The Sacred Art of Listening - Sharing the Gift of Presence

There’s a stillness I am learning to lean into.

Not a silence of disconnection or withdrawal, but one of presence. A holy hush. A space where something else can emerge—something beyond my need to know, to respond, to be right, to perform my intelligence or prove my worth.

It’s wild, really, to realize how deeply conditioned we are not to listen.

From the time we’re small, the world rewards answers. Praise comes with hands raised fast. Classrooms become competitions of knowing. If you don’t know, you shrink. You get teased, maybe, or worse—you internalize the moment, file it away as evidence that you are not enough. And so we learn: better to always be prepared with an answer than to risk the humiliation of not knowing.

But listening—true listening—is not about knowing. It’s about being. It’s about witnessing, receiving, opening. It’s about surrendering the illusion that we need to be the ones to fix, solve, explain, rescue, or justify.

Lately, I’ve been on a humbling journey into my own habits of response. How often I feel the pull to jump in. To analyze, reframe, defend. To offer the insight, the reframe, the “aha” moment. All of it well-meaning. All of it deeply practiced. All of it… noise.

What happens when we stop trying to add to the conversation and instead allow the conversation to shape us?

Listening, I’ve come to see, is not passive. It’s not doing nothing. It’s an active engagement with the present moment, with the speaker, with ourselves. It requires discipline. It requires humility. And most of all, it requires space—space to let what’s being said land in the body. Space to allow feelings to rise. Space to integrate before responding, if we even need to respond at all.

Because the truth is, sometimes words aren’t what’s needed. Sometimes the gift is in our presence. In the safety created when someone knows they won’t be interrupted, redirected, or advised. They’ll simply be held. Heard. Felt.

We live in a world so full of reaction. Scroll, comment, post, debate, move on. We’re taught to fill every gap with something—an opinion, a solution, a soundbite. But what if the most radical act is to pause?

To say: I don’t know.

To ask: Can I sit with that?

To whisper: I’m listening.

There is something deeply human in this longing to be received without being fixed. We carry so many unspoken things in our hearts. And most of us have never been taught how to hold space—for ourselves, or for another. We’ve forgotten how to listen for what isn’t being said. For the tremble behind the words. For the sacred breath between sentences. For the longing behind the anger. For the tenderness in the silence.

There are moments now where I feel this shift rising in me—not always as ease, but as awareness. A desire to listen, not just to words, but to tone. To body. To energy. To the spaces between things. To what life is trying to say through another’s eyes, or tears, or laughter. To what I am saying, even when I think I’m being quiet.

There’s a deeper listening I’ve been initiated into—one that isn’t taught but felt. It’s a listening born from being met without judgment, from witnessing presence that doesn’t seek to fix, from the way love can sit beside silence and not demand more. That kind of listening changes you. Softens the parts of you that believed they had to speak to exist. Invites you to remember that who you are, in stillness, is already enough.

So I am learning to listen.

To the world.

To myself.

To the ones I love.

And in doing so, I remember something ancient—something no school ever taught me:

That listening is a form of reverence.

That it is enough not to know.

That silence can be sacred.

That we are all aching, in our own ways, to be heard.

And that maybe—just maybe—the medicine isn’t always in the words we speak, but in the hearts we open when we don’t.