How I Learned to Listen...

The teachers, experiences, and moments that taught me to trust what wants to emerge.

People sometimes ask me how I learned to listen the way I do.

The truth is, I don’t think I learned it in one place.

I learned it from many teachers.

Some of them were people.

Some of them were experiences.

Some arrived as gifts.

Others arrived as heartbreak.

I learned something about listening as a midwife.

Sitting beside birth taught me that life unfolds in its own timing.

You cannot rush emergence.

You cannot force readiness.

You can support.

You can accompany.

You can listen.

Years later, biodynamic craniosacral therapy deepened that understanding.

I learned to listen with my hands.

To listen beneath words.

To listen for the intelligence that lives within the body.

To trust that there is often something larger at work than what is immediately visible.

Life continued to teach me.

Through illness.

Through grief.

Through relationships.

Through the years following my brain injury, when so much of what I thought I knew about myself was stripped away.

Again and again, I found myself being asked to slow down.

To listen differently.

To listen not for answers, but for what was trying to emerge.

Some of my greatest teachers have never offered me a technique.

Instead, they taught me how to stay.

How to remain present in uncertainty.

How to become curious rather than certain.

How to trust what unfolds when we stop forcing and start listening.

Over time, I have come to realize that listening is not passive.

It is an act of relationship.

A way of saying:

I am here.

I am willing to stay.

I am interested in what is true.

Today, whether I am sitting with someone in craniosacral therapy, relational somatic therapy, breathwork, or spiritual mentorship, I find myself returning to the same practice.

I listen.

And then I slow down a little more.

Not because I know what is coming.

But because I have learned to trust that what needs to emerge will emerge when it has been deeply listened to.