The Octopus Teacher

Shhh…

Country Mouse, do you hear that? 

The quiet rustling leaves of a quaking aspen? The bubbling of the mountain stream? The slow, liquid trill of the swamp sparrow? The evening peepers’ song by the pond? 

Or…are you a City Mouse? 

Do you live where the notes are bolder, but just as rhythmic? 

Voices calling over one another. Horns honking. Metal clanking. Trains screeching on tracks around the bend. Things getting done.

This rich world is full of notes. Some are piano—soft, gentle, subtle. But others are louder, more aggressive—fortissimo. 

To listen, we can access the full spectrum—the many octaves of notes. But to truly hear, we need to hear the space in between the notes.

We need to hear the rest.

That moment of quiet. The pause. The silence.

This is how we hear ourselves, too.

When you stop bustling back and forth, darting from one activity to the next, rushing in and out of your house, closing your car and office doors, what do you hear?

And do you pause long enough to hear it?

When I was trained as a coach through Co-Active Training Institute, they taught us three levels of listening. Level 1 is listening to what’s going on in our own minds. It’s paying attention to our own agenda. In Level 1 listening, we focus on what we want in an interaction. 

Level 2 listening is a step beyond that—listening to someone else. In Level 2, our focus is on another person or group and hearing what they are saying. 

But Level 3 listening? 

That is listening to the energy in the room. Listening for what is not being said. Listening to the vibration that is in the air.

You know how you can walk into a room and feel tension, even if no one is saying anything? Sensing that—that is Level 3 listening.

How often do you hear what is coming from this space? Do you hear what others say when they are not saying a single word? Do you notice that raise of the eyebrow, the shifting of the body weight, the tightening of the arms across the chest, or that look of longing?

Tuning in to all of that is what makes a great listener—a tuned-in spouse, partner, or parent. Otto Scharmer, author and co-founder of the Presencing Institute, says, “Listening is at the source of all great leadership.”

And what if we used those pauses to listen to ourselves too?

I recently saw at the Artis Groote Museum in Amsterdam a display about the octopus. It said that the octopus has no central nervous system. “Three quarters of its nerve cells are located in its eight arms, each of which perceives its environment separately and draws its own conclusions. The brain contains the other quarter and functions as mission control.”

Imagine that. An octopus listens with all eight of its arms.

What might we hear if we listened with all of our limbs?

They call this somatic listening—listening with the body. What is your body thinking or feeling when someone else is around? What is your body taking in?

And how much do you listen for what you don’t want to hear or see?

We do this with our children. Or our spouse or significant other. Our best friend. We sometimes want so badly to hear that all is well. That everything is fine. And if it’s not, we can blitz by it. Merely to quell our own anxiety, we can move fast. We skip right over the rest to get to the next note.

But we also do the same with ourselves. 

I’m not always the best listener to me. How about you?

American anabaptist author David Augsburger said, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.”

How much are you hearing yourself? Listening to what your own mind, body, and heart are telling you?

And how much are you truly listening to others?

I heard a coach say recently that the word listening is almost not a big enough word for what we can do for each other. I love that. Imagine a word that can expand to be broad enough liminal space to truly hold another being. 

Let’s listen to ourselves and each other like octopi. 

Listen with our arms, our legs, our hearts. Listen with our elbows. Our fingers. Our toes. 

We may be surprised what we learn when we suction cup in.

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