“Everyone in the group has equal time to talk - in this case, a half hour each - uninterrupted and without evaluation. This is a revolutionary experience for some women. Being seriously and completely listened to, being genuinely heard, hardly ever happens to women in ordinary everyday life. Many women cry the first time they try this process. Their being so avidly heard in the present causes them to realize how deeply they have been wounded by being ignored and disregarded, shut up, talked over, and found inconsequential or amusing during most of their past lives. It is also often the first time women have ever listened to somebody else for a half hour or so without responding, without murmuring, "Oh yeah?," "I see," "Um hum," "I know how you feel," at appropriate intervals. Or laughing, or making sympathetic noises. It is often the first time they have ever listened to somebody else without allowing their facial expressions to communicate understanding, puzzlement, disagreement, or a host of other reactions. 

It is not easy for women to learn not to respond. We are thoroughly conditioned to respond. We always respond. That is one of our roles in patriarchy - to be the responders, the chorus. Men talk, and we nod and say breathlessly, "Then what happened?" or "Oh, yes, I'd love to hear about your childhood rock collection!" Our children have legitimate needs for our attention. They need to have us laugh when they're witty or cluck with dismay when they tell us their woes. Our faces are infinitely plastic: we are required to register admiration, servility, sympathy, concern, sorrow, and understanding all day long every day. We almost cannot not respond by this time in our lives. We almost cannot allow somebody to set forth upon this quest for their own ideas in our presence without our solicitous questions and reassurances, our reactions stamped clearly on our visages, our oohings and aahings - we are such active listeners. When we first try to listen passively to others, some of us feel like traitors; we feel as if we're doing something illegal, as if we might be arrested for it any moment. And because as women we have been taught to be primarily outer - or other-directed, we in our turn as speakers have come to rely on the cues our listeners give us, the little "I'm listening" noises they make, to judge where we are in their estimation, and where our discourse should move next if we are to win their approval, consolidate their sympathy, etc. Some of us become very disoriented without constant feedback. 

But in Hearing into Being, for every participant's sake, listeners and talkers must break their addiction to response and evaluation. The process works, if we will just give quiet attention and the speaker can just forget about us. The reason for the nonevaluation, the nonresponse, is that evaluation and response make storming our brain's barricades impossible. Most of the time that we are conversing with people, we know we have to hurry and make our point before they break in to make theirs. Even as we're talking, they're judging what we're saying, how close we are to being finished, shaking or nodding their heads, and making impatient little gestures that tell us they're getting ready for their turn. Always being acutely aware of how little time we have before we're going to be interrupted, we focus very narrowly and exclusively upon the point we're making. We can't afford to extrapolate, to associate, to let extraneous thoughts claim our attention. 

What's happening while we're concentrating and talking on this one subject, however, is that a lot of related material is emptying out of our mental files, as well as other ideas that are sparked simply by the fact that we're thinking, our mental sap is running. The mind doesn't just hand us evidence to support the one idea we're concerned with at the moment; we single it out from lots of other information. These other ideas, fragments of ideas, and musings are competing for center stage, but because we're so focused, we can't hear them begging from the wings to be let into the act. They seem irrelevant to our argument; they're not going to help us convert these people. But when we are free to talk without threat of interruption, evaluation, and the pressure of time; when our listeners are attentive and interested, nonjudgmental, and not waiting impatiently for a chance to rebut or agree, or just to say their piece; when we don't have to defend what we say, now or ever; when we don't have to persuade anyone; when we don't have to elaborate upon it to help someone understand (because it doesn't matter whether they understand or not; this is personal, not inter-personal, communication ) - when all these conditions are met, we move quickly past known territory out onto the frontiers of our thought. 

Knowing that no one but us is going to say one single sound for that half hour, no matter what, helps us relax our minds. And when we relax, we can begin to hear and explore the other ideas that are clamoring to be heard. We begin to notice that there are hoards and flocks of them. We are astonished at how fast and how thickly they are rushing upon us. Sometimes we think, "Oh, I can't get all this organized. I can't talk about it because I won't be able to be logical; I won't make sense." 

This is a powerful process. Being heard in this way lets us peel off layers of our minds, come closer and closer to what I call our wise old woman's mind. We may not have an epiphany in the first half hour, although every time I've been with a group doing Hearing into Being, most women have been amazed at themselves the first half hour. They have hardly been able to believe they are the source of such fascinating insights. But if exciting ideas don't occur to us in the first half hour, they almost certainly will in the second, and by the end of the third session, women realize that what they thought they knew, and how intelligent they thought they were, was the merest beginning. The kind of free-wheeling thought this process aims for can only emerge in the absence of all interference, no matter how well meaning. Any evaluation, even praise, hangs us up at that level. Perhaps especially praise. Since a little praise whets our appetites, we tailor what we say to get more. We also fashion our discourse to bring down raised eyebrows, or to change looks of disagreement or perplexity. Almost every facial expression, except pleasant interest, detours us quickly right back into familiar territory. Although Hearing into Being is of highest value for brainstorming, for coming up with many and varied ideas, for making connections, putting everything together and coming up with something new, from the beginning I understood and liked another aspect of it even more: it eliminates competitive talking, one of the major pleasures in men's culture.

Here is a place where we can concentrate exclusively upon how the world would be if it were just exactly as we want it to be, without having to be 'realistic,' without having to deal with ours and everybody else's old perceptions of how the world is. Who says it's this way anyway? We are, after all, living in someone else's dream. Is the patriarchal dream more "real" than ours?”

- Going Out of Our Minds by Sonia Johnson

Sonia Johson, Wildfire. 1989.