#1
26.07.22
I am trying to consider this space as separate, or at least parallel to my art practice, in that I resist the urge to document, to progress, to work towards an outcome, to do what is expected of me as an artist. However, I did want to note down some reflections on what has happened so far. To use the same rationale of the sessions, where I find myself in the process is in a space of both intimacy and spaciousness. Intimate because the sessions have been characterised by an uncommon openness that moves me every time, and spacious because they could develop in any direction. The beginning of the process was quite nerve-wracking, like any exploratory practice. Holding space for whatever emerges is not easy, especially the first time. As the sessions have gone on, I find it easier to let go, trying to become less like a facilitator. After the end of the second session, in which there was quite a bit of silence, my sense was that it hadn’t gone well. However, what followed when we closed the circle was an extremely rich conversation, in which I learned that silence does not equal disengagement. We decided in this conversation that sharing need not be in English, or even in verbal language. A sense of the process, I could even say ritual, carrying this loose collective of people who choose to be in this space, grows with each session.
I have been describing what we are doing as ‘deep listening as a transformative collective practice’ but inevitably this shortens to ‘deep listening’. For background, deep listening is a very well established practice initiated and developed by Pauline Oliveros until her death, and her work has been continued globally since. In May of this year, it would have been Pauline Oliveros’ 90th birthday, and to coincide, a new edition of her book ‘Quantum Listening’ was published. The book is described as a manifesto for listening as activism, foregrounding compassion and peace as the basis for our actions in the world, which resonates strongly with my own founding intentions for this space. I hope we can experiment with some of these exercises together in future sessions.
#2
21.10.22
This is the second instalment of an irregular blog that I decided to keep to chart the progress of this year long process of deep listening as a transformative practice, in collaboration with Dancing on the Edge. An open group meets every month with the purpose of listening together and to each other.
We listen to each other speaking and we listen to each other refrain from speaking. We listen together to sounds from our individual environments that punctuate our shared silence: children playing in Amsterdam, birds in a tree in Alexandria, a coffee being delivered to a cafe table in Palermo, the dusk falling in Paris, a laptop overheating in Sheffield. We listen to the silences that we build together, which have something of a healing quality for the knowing that we have built them together.
We have now been developing this practice together for six months, with new and now familiar faces arriving each time, and what I have been most struck by as the sessions have progressed, is how each time is so markedly different. The rhythm and feel of each session are distinct, held by the growing experience within the group, and also invigorated by those experiencing it for the first time.
I have been learning from the writing and thinking of Pauline Oliveros, the founder of the deep listening movement, and noticed something that Pauline’s life partner Ione mentioned in her recollections about her experience of facilitating Pauline’s ‘Tuning meditation’, from her well-known work Sonic Meditations (1971). The instruction for the meditation is:
“Inhale deeply; exhale on the note of your choice; listen to the sounds around you, and match your next note to one of them; on your next breath make a note no one else is making; repeat. Call it listening out loud.”
Recalling facilitating this work with audiences, Ione recalls how, in the exercise of ‘listening to our listening’, as she describes it, ‘something special, something both old and new, occurred. Something healing’. Pauline herself once spoke about how practised listening continues to evolve, consistently yielding new information, and there is something of this beginning to emerge out of our sessions.
One recent session began to feel like a magical séance, as multiple synchronicities curiously wove themselves through the fabric of our shared space, so that all we could do was to laugh together. The last session took place over dusk for many of the localities on the call, and as our windows darkened, we listened to each other speak in shared and native languages. For some this meant casting words into the void, not knowing if they were being understood, and for others it meant listening beyond language to what else is held in the voice.
#3
20.02.23
We held the first of these monthly sessions at the end of April last year. Now three-quarters of the way through this year of listening together, my thoughts turn inevitably towards the end of that cycle. The format for each session has been the same throughout, which has helped me to refrain from thinking beyond the session itself towards future developments, and allowing me to focus on my evolving relationship to this curious space that we’ve grown together. I wonder if other regular participants have some version of this experience.
I have used it hesitantly throughout, but I do think that practice is the right word for what we’ve been exploring together. This morning I read a new Substack post by my friend the artist, and Tai Chi teacher Caroline Ross, which dropped serendipitously into my inbox this morning just as I was thinking about this, in which she writes ‘To be complete, a practice or Way must have an element of non-doing, as well as an apparent form.’ In this co-listening practice (more on the co-prefix shortly), the silence we share is our non-doing. After a recent session, one participant reflected on the different qualities of silence before, during and after the session, and others were quick to agree. It led me to expand my sense of how it is possible to grow together through digital space, even only through silence, and now to a deeper appreciation of the importance of non-doing.
In her post, Caroline goes on: ‘In much meditation, one does not ‘do’ anything much, the effort is in returning the mind and body to relaxed open emptiness from its habitual state of over-use (or torpor). Once settled, the mind is not held tightly, instead, a non-reactive, steadfast quality arises. We become like bogs: absorptive, unclear, not immediately useful, slower, fuller, moderating the flows of thought and life, like peat.’ I like to imagine that what we are doing when we meet is a version of this bog-becoming, a group of strangers growing into one another. It has been my experience that once the subsoil exists, by which I mean that once there is a core of people in each session for whom this practice has become familiar, then significant amounts of bog-becoming can happen even in just one session of ninety minutes.
Each time we respond to the question ‘where do you find yourselves?’. It is always tempting to change the prompt but each time we face this question we deepen our connection to it. Somehow it happens that most people, when they choose to speak, begin by saying ‘I find myself…’. Like an impromptu observance of ritual, each time someone says it we are returned to the connective tissue of our togetherness. One regular attendee frames it differently, seeing it as a way of puncturing the membrane between physical aloneness and shared silence. Either way, it has become part of our collective practice.
In the last session, a new participant asked ‘Am I supposed to find myself?’. In the silence that followed, I realised that getting lost is something we are learning to do together. There is no map for this work, no outcomes, no pathway, nothing that is supposed to happen, either individually or collectively. Those who return are invariably drawn by something they can’t quite explain, something that lies out beyond daily experience, inviting us to be together in a different way. Getting lost in a time of mapping is an act of resistance. As Bayo Akomolafe says, ‘to find our way, we must first get lost’, and suggests that Western culture yearns for lostness. Maybe what we are doing here is some version of that, reaching for the spaces beyond the edges of the maps of modernity and coloniality.
There are three more sessions until the end of the yearly cycle, which anyone can still join.
GROUP REFLECTIONS
Stephen Jon
28.10.22
I have now experienced five sessions. I explore the spaces between words, spaces between thoughts even. There is a huge release in having permission not to speak.
02.05.22
First session left me feeling light, open and calm. Akin to a meditation but different in being shared. Loved listening, quiet mind, not listening hard, just open to the sense of connection.
03.06.22
My second session was the first that I spoke at, and that was very much a personal reflection as to things happening in my own life. A time of change which was somewhat reflected in what everyone else was expressing. I longed to hear what people said in their own language, to hear the sense rather than the meaning of words.
05.08.22
My third session, I came with 4 deaths in my sphere over the last month. A sense of grief sitting on my shoulders, lightly, but noticeably there. I found it hard to articulate what is happening in this Zoom zone, I just know that I want to be there. We all seem to be circling around some sort of truth, almost hearing, almost reaching for an understanding beyond words. A few days later, I had a strange feeling, a memory of self being someone not me, the person I was in the past is not the same person as I am now. Memories exist of that other being, but I am now other although still a summation of those memories.
06.09.22
My fourth session. Big groups, different dynamic, felt theatrical, as most of us sat in dwindling light. The northern eruption twilight throwing people’s faces into chiaroscuro. I was reminded of Rembrandt. As people talked, their words seemed to be absorbed into that dark with just the sound left to be felt, to be experienced, as language itself became noise, a music, an abstraction. It gave me great joy to hear other languages, felt honest and uninhibited. The sounds that people made felt unfiltered.
As the following days passed, my mind returned frequently to the experience, enriched and enhanced by the separation of time and geography. I recollect the experience whilst exploring a new studio space far away from home. I have the use of someone else’s studio, on loan for occasional use. I am listening deep to this new space, to new rural sounds, to a different landscape, to the spirit of Rosie whose studio it is. A woman I have only met a few times but to whom I feel a great warmth. At first unsettling and it shall remain so until I find out what I am meant to be doing here.
07.10.22
My fifth session. I am eager and ready for this session, feeling that I have much to share after my ponderings in the new studio over the last few days, BUT, as I settle into to session, all those impulses dissolve. I find that I just want to sit with the silence, to listen and let the overthinking mind release itself. I am conscious of sighing deeply and regularly. I sigh particularly at the end of each monologue. It is as if I am breathing the session, breathing each person into the Zoom Zone. Breathing myself in. Each breath is an absorption and a release. The word ‘Yearning’ continues to resonate with me.
Sofie
23.11.22
The voices felt like the connection between people and the silences like the space between them. Using voice is a gesture, and the space is the witness.
Like the note played on an instrument is the musician’s gesture, but the space between the notes belongs to all that witness the music.
The silences allowed for an echo, that of the voice that just spoke, and then met by one’s own reflective thought-voice. In the silence that followed a sentence, a timbre came to life and became animated; the internation of the voice still heard, told its own story -more like the emotion implicitly felt in music, than explicitly communicated in a sentence.
Initially, the silences highlighted difference and distance between people both geographically and psychologically, but as the session progressed, the silence is what drew everybody close. Intimate, and almost sacred. Perhaps the silence became acceptance itself- a vessel held by everyone.
I felt that the common factor in everyone’s contribution was a degree of vulnerability.
I noticed the willingness to share without the reassurance of a response. And yet, the silence, for me, became the most reassuring factor of all. When listening becomes hearing, the silence becomes more akin to acceptance, which holds a reassuring quality. When listening and hearing is the aim, then silence no longer holds a threat; a threat such as the anticipation of judgement, of disconnection, or even attack or rejection.
Whilst initially silence between group members was a reminder of difference and distance, both geographical and psychological, this shift into acceptance – with silence as a metaphorical vessel for what everybody brings – actually changed the silence into the very matter that drew everybody close.
Thoughts on listening to other languages, of which you only know the occasional word or none at all:
The fact that the focus of the group was on listening, and not responding, took the pressure off the listener, and allowed for them to hear other things; nuance of voice, internation, emotional qualities, inherent in speech. The focus shifted from being concerned with cognitive understanding (in anticipation of having to respond with words) to hearing what is implicitly felt in the use of the voice.
As a listener, Instead of noticing otherness, the focus shifted to noticing familiarity- the universally recognised and ‘known’ about how we express ourselves as humans.
The silence shifted from being about what wasn’t said to being what had been said.
Louisa
25.11.22
I can’t recall exactly how I ended up here, joining via Zoom with a group of people I have never met, on a dark rainy evening. But settling in to the silence after the chime was a sense of home; perhaps because some of the participants have been doing this together for months already, perhaps because my cells recollect similar spaces from practices in other parts of my life, perhaps because this silence and space evokes a connection with another kind of space which is beyond words.
I have been working lately with an exploration through movement and stillness into the physical space of the womb and the way it is the space that holds the information from which the structures of the embryo are formed (from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering). And I have been working with how this relates to less tangible spaces; how they are also spaces which hold information.
So when Sofie spoke of the symbol of bowls inside one another, I felt a rush of energy through my body. Just that morning I had been studying Anthony Gormley’s work and came across Full Bowl: a set of small black bowls resting one inside the other. It reminded me that this symbol has been in my awareness for a while, first drawing and painting a vessel of a similar shape last year, then making a small coil bowl from locally dug clay (in the dark so I could deliberately eliminate my dominant sense), and then, since arriving back in the UK in April, repeatedly seeing, in semi-waking and sleeping states, a ring of concentric circles, which I have recorded several times (images below). It was particularly present when I stayed right next to Arbor Low stone circle for a few nights over the summer solstice.
So in this rainy evening Zoom gathering, in this deep listening to silence and to others sharing their day to day experience, something curious and subtly exciting appears to be happening. I hesitate to name it, and certainly don’t want to analyse it, but there is a sense that this kind of space somehow allows the otherwise to show up.
#4
15.06.23
Pinned on the wall of my studio are a number of scraps of paper, on which are written embryonic attempts to articulate this year of listening together. The term ‘practice of togetherness’ appears consistently, scattered through with questions like ‘Can listening help us to live better with the consequences of a collapsing system?’ and ‘what are the revolutionary properties of silence?’. The longer this scrawled constellation remains, though, what emerges most clearly is my reluctance to pin it down. I grapple now with the task of writing conclusively about a practice that resists the framing of conclusion. Instead then, I decide to describe the sessions that have taken place since last writing, and see what floats to the surface.
February feels like reaching a long way back from the balmy green of midsummer. I remember thinking there was more silence. Someone says that they feel lost in a forest. I try to articulate the feeling of sinking into unknown languages. Someone else shares that attending the group feels like meeting in a clearing in the fog, though she doesn’t say whether the image is on land or at sea. I imagine a congregation of coracles. Another speaks of having to re-find themselves after listening to others speaking, of becoming immersed each time in the experience of another.
The next time we meet, it is over an hour before anyone speaks. Then someone says ‘I feel myself listening at many levels now’, and this is followed by an outburst of birdsong. I do not know in whose locality is the blackbird, or the song thrush, or the others that I cannot identify, but their insistence to be heard today is striking. I turn my chair away from the screen and look out of a window facing the sky. The ramifications of this practice seem amplified. Later, many of those present express that this was the session they found most moving.
Late April comes around. The last session doesn’t feel like the end of a journey together, more like a solstice, birthday or some such; the circular pilgrimage of the seasons coming to its ending, only to start over. Each month has been different and in some ways this is the least notable, but there is an easy conviviality that I haven’t noticed before; a warm chuckle, a nod of recognition, solidarity in a bowing of the head or a closing of the eyes. No-one wants to draw conclusions, and I’m glad for that.
Amongst the scraps on my wall is a single yellow post-it note. There were others but they fell off. On it is written and circled ‘holding space for the minutiae of lives playing out in a collapsing system.’ My eyes keep returning to it as I sit here. It draws me because there is nothing else on my wall that acknowledges how to fit this snowballing recognition – that our way of life might be coming to an end – into the rituals of our daily lives. How does the question of ‘how to approach the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it’ move through us as we clean our teeth, walk the dog, or wait to speak with a machine about debt repayment?
If this sounds dramatic, it doesn’t feel that way to me. There has been, over the last decade, a growing body of thinking, artmaking, writing, and maybe even science, that lies somewhere out beyond the idea that we can save the world from impending climate catastrophe. This is not to turn away, but to stay with the trouble of it, to understand that we might not have a solution, and in that eventuality, to ask ‘what next?’. In the space that opens up, we might refocus our attention, care and radical energy on the local, the interpersonal, the collective, and the relationships that we have in our daily lives with other beings. What I call practices of togetherness re-situate care in the everyday, relocating our potential as care givers and care receivers away from the purchased self-care of the wellbeing industry, therapy and one-on-one treatments, and back towards the collective. We build local and trans-local networks of interdependence, and maybe we improve our collective capacity to face the future realities of an unsaved world in all its grief and joy, wonder and drudgery.
But I am getting carried away, asking too much, looking for solutions, off down that rabbit hole. At the beginning of this co-listening experiment, I wanted to spend one year in this practice, showing up each month, and seeing where it takes us. At the end of that year, I still feel the same.
And so I reach the difficult part – concluding the inconclusive. To do that, I want to honour the collectivism at the heart of the work so by ending with words from other participants.
We are open to connection. We reflect together on times of change. We come with grief sitting on our shoulders. We allow the otherwise to show up. We explore the spaces between words and thoughts. We hear language as noise, music, abstraction. We welcome the birds. We are drawn together by silence. We are vulnerable. We just want to be here.
These are freeform sessions with no anticipated results, but which may offer participants space for deeper collective consideration. This generative and communal process underpins all of Ian’s work with DOTE and all are warmly invited to be present.
The sessions have been taking place online every month since April 2022. Each session takes about 1,5 hours from 19:00 – 20:30 CET (London 18:00 BST / Beirut 20:00 EET).
Visit the project page and sign up for our newsletter to stay tuned about the upcoming sessions and more.
