The Practice of "Deep Listening"

As part of the Gaiafield Center for Subtle Activism's "WiseUSA 'O8" program last year, a practice emerged for us that we have come to call "Deep Listening." It began several months before the public WiseUSA program was launched. We initiated a series of weekly calls originally intended just for the members of our Wisdom Council so that we would have a space each week to nurture ourselves and to find greater clarity to help guide our management of the project. We found our experience of the calls to be so profound and meaningful that we eventually introduced the structure into our public program. Now they seem to have become our signature practice.

What happens in a "deep listening" call? (I will describe the practice of deep listening as it occurs via a teleconference call, our usual mode. However, the same principles could be applied to a live group.) The structure is very simple. One person acts as the moderator. One person (or several) play the role of "spaceholder". The moderator invites all the participants on the call into a deeper space of presence and connection, first with themselves and then with all the others on the call. Once this connection has been established, the moderator invites the participants to open their awareness to a larger field of presence of which we are all a part. During our WiseUSA program, this usually took the form of the "Soul of America". Other times, we have opened ourselves to "Gaia" or simply to Divine Source. Then we have a period of "deep listening" - about half an hour or so of silence in which we invite participants to be open to any form of intuitive guidance that may arise from the larger field. After the time of silence, the moderator "opens the circle", inviting anyone who feels moved to share what insights or guidance arose for them during the meditation. Often as people share the insights build on each other, as though we are weaving a beautiful tapestry of collective spiritual wisdom.

What makes these calls "subtle activism" as opposed to another kind of spiritual practice is that the focus of our spiritual attention is on the collective realm. Personal issues are not excluded - in fact when they arise we can often recognize an important symbolic connection between them and our collective focus - but the primary focus is on the collective arena. For example, on Election Day we brought our attention to the election process; on Inauguration Day we focused on that event; and recently we focused on the members of Congress on the day of the vote regarding the stimulus bill.

The experience of these calls has been consistently wonderful for many of the participants. Many fascinating and touching insights have emerged. For example, when we brought our attention to the members of Congress on the day of the stimulus vote, one of our members "saw" in her inner vision a collection of stars entering the Chamber. The stars each represented a piece of energy of the soul of America. She saw these stars, one by one, attaching themselves to the aura of each member of Congress, guiding them to be in alignment with the soul of America. During the Democratic convention, one of our participants "saw" the convention surrounded by beings of light, including many Native American wisdomkeepers who had specific guidance about the deeper meaning of these gatherings.

The practice of holding space as a group and listening deeply for guidance about a situation in the collective, public realm represents an exciting new direction for spirituality, which for centuries has been almost exclusively focused on individual subjectivity. We can start to imagine the potential of integrating this practice into many different arenas of our culture. One of our members recently shared the vision of having groups of subtle activists "holding space" during major political debates, scientific gatherings, economic forums, ecological conferences, and so on. As subtle activists, we can do our part in the great project to re-integrate the inner and the outer, the invisible and the visible, spirit and matter - an integration that has become vital if we are to meet our current evolutionary challenges.