In this section, I provide the reader with a sense of what it means to be in the sixteen-week undergraduate Listening to the SONG of Life class. I describe and elaborate on listening activities and learnings from lecture and student discussions associated with each verse of the SONG of life.

There are several qualifications that frame the story of my experience of listening to the SONG of life in the classroom. First, the story is necessarily incomplete because it represents the single viewpoint of one instructor. There are fifteen to twenty-some other student viewpoints in the classroom each semester. The story is based on my interpretation of the most important and meaningful activities and learnings. Second, the story is partly based on memories of conversations with students in and outside of class. There are probably many memorial distortions operative in the selection and narration of classroom events and discussions.^[1] I attempt to offset these memorial distortions by taking notes after each class. Third, I bear witness to times when I’ve felt the inspiration of the creative spirit in writing the story, a more mysterious and intuitive kind of influence that I cannot fully explain. Finally, the story is rooted in my worldview-standpoint^[2] as a full Professor of Communication trained in social science, aligned with the interspiritual mystical tradition,^[3] and imbued with my life experiences as a sexagenarian, husband, and father.

The story would be more complete if I could include quoted voices of students journeying with me during the semester, but due to complications with the human subjects committee, I am not ethically able to include excerpts from student journal writings and poems. However, I do have my personal memory and class notes to draw on. Using these resources, I reconstruct student voices by paraphrasing their words. As a partial validation of these reconstructed student voices, I obtained human subject’s approval to survey former students from the listening course. I invited students via electronic mail to rate an amalgamation of six key student excerpts from the present autoethnography. Twenty-five percent (five of twenty) of students agreed to complete the survey. In ninety-three percent of the cases, student rated the excerpts as, “Consistent with my experience in the class.”^[4] This evidence suggests that the majority of the reconstructed student voices in the autoethnography align with the experience of some of the students from the course and are not simply memory distortions based on instructor bias.

Ultimately, my purpose in narrating this story is to provide readers with teachings, learnings, and insights that may benefit those interested in incorporating one or more verses of the SONG of life into their teaching, research, and service (for instructors), into their thinking, conversations, and writing (for students), and into their everyday life (for others interested in various aspects of listening). I now turn to narrating what it feels like to be in the Listening to the SONG of Life course–one verse at a time, beginning with listening to self.

SONG of Self: Silence and Solitude

What does it mean to “listen below the noise?” I asked students during our second week of class. Students easily identified with the term noise,^[5] but the phrase “listening below the noise” was more difficult for them to grasp. Students quickly enumerated external noises such as traffic outside of the building, chatter of talk in the hallway, and the hum of the overhead projector in the classroom. Social media also carried a noise frequency for students. By way of illustration, consider the following student comments. “I feel like I have to respond to every text right when I get it,” “I need to update my Facebook status at least once a week,” “I have to see if the people I’m following on Twitter have any new posts,” and “I’ve got to check out my friend’s pics on Instagram.” After this initial discussion about external noises, some students began discussing internal noises, for instance, “Gurgles in my stomach,” “I’m just itching to go on break,” and “Maybe my own random thoughts are a kind of noise.” At this point, I introduce the idea of listening below the noise. LeClaire defines listening below the noise as a way of being alone, in silence and solitude, with the self.^[6] Some students seemed intrigued by the idea while others found the prospect of listening in solitude and silence “boring,” “tolerable,” and “terrifying.”

Reminding students that this is a course in listening, I asked them to remain open and receptive to LeClaire’s ten-minute audio story.^[7] After listening to LeClaire’s story, students are eager to ask questions, “How could she stay silent for a whole 24 hours?”, “Twice monthly?”, “For over twenty years?!”, “ I don’t get how being silent made her more in tune with others?” and “How can she stay comfortable in her own skin with all those thoughts running around?” Curiosity and wonder in the form of questions now pervade the atmosphere of the class. As this energy peaks, I invite them to listen to the silence and solitude within themselves.

I challenge students to carve out time (not less than one, but no more than six hours) the following week to be silent in a private quiet place without talking to anyone, and without the influence of media^[8] — Just Be. After students complete their time in solitude and silence, their journal writings reveal that most of them could not recall a recent time in their life when they intentionally created space for silence and solitude. Reactions to the solitude and silence activity varied greatly. Some students felt frustrated with continuous mind chatter filling the silence, others were aware of the chatter but could detach from it, and still others experienced their thoughts slowing down, accompanied by feelings of peace, like “muddy waters becoming clear.”^[9]

In the ensuing student discussion, we discovered diverse ways to practice the art of silently listening to the self in solitude. For illustrative purposes I recount some of the student ideas for being in silence and solitude. Simply pausing is an aid to recollecting oneself in the car upon arriving to school, work, or home. Sitting outside under a covered porch, on a park bench, or on a patch of grass makes it easier to free oneself from the tether of electronic devices. And making a ritual space by clearing a corner of a room, shed, or garage for a private place to be alone is conducive to cultivating silence and solitude.

There are seeds of silence and solitude in each of us that, in due season, sprout in a place where we listen below the noise, discover our true self, and perhaps in time, blossom and bear fruit for the service of others. In the words of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton:

The truest solitude is not something outside you . . . it is an abyss opening up in the center of your soul . . . You do not find it by travelling but by standing [being] still . . . here you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and . . . a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.^[10]

The class activity of listening below the noise begins to orient students in the direction of their interior life, a life so beautifully and poetically described by Merton. The benefits of silence and solitude are available to all who are willing to listen to the self in the SONG of life speaking below the noise. In the next section, I turn to the second verse in Listening to the SONG of Life, listening to the “other.”

SONG of Other: Surfing the Waves of Empathy

In a talk to members of the Google organization, Buddhist teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn quotes Swami Satchidananda who reportedly said, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf!”^[11] According to nonviolent communication teacher Marshall Rosenberg, waves of life energy are continually emanating from human beings, and we can learn to surf these waves by listening empathically.^[12] In class, we learned to surf the waves of energy from another person by having each person in a small group tell a short story from the past week. Then, group members attempt to surf the person’s wave of energy by empathizing with their feelings and needs. Rosenberg references the work of Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef who describes a human matrix of needs and satisfiers that are culturally and historically universal.^[13]

We adopted the following question to structure an empathic response when listening to another, “Are you feeling…(guess the feeling), because you are needing…(guess the need).”^[14] Sometimes we catch the other person’s wave of energy, experiencing the exhilaration of metaphorically popping up on the surfboard and riding their wave of energy into the shore. Other times, we miss the wave or wipe out. But even in wiping out, our attempts to empathize with the other person demonstrates caring and support. This active empathic engagement sustains a connection with the waves of life energy flowing from the other person.^[15]

Students resonate with the surfing metaphor as a means to understand the process of empathic listening since the beach at the Atlantic Ocean is a mere thirty-minute drive from campus. In the language of surfers, sometimes it is hard to “catch a wave” because the wave is too humongous, intense, or otherwise gnarly. Likewise, it is challenging to catch the feelings and needs of others when their story is embedded in language that blames or criticizes the listener. In such cases, we may first need to empathize with our own feelings and needs before empathizing with another.

Some students remained skeptical about empathically surfing waves of energy from others outside the classroom. They express their concern, “Dr. B, this is cool for class, but my friends aren’t gonna listen like that…if they’re done talking and I don’t say anything right away, they’re gonna think somethings wrong with me!” “Yes,” I replied, “That’s probably going to happen because of the elongated time it takes to clarify our own feelings and needs, listen and verbalize the feelings and needs of the other, and obtain feedback from the other to ensure the accuracy of our listening.” After empathizing with the student, I provided a simple metaphor that seemed to satisfy. “Like surfing, empathizing just takes practice!”

Interlude: Voicing Our Learnings

The students and I recite learning poems to mark the mid-semester assessment.^[16] To motivate students to meditate, write, and recite a learning poem for the class, we listen to Sarah Kay recite her poem entitled “B…” which begins with the phrase, “If I should have a daughter. . .”^[17] The class sat in rapt attention as she recited her poem, and when Kay paused at the end, the class applauded with intensity. After the poem, Kay shares insights and activities for developing a poetic voice. With inspiration from Kay’s poetry and message, students are ready to create and share their listening learnings as poetry. A week later, students recite their learning poems. There was a palpable silence in the room while each student in turn gave voice to their personal learnings as poetry. When the last student finished reciting their poem, one student in the class playfully remarked, “Dr. B, don’t you have a poem for us?” I replied, “I sure do!” Unfolding a poem from my back pocket, I began to slowly recite, “Wonderings and Hopes of a Professor.” After the mid-semester interlude, we continued the journey of listening to the SONG of life by exploring the song of nature.

SONG of Nature: Sunflowers and Tubers

The second half of the term begins with me placing grains of sand and a small yellow flower in the palm of each student. I ask students to let their gaze softly focus on these natural objects resting in the palm of their hand and meditate. After a time, I write some lines on the whiteboard and then recite part of William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence, “To see the World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”^[18] In listening to Blake’s words as they gaze at the sand in their palm, some students report feeling a genuine connection with nature. Some of their insights include how the micro grains of sand resting in their hand also make up the macro world around their hands, that processed sand makes up parts of this classroom, and that sand is embedded in the concrete walkways on campus. Other students report that Blake’s poem inspires them to relax with the flower in their hand, smell the aroma, behold the golden color, and feel the velvety petals.

I have a vivid memory of a small group of students adorning their hair with the sunchoke blossoms that I gave them as they departed class that evening. Their smiling and laughing as they rearranged the flowers in each other’s hair became my joy.

After this initiation into listening to nature, we engaged in other nature activities.^[19] For instance, we offered the gift of our breath (exhaled carbon dioxide) to green plants, and in return, the plants offered their gift of breath (oxygen) to us as we inhaled. We sat in a small grassy area outside of class surrounded by trees, shrubs, and flowers with closed eyes and silently named the individual parts of the soundscape surrounding us. And, we mindfully ate a single raisin in the space of three minutes. Overall, we explored diverse ways to listen to nature, buzzing insects, singing birds, animal movements and sounds, colorings and textures of plants, brightness and warmth of sunlight, and the feel of the earth on our bare feet.

Our discussions of the different nature activities left students with mixed feelings: awkward, perplexed, surprised, peaceful, renewed, and happy. As one illustration of these mixed feelings, I recall the story of student that said, “Putting my head into a green plant in a public place was one of the silliest things I have ever done, but after breathing with the plant for about a minute, I found myself feeling inexplicably happy.” Another student found connection with nature in a mature Magnolia tree that she observed from our second story class window during the first half of the semester. Recounting her story to the class, she said,

I felt drawn to the tree, hugged it like an old friend . . . I saw a name plate next to the tree, and when I googled the name, it was a professor that had died over a decade ago . . . I’ll always remember the name of that professor and that special Magnolia tree.

Another insight from experiencing nature came from “listening to the feel of a stone.” One student noted, “You can feel things about the stone that you cannot see with the naked eye.” This insight reveals experientially that we possess latent abilities to listen with more than just our ears and eyes. In the feeling stone activity, there are subtle textures of the stone that we cannot see with the naked eye, but that we can explore, know, and understand by feeling the stone with our fingertips. Michael Cohen suggests, based on thirty years of leading workshops and extended trips in nature, that humans posses at least fifty-two senses, and I hypothesize that we are capable of listening to all of them.^[20]

The nature section of the course ends with the professor handing out a thumb sized, light brown colored, plant tuber to each student. Recall that I handed out small sunflowers to each student at the beginning of the nature section of the course. The tubers and sunflowers came from the same plant in my garden known as the Jerusalem Artichoke Helianthus tuberosus or more informally, the sunchoke. The flowers from sunchokes in my garden had faded with the cooler temperatures of fall, and I harvested the tubers the day before I handed them out in class. I asked students if they could see a connection between the flowers I handed out two weeks earlier and the plant tubers I gave them today. Gradually, students began to articulate the universal circle of life in nature. I felt a sense of excitement building as the discussion slowly filled in the missing pieces of the circle of life that I was sketching on the board as they voiced their ideas. Finally, the circle was complete. The tuber gives birth to plant, plant to flower, flower to seed, and seed gives birth to tuber, in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. We marveled at the wisdom we created based on our experience of deeply listening to nature.

As a follow-up, I challenged students to plant the tuber in a pot, or in the ground, three to four inches deep, and then patiently listen and wait. In spring, the tuber puts out shoots and grows into a six to eight-foot sunchoke, or a three to four-foot plant if potted. If we listen well and take care of the sunchoke, the following fall season will bring a harvest of twelve petaled bright yellow flowers to enjoy. And the edible tubers can be consumed in the company of friends. This follow-up challenge involves listening to the needs of the plant, cultivating the soil to ensure the spread of roots, ensuring ample sunshine by attending to the movement of the sun, providing appropriate moisture by listening to rainfall, and conscious breathing with the plant to maintain a sense of connection. In return for listening deeply to the plant, the sunchoke yields beauty, nourishment, and wisdom about the great circle of life. The section on listening to nature comes to an end with this final challenge, and we continue to explore the next verse in the SONG of life– listening to the song of the Goddess-God-Divine.

SONG of God-Goddess-the Divine

Lectio Divina

Written accounts of an individual’s direct experience with Goddess-God or more broadly the Divine, when validated by a community of believers, is sometimes raised to the status of “sacred scripture” among world religions like Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism among others.^[21] Listening deeply to a holy text or sacred scripture, as in prayer or meditation, can guide the listener into something akin to the original Divine experience that inspired the sacred writing. Deep listening can also connect the listener with a community of believers embodying the meaning and lived experience of the sacred text. One way to practice this deep listening to sacred scripture, in the Christian tradition, is called Divine reading or lectio divina.

The Priest at the Well

Developed by monks in the Middle Ages, lectio divina is a method of Divine reading applied to sacred scripture. Monsignor Chet Michael, a dynamo of Divine energy and the octogenarian retreat master at the Well Retreat Center, shared the Lectio Divina method as one of the important spiritual practices during the retreat I attended. Standing not more than five feet tall, snow-haired and wrinkled, with dancing eyes beneath black-framed glasses, he described the workings of the Holy Spirit to a group of about twenty-five of us retreatants sitting in a circle in the Great Room at the Well Retreat Center. His teachings and counsel during that weekend mark a high point on my spiritual journey. Monsignor taught this method as the “Four R’s,” Read, Reflect, Respond, and Rest.

The Four R’s of Listening to the Divine

I begin our evening listening class with the words, “We are going to listen to the Divine through sacred reading.” After sipping some herbal tea that smelled like candied peppermints, I discuss a special type of reading called lectio divina or sacred reading. I explain. It’s different than the way you read a textbook or the way you might scan a social media site. This method of reading applies specifically to Divinely inspired texts like those of the major world religions, for example, Christianity’s New Testament, the Jewish Torah, the Muslim Qu‘ran, the Hindu Vedas and the Buddhist Dhammapada. You can also use this method for any text, like poems, literature, or musical lyrics, that you believe is Divinely inspired.

For many students, the first issue in attempting the lectio method is finding a sacred text that they want to read. A few students can recite poems by heart from grade school, but most students have long forgotten them, and many don’t believe these poems to be Divinely inspired anyway.

I write on the whiteboard in red letters: “The 4 R’s of Lectio Divina.” Under this title, one beneath the other, I write four capital “R’s.” Next to the first “R” I add the letters “ead” (Read). Then I say: There are four “R’s” to the method of lectio. The first is Read. We read a short section (a few lines or paragraph) of a text that we believe to be Divinely inspired. We read s l o w l y, as if we are a connoisseur sipping a fine wine, savoring the flavor. As we read, when we discover something that “tastes good,” we stay with that feeling of goodness and begin the second step of Reflecting (the second “R”) on the meaning of the text. Metaphorically, we let the wine swish around in our mouth, enjoying the taste until there is no more taste (meaning) to be savored. After considering the meaning of the text (literal and symbolic), we ask ourselves: what Response (the third “R”) does this passage require of me. That is, what action am I being called to? Once we commit to a concrete resolution, we Rest (the fourth “R”) with the passage, not trying to do anything in particular…just being with the passage. If we have more time, we return to the passage to find another tasty sip of wine and make our way through the four steps again. In just a moment, we will have a chance to practice the four “R’s” of lectio, but first, I ask: are there any questions?

Tasting the Wine

To practice the method of lectio divina, I project on the classroom screen a Divinely inspired poem from the book Prayers for a Thousand Years.^[22] Part of the poem reads:

May we listen to one another in openness and mercy.

May we listen to plants and animals in wonder and respect.

May we listen to our own hearts in love and forgiveness.

May we listen to God [the Divine] in quietness and awe.

I ask the students if they notice any connection between the poem and the SONG of life. After some discussion, students eventually notice that the poem contains all the elements of listening to the SONG of life, self (“our own hearts”), others (“one another”), nature (“plants and animals”), and Goddess-God-the Divine (“God”).

I allot two minutes for students to engage in each of the four R’s of lectio divina (eight minutes total). At the end of each segment, I invite students to “bring to a close” that step in the lectio process, and record something if they need to before proceeding to the next step. After concluding the fourth step of resting, we discuss the process and what we have learned.

Student Reactions to Listening to the Divine

One student remarked, “That went by way too fast…I don’t feel like I had enough time . . . I didn’t even get past the first stanza in the poem.” I replied, “It is okay if you didn’t finish the poem. Remember, the purpose is to listen for the Divine nudge, to find something that speaks to you. Once you’ve found something, you savor it before moving on.” As for the time pressure, I encourage students to experiment with the lectio method outside of class when they can allot at least fifteen to twenty minutes for the practice. Then they can compare their experience of the extended time outside of class with the more compressed time in class. We later explore which conditions optimize the ability to listen and connect with the Divine and why.

Another student playfully remarked, “This is deep. You can really get a lot out of a few words. We should read our textbooks this way.” Another student countered, “No way. It would take way too long, and those college books aren’t Divinely inspired anyway!” I smiled in agreement. Overall, students are uniformly surprised at how a short phrase from a sacred text can be the gateway to Divine vistas, meanings, and insights.^[23]

In student conferences near the end of the course, three students who self-identify as “not religious” or “atheist” found new connections with the Divine. For one student, the new connection is described as “Something larger than me, a feeling that there is more to life than just me, that there is something out there that I can connect with.” For another student, the Divine connection was a return to, and reframing of, their family’s religious roots. This student was estranged from their family’s fundamentalist Christian practices, but the experience of practicing lectio divina rekindled an interest in approaching the Bible in a new way. They found this new way more “meditative, practical, and restful.” Still another student expressed their new connection with the Divine as “. . . mysterious, hard to explain, a presence.” I appreciate this student’s attempt to language the numinous, something that inevitably falls short of the actual experience but is important and meaningful.

I’m reminded of the Taoist idea that the Way cannot be verbally spoken or communicated to another person through ordinary language. Rather, the Way is known through direct experience,^[24] that is, partly through listening. Similarly, lectio divina provides a way to experience the Divine through deep listening. My observations indicate that most students with a religious or spiritual faith express their connection with the Divine in our class discussions and in their journal writings with words like “renewal, growth, peace, and happiness.” The joy of being able to facilitate these kinds of positive listening experiences with students is the fulfillment of a life-long dream for me, for I, too, am experiencing renewal, growth, peace, and happiness.

Practicing Listening to the Divine

I invite readers of this book to consider performing an age regression experiment. What kinds of books, poems, or musical lyrics did you hold as sacred as a child . . . adolescent . . . young adult . . . middle-aged adult . . . older adult? When you compare sacred writings across the lifespan, do you notice any theme that ties the stages together? In contrast, how have your views about sacred writings evolved over time. That is, how are the sacred writings unique or different in each stage of life? Finally, if you were to pick a sacred passage for practicing lectio divina sometime within the next week, what passage would you choose to read, reflect, respond, and rest in…why this one? Set aside a specific and unhurried time and place to explore listening to the Divine using the practice of lectio divina.