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Care-full Listening Part I

Writer's picture: Richard BentleyRichard Bentley

During the COVID-19 pandemic, with the insecurities of hourly-paid university lecturing becoming increasingly evident, I found myself looking for a different path. I had wanted to explore chaplaincy for many years and, prompted by an arts-for-wellbeing project I facilitated with the local hospital’s ICU, I took the opportunity to volunteer as a Buddhist/non-religious chaplain (see previous post for disambiguation). Having seen a need, I felt drawn to offer support, but also to honour in myself an unshakeable desire to care and connect with people more deeply and more frequently than I was able to as a lecturer. After a long and refreshingly unguarded chat with the Lead Chaplain (and Tubeway Army drummer) Bob Simmonds, I was encouraged not to volunteer but to apply for a part-time position, which I later secured. Over the past four years I have been privileged, and I really mean privileged, to have had the opportunity to work alongside patients and their families, visitors, staff and a burgeoning volunteer team. To be honest, at the outset I felt completely out of my depth, struggling with the confidence to know what to say to people who were facing immense loss, pain, distress and overwhelm and later, more importantly, knowing how to be silent, listen and care without saying much at all. Whilst being a calm presence in these situations has become a little more natural, I am all too aware of how much I still have to experience and learn. In an environment such as this, there is certainly no room for misplaced-confidence and complacency. Doing this work has sharpened my listening skills, expanding my capacity to be present with what is most difficult to hear which, for “gentle souls” (I think I’m secure enough to ‘own’ this label now!), can be a particularly bumpy ride! There is, of course, another side to working in this environment, where you cannot help but be touched by the depth of human compassion, witness inspiring human connections and be buoyed by the practical, roll-your-sleeves-up (bare-below-the-elbows), get-on-with-the-job type care that’s needed. It is this personal commitment to care, so critical to work in healthcare, that also underpins a contemplative approach to listening and field recording. It sounds a bit corny, but ‘care-full’ listening seems to be a term I return to i.e. to listen with as much care as I can muster. So, in this post and the next, I would like to explore this orientation of listening, making connections between listening ‘in the field’ and listening in the hospital.


a piece written during the COVID-19 pandemic

(trigger warning: contains recordings of an ICU ward, which some might find difficult)


My aspiration, when working at the hospital, is to be rooted in mindful, care-full listening. In secular mindfulness there is a practice called 50-50 awareness, giving 50% of our awareness to our own body to remain grounded, while giving the other 50% of our awareness to the person we are speaking to. While in reality the ratio naturally shifts, the practice helps us not to get lost either in our own thoughts and feelings (e.g. worrying what to say next) or get carried away by the conversation or the emotions ‘in-the-room,’ instead remaining grounded and aware of both. In some situations, it feels like the practice is more 33%-33%-33% (apologies if the maths is uncomfortable!). As well as awareness of self and ‘other,’ there’s a need to be aware of what is not immediately apparent, either in what the person is not saying (e.g. reading between the lines, sensing in someone’s body language) or of the deeper reality in which they live and perceive the world (e.g. perhaps for them, God is also present in our conversation). In the same way, my field recording practice seems rooted in a care-full awareness of a) my own interior soundscape b) what I am listening to and c) what may go unheard. In this post, I’ll look at the first of these, the experience of ourselves as listeners…

 

Listening Inwardly

Last month I was invited to speak on a podcast exploring staff wellbeing in the NHS which got me thinking about the practicalities of looking after ourselves. My initial response to the theme was to note the importance of having a menu of accessible, flexible and good quality options to support staff, staff that may be on low incomes, have erratic shift-patterns and busy home lives, or feel guilty about taking time for themselves. However, working backwards, it was clear that making the best use of any support on offer would depend on our level of self-awareness, our ability to listen deeply and understand what we may need. Like a course of medical treatment, there must be an exploration of the symptoms, an initial diagnosis and treatment plan, but also an ongoing review of our health and wellbeing. There is a need to foster the skill of listening carefully to our bodies and the flow of thoughts and feelings that make up our experience which, for people living mostly on ‘automatic pilot’, is trickier than we’d like to acknowledge. A contemplative approach to field recording begins then, with developing the skill of listening inwardly.


Sweep – a project I carried out for the Sonic Arts Research Unit in 2019,

listening inwardly (and outwardly) to the sounds of sweeping

 

When listening to patients, there are rarely any fixes to peoples difficulties and even fewer quick ones. However, as you may have experienced yourself, there can be a lot of relief from simply being heard. So too, it seems, that when we experience difficulties, listening to ourselves with a kind, non-judgmental and understanding attitude may offer some relief. We still suffer, but have an opportunity to step back a bit and not get so caught-up and lost in it. Like other forms of mindfulness practice, contemplative listening and field recording encourage us to appreciate how we are when we record, rather than simply on what or how we record, acknowledging the porous membrane separating our inner and outer experience. In practice, this could mean noticing the feeling-tone (in Sanskrit and Pāli called vedanā) of our listening, how we experience and label sounds as positive, negative or neutral. This could be an awareness of our feelings when we become frustrated at a motorcycle roaring through a peaceful riverside recording, noticing how beautifully nostalgic we feel as we walk past a busker on a soundwalk, or noticing how bored we are by the lack of interest in a pond-life hydrophone recording. ‘How we are’ when recording can also involve an awareness of our body. This could simply involve an appreciation of our hearing, or noticing when sitting silently-still is painful. Similarly, awareness of our thoughts could mean noticing when we are getting overly caught-up in planning our microphone set-up, noticing when we are worrying about our conspicuous presence in a place or when reminiscing at the sound of children playing whilst listening back to a recording. This is the material of contemplative field recording practice as much as the recordings themselves. While some of this may seem trivial, building this mindful awareness can be incredibly powerful in all aspects of our lives, particularly when physical pain, strong emotions or difficult thoughts are present for us. As such, contemplative field recording is training for everyday life.


When we launch into listening, sound-hunting, recording, operating on automatic pilot, we may lose our freedom and unwittingly return to well-worn but unhelpful patterns of behaviour. A simple practice I find useful at the hospital is to take a little time to check-in with myself before visiting a patient, often by walking with a solid, present-focused attention through the corridors, sensing how I am in myself and connecting with the sound of my footsteps. This allows me to arrive at the bedside, knowing how I am in myself and better prepared to hold a space for whatever I find there. Similarly, when field recording, I try to become aware of the way I am in that moment, noticing any reverberations from activity beforehand as well as any intentions, expectations and aspirations for the session. Grounding myself allows me to slow-down and find an open and more accepting place from which to listen and record, one that acknowledges the way I am, even if that’s difficult to be with sometimes. Taking time to listen to my body, the flow of thoughts and feelings that makes up my experience, underpins the practice of contemplative field recording. With this self-understanding can come a bit more compassion for myself as I am. It is an act of self-care simply to acknowledge how I am, but it is also the basis for a more open, friendly and honest relationship with others.


Closing Thoughts

Over the course of these blog posts, I'll return to this awareness of our internal soundscape, highlighting listening and field recording practices that can foster what psychologists call 'meta-cognitive awareness,' (our ability to take a step back and observe sensations, thoughts and feelings in real-time). I plan to explore, not only how this supports our listening and field recording practice, but how this reverberates into the hubbub of daily life. In Part II of this post, I’ll be looking at care-full listening to the soundscape and beyond, to what is present but unheard.


I hope that some of what has been explored in this post has been useful. It feels a bit strange to be talking about ‘care’, ‘mindfulness’ and ‘wellbeing’ etc. in the context of field recording, a practice that is more commonly associated with the 'hard-stuff' of microphone set-ups, audio tech and sound design. But that’s for me to deal with!


Whatever brought you here, you are very welcome.

Thank you for listening and do consider sharing your experiences, reflections and wisdom in the comments below or by emailing me at: richard@anoisysilence.com

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