Listening is an advanced art, a matured skill. How often through your life has someone said ‘You can tell me anything’? Have you ever said this yourself? Most importantly: is it true? Is it true you can tell that person ‘anything’, is it true someone can tell you anything?

No. We say that phrase to feed our ego, our belief that we want to be wise, understanding, the go-to person whenever someone needs an ear to listen to them, a shoulder to lean on, someone to advise them, help them during problems. But for most of us, our belief that we are that guru of wonderful and wise listening, or even just that we’re ‘there’ when someone needs us to listen… is a false belief.

What normally happens, when you really need someone to listen to you? What happens, when someone really needs you to listen to them? I’m talking about important, touchy matters, something that might be quite scary to tell out loud. What happens when someone needs a good listener, to hear about something that might be very upsetting to one or both people?

FILTERS happen. You know, those thought-screens that filter most of anything we receive and send. Filters have a rising scale of effectiveness in blocking out what we don’t like, what we believe is wrong, what we’re afraid of, what we don’t want to happen, what offends us, in conversation. We begin talking, really needing that person to hear us deeply, and immediately their filters jump into action. You tell them you are unhappy and really want to quit your job, and you see their own fears and judgements arise: ‘What will you do for money? But you seemed so happy there. But they need you, how can you abandon them? Are you nuts, that’s really irresponsible to your family. Does that mean you’ll have to move away from us? What’s wrong with your job, it’s a great job’. And a thousand other instant-reaction comments.

Or you’re a teenager bringing home news to your parents. We all know how scary that is, with common parental-responses like ‘What!? Are you insane!? No way in hell! You’re grounded! I don’t care, it’s not going to happen!’ If it’s something intense, reactions are even more filtered through your parents’ fears and judgements: ‘You’re PREGNANT!? How did that happen! I don’t believe you could do that to us! What will everyone think of us, pregnant at your age?! Who’s the father, is it that boy we told you not to see? I KNEW he was trouble! By God, he’d better step up and do the right thing! You’re not going to have it, how could you possibly have a baby at your age, what about school, your future? Who’ll take care of it, babies are expensive, WE can’t afford all that time and money, it’s your responsibility…’ blah blah blah.

That’s the filter: when you listen through your own fears and judgments and preconceived ideas, rather than ‘just listening’.

The question is not whether your listeners have their right to all their feelings and reactions. The question is not whether you have your right to your own feelings and reactions when people are telling you things. We all have that right to our responsive feelings inside. But the question is: How deeply do you want to hear? Do you want to listen to peoples’ souls, their needs and what they are telling you on a deep level, or do you want to be the kind of person who violently reacts to the shallow surface of whatever you hear?

Most of us grow up listening through our immediate, shallow filters. If we are devoutly religious, anything heard might be filtered through the things our beliefs say are right and wrong, filtered through our fears of breaking taboos, committing sins, going to hell. If our life experience tells us the things that do and don’t work out for us, what is legal and illegal in our area, that knowledge becomes part of our listening filter. If we have goals, but what we’re hearing helps or stands in the way of those goals, that becomes part of the filter. The emotional reactions entrained into us by family, culture, our nerves, become part of the filter.

Then when someone opens up to us, needs us to listen to them, certain keywords and ideas they mention begin to press our filters’ buttons, we begin to tighten up, react. When we share deep things with others, we watch as what we say begins to nudge their filters into reacting, whether for or against us. Filters make people agree with you. Oppose you. Want to correct you. Want to change you, stop you, help you, fight you, join you, avoid you, love you, kill you, in their reactions to what you are telling them.

To listen with no filter, is not a natural behavior. We learn things, we construct our filters out of the learnings of our lifetime, and we keep those filters strong. There are many levels of fears, judgements, knowledge we have to discover in ourselves and bring out into the open, become familiar with and master, in order to evolve into being a good listener. Because when people tell us things about themselves, or about us, it pushes our reaction buttons, and when we tell things to others about ourselves or themselves, it pushes their buttons into reacting.

What do those filters do, to the process of listening?

Filters shut down listening, and they shut down talking. If someone says ‘You can tell me anything’, and you proceed to tell them anything… what happens? People start reacting. Instead of the listener allowing the talker to ‘say anything’, the listener immediately begins reacting internally to what the talker is saying. As listeners, we shake our heads, we analyze, we nod our heads, we agree or disagree, we try to steer them our way, we argue, we have thousands of emotional reactions small and large. A conversation, even a conversation in which the talker is deeply wanting to be heard, becomes not about the hearing, but about the reacting.

This is a very high price to pay, for all parties involved. If you tell someone something, if you’re confused or scared and you really want to be heard… and upon hearing you, they react poorly and you spend the next two hours or two weeks dealing with their violent reaction, dealing with how it affects THEM… you have learned something: you have learned that you were not listened to well. You’ve learned that when you talk about anything touchy, it becomes about them and not you… even if it was about you in the first place. You might have to spend a good part of your life dealing with someone pouting, being resentful, vindictive, angry, giving you the cold shoulder, cutting off communication, spreading rumors and exposing secrets, in reaction to what you tell them.

A person who says you can tell them anything, and then screams at you upon hearing it… becomes a person you can NOT tell anything. A person who says you can tell them anything, and then becomes defensive, resentful, pouty, cold or closed off to you once you tell something, even if it’s about THEM… is not someone you can tell anything to. A person who says you can tell them anything, and then calls you a liar, doesn’t want to listen to you, gossips your secrets to others, tells lies about what you told them… is not someone you can tell anything to.

Sure, you technically can tell anything to anyone. The telling is not the issue. The REACTION is the issue. It can be very expensive to you, until you learn that you cannot tell ‘anything’. Telling anything, often leads to quite unexpected and ruinous reactions. We have all paid the price of that mistake, in ways large and small. There are always peoples’ filters, filters that will make them react poorly to what you tell them.

So, when we need to talk about something scary, when we really need a listener, when we want to be heard clearly, yet what we have to say is something that could be quite touchy, even scary… who do we tell? And when someone else needs us to be that perfect listener, how do we do that?

WE LISTEN WITH NO FILTERS.

Since your filter is your learned thoughts, beliefs, your laws and right-and-wrongs, your experiences, your opinions, you can’t get rid of it. You shouldn’t get rid of it.

But you can put it aside while listening. You can listen as if you are meditating: you allow your own thoughts to arise, and to dissipate, dissolve. You are quiet, yet you are entirely here with the situation. You let go of your reactive responses, yet you are still entirely here in presence, awareness, listening, hearing and understanding. As a button is pushed, you allow it to dissolve. As a resentment or offendedness arises, you allow it to dissolve. As your own agendas in the conversation arise, you allow them to dissolve. Each time a part of your filter has a button pushed, you take note of it, but don’t let yourself be hooked by it, and you let it dissolve.

Rather than zoning out, or going into your own thoughts, or allowing your buttons to be triggered one after the other by what is being told to you, you remain entirely present and listening, powerful yet non-reactive, but you allow your filter to be in constant turned-off mode.

And when you are telling something important, and your listener is not listening so much as reacting to your words… you let go of telling. You might let yourself stop talking about this matter entirely, or you might find the words to ask your listener to please stop reacting and start hearing openly, because you really need to be heard and to have this topic remain about you for now, to not digress into being about their reactions. You might find a way to tell them you really need to be heard openly about this, rather than being reacted to.

Listening with a filtering mind, shuts communication down. When you are talking and are not being heard properly, you feel there is no point in the talking. When their reactions are messy and energy-draining, you lose energy and it becomes tiring and you no longer want to share such things with this person.

And when you are listening to them, and using your filtered mind and reacting to them, you will shortchange yourself of so much they want to tell you. They may have so much to tell you, but your reactions are throwing up a brick wall to them. It does not matter if your reactions are justified, they probably are. What matters is that your reactions are shutting them down.

If you want a clear mind in talking and listening, you will learn to find listeners who have clearer, more patient, quieter, more understanding ‘filters’. People who can really listen to you and not jump on each thing you say, or sway your words over to being about them. And you will learn to listen to others, without using your own filter. You just listen, and you let your reactions dissolve. You can talk through your reactions later, or journal them, or discuss them with someone else, but while you’re trying to ‘be there’ for someone who needs you to listen, if you can put aside your own reactions and defenses, and just HEAR, you will hear a lot more.

This is very, very difficult to learn. Because the moment we hear something, we want to jump in with what WE think about it, how it makes us feel. We learn that growing up. But that constructs habits leading to unclear communication. We start talking, and then reactions make it messy, and then we change the subject or stop talking about it. The filter kicks in and we miss so much that we could have said, could have heard.

Listening with no filter takes immense courage, perseverance, patience, at least in the early stages of learning to do it. It took me many years, but I have learned to listen with no filter. The filter is there, I can’t get rid of it… but I learned to put it aside when listening. I let the listening be about me HEARING THEM, not about ME REACTING to them. This is very, very difficult when I am listening to upsetting things, especially upsetting things about me or about loved ones. And I forget this tool upon occasion, I’m not ‘living’ it yet myself. But I’m good at it, and I rarely lose it. I almost always listen with no filter. I’ve seen very few other people who have accomplished this. I do see it sometimes though, and it is so wonderfully refreshing to see. Those people who listen without filters hear thousands of times more deep and personal information, than do most listeners.

Sometimes, during some special, unusual conversation, you are ‘so easy to talk to’ or you are talking to someone else and you feel that they are really listening to you… but are you easy to talk to ALWAYS, during all situations? This is one of the most beautiful and rewarding of these tools for learning how to clear your mind and clear up your relationships. A reactive mind, constantly reacting to what is said, is an agitated, unclear mind. But an unfiltered mind hears through a much wider, clearer tunnel. People don’t close down around it, they open. You hear more, they say more. Then when you do respond – by choice and wisdom, rather than by knee-jerk reaction – you have much more, much clearer, information with which to see the wider scope.

When you separate yourself from your reactive filter while listening, you remain calmer, happier, wiser, stronger, nicer, CLEARER. You hear more, learn more. It opens the wide gate to success in love and family, problem solving, business. All things, everywhere.

LISTEN WITH NO FILTER!