Listening for the quietness of instinct

Inhabiting immediacy

Marisa:

There’s this idea I've noticed living in the bodies of my students that spontaneity requires a kind of thoughtless, wild, immediate response!

Sometimes it takes deep listening to respond spontaneously.

Yatharth:

Mm. There’s a different word I like. Spontaneity means responding with immediacy, and immediacy means fully inhabiting the the call of the moment, in a way that’s not always our first instinct.

Marisa:

Oh wow, I love that so much, Yatharth! Spontaneity and mindfulness are two sides of the same coin. Responding impulsively is different from responding spontaneously. There's impulse (and seriously, yay impulse! It's important in a buttoned up world to learn to allow our impulses!) . . . but there's also something deeper, like intuition - which can still be spontaneous.

Sometimes I describe this as “reacting versus responding.”

Yatharth:

In a loud world, sometimes it takes quietness to hear the instincts of our bones.

In the book I’ve been reading, Women Who Run With The Wolves, there’s an image that’s stuck with me: the wild woman, lone in the desert in the night, by some bones, barefoot, listening.

Our primal instinct lives and breaths among us. It never stopped living through us since the day our hearts started beating, and it won’t stop after we die either.

Humans have this distinctive ability to listen for that instinct. It’s the instinct that can be terrifying. It can nurture, and protect. It pushes us to grow and to attend to our loved ones.

But listening to that instinct can be a quiet, and sometimes a little estranging process.

Marisa:

When I lead Core Sounding circles, I encourage people, when they hear a sound someone is making that they want to make a sound in response to, to let the sound reverberate in their bones a bit first. Then see what vocalizing wants to comes out.

Nothing is lost in that process, but something deepens. The listening outward becomes listening inward - circulating what you heard and giving time for it to move through your system and bring what you heard on the outside into deeper contact with all the bones and blood of you. What comes out can be a little more new, and a little more true to the moment.

Sometimes that process can be quick too - but doing it slowly can develop that kind of circulatory listening pathway…

I think of Pauline Oliver’s exercises, of course, that behemoth figure in electronic music, creator of Deep Listening as a modality and a way and even a lifestyle.

Doing her pieces feels like meditating to me. Listening to sounds and to the entire field of sound as a way to be present, to hear what’s alive right now, to listen through all of your skin and your body. Yum.

And I also love practicing allowing instincts and wildness. Not equating mindfulness or responsiveness with something that looks zen and calm all the time. Sometimes listening can feel like holding back, and sometimes listening can spark desire to sing wildly in response. I like it all. All these energies.

I don't have too much more to say about this. Just enjoying considering both spontaneity and mindfulness.

Yatharth:

To inhabit immediacy means both wild and quiet

To express and not react come from one and the same hand.

To listen means to listen to the outside and to the inside.

Silence is loud.