Using the Arts to Learn How to Listen

You will find many ways to practice listening and hearing what is being communicated.

For me, listening to music evokes something in me that’s greater than just the music itself. Like all art, there’s the composer and performer that "speak" to us. What a perfect opportunity to listen to what each wants us to hear. For example, Jean Sibelius' 2nd Symphony speaks to me of not only exquisite beauty through the sounds alone, but even more of the lush country called Finland that he said he wanted to "paint" with his music.

Perhaps you can listen to the visual or tactile arts. How might you do that? Well, as I see it, your rapt attention to the work of art is a way you listen to your own experience from within yourself. What an ideal way to pratice listening without judgment! If you find yourself becoming a critic of the art, stop and contemplate what it might be like to "listen" to the artist without judgment.

When all is said and done, the pleasure and delight in all of art is that the beholder/listener decides in some mysterious way what is pleasurable and delightful. For those who listen without judgment (is it good art or do I like it), whatever is present may have a chance to come through to you, to me, to anyone. It takes practice.

Listening without judgment or your own mental model of what should be, takes conscious thought and deliberate practice, just as does anything worth learning to do well.