chaim Potok, The Chosen
REGAINING OUR BIRTHRIGHT THROUGH LISTENING
writing a book is a kind of musical experience when you listen to yourself
Children, initially, hear all the sounds within the sounds, all the music and discordances, all the spaces between the words. It’s been documented that children are born with the capacity to speak any language on the face of the earth. Why some children learn to speak English and not Swahili, or Spanish and not Tagalog, is because those sounds (which will, eventually, be understood as words with specific meanings) are repeated and affirmed within the family, while other sounds are discouraged or simply never come up. Who we are now, what we have become, how we got here — so much of this is the product of conditioning, including hearing-conditioning. And we have all been conditioned to something.
That’s not bad in itself. But there’s another level of our being that we gradually lose touch with, and that loss matters crucially. When that loss is opaque enough to be forgotten altogether — or recalled only dimly, like a snapshot from childhood when we gazed into the camera with infinite hope and trust — then our lives weigh on us. No amount of goals accomplished can make up for the loss of that eternal state of Belonging to Life.
Yet the wonderful thing is that learning to hear consciously — to listen — can open a door into that set-aside inner world. The ability to hear between the spaces, to receive the pitch and tonalities of each note, to hear music in virtually anything (the tapping of computer keys, the hum of the refrigerator, the sound of our own breathing) can unpack the conditioned life instantaneously (at least, for the moments when we are present), once we are tuned to it. It’s a way of being that our deeper Self knows — that we knew before meanings were ascribed to things, and we entered into those ascriptions completely and forgetfully.
"Listening is its own reward; there are no prizes to be won, no contest of creative listening. But I hold that person fortunate who has the gift, for there are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one can recognize beauty when one comes upon it." — Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination
A SHOWER OF INSPIRATION: LISTENING BRINGS YOU TO RECEIVING
To regain the joy of listening, which will lead you straight to Being, drop a plumb line into the ocean of stillness by letting your ears take you there. There is always something to listen to — whether it’s the sounds outside you or the sounds within you. Bringing your conscious attention to them will open up something fresh and clean, and amply gestatable inside you.
“The eyes grab, but the ears receive.” — a naturopathic doctor of my acquaintance
For example: When you get into the shower, your mind may be full of thoughts and plans. You may reach automatically for the hot-and-cold water knobs or levers, and adjust the temperature while your thoughts are going forward into the future and backwards into the past.
But what if you actually hear the music of the water droplets, as they plink against the bathtub floor? Then music would instantly make its way back into your life. Now, you are right here. Your skin, head-to-toe, is available to receive the warm cascade of water. Your body, ministered to because you are now here for that, opens its throat and accepts the song. From this place of listening with your ears, you can move into your day more confident that life will meet you well, because you are now able to receive it.
You can do this same thing by listening to the pitch of a toilet flushing — the tonality of your urination tinkling into the toilet bowl (to take two mundane and daily examples) — the guttural chord of your car’s ignition starting up. Really, almost any ordinary activity, when listened to, will open your receptivity. And this receptivity is essential for the kind of creating that feels natural and gift-bearing, both.
When you place your attention on the sounds around you and really take them is as if hearing them for the very first time, and open to the gifts they bear for you, you bring yourself into the present moment, with the same openness and availability you had as a child. This connection to your early openness is not just a distant memory; it’s a living experience, because that receptivity is your true nature.
Such listening may confer the side-benefit of making you more musical. More importantly, it will bring you into relationship with the world around you in an inherently interested, joyful way. Relating to the world (outer as well as inner) in an open, listening place places you in the stream of Being.
This is a glorious, and simple, place to write from.
"I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony." —Gustave Flaubert
LISTENING PRACTICES TO PLAY WITH
You don’t have to go out of your way to find something to listen to. Once you are open to it, there’s always something. You might try listening to the sounds of:
Your feet sliding along the carpet or the floor
Shaking a container of salt.
Your neck as you make a slow circle with your head.
The dishes being placed in the cupboard.
The garbage cans being picked up by the sanitation truck.
The breeze moving through tree branches.
Cows lowing, dogs barking, horses whinnying, grass growing, creek-water spilling over rocks (if you’re in the country).
Your own breath.
Your speaking voice: tonality, inflection, volume, pauses and silences between the words.
The underlying message?
You can write the book of your heart if you can listen to what wants to be known through you.
This is a practice that yields infinite benefits, including but also going well beyond writing a book.
A Book That Will Help You Listen Forth Your Own Book
The suggestions offered above constitute just a small taste from the larger menu of ways to listen your writing forth that appear in my book,
Starting Your Book: A Guide to Navigating the Blank Page by Attending to What’s Inside You
naomi rose, book coach / developer & Creative Midwife, helps people write books they love
Writing deeply and truly does not depend only on writing craft.
What’s precedes that, and is even more important, is the person doing the writing.
In this case, that would be you.
Starting your book is not a formula you need to learn. It’s an organic growth that can only come out of you.
You are not incidental to writing the book of your heart — you are essential.
This presence, from which your words will flow forth, is your real gift — to yourself as well as your readers.
And it’s by listening within that this gift is revealed.
“Your book is overflowing with so much wisdom. I did not expect such an inward journey. It's exactly what I needed. I'm in a much greater state of allowing, rather than controlling and dictating. I feel very relaxed and like my ideas are going to flow so much smoother now.”—Erik Carlberg, author
“When you read something true, it feels like love, or gratitude, or a connection to something larger. This is how I feel when I read Starting Your Book. The deeper place that Naomi’s words emerge from serve to invite and induct me into a more heart-full and connected place within my own writing. Her book has been a solace and a reminder that I do have something to say. We all do." — Shelly Klammer, author, Collage for Self-Discovery. From the Foreword to Starting Your Book
“Reading your book was like receiving a comforting hug of encouragement. The connection of writing and the heart — of the practice of writing as a way to get in touch with our divinity — how could this elude us, ever? Once you have this treasure in your being, you realize how clear it all is — why we write, why it matters.” — Jane Majkiewicz, writer, editor, literary agency associate emeritus
FIND OUT MORE about Starting Your Book. And I have others on the creative process, too.
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