Dadirri
Dadirri is a word from the Ngangikurungkurr people of Northern Australia. There is no single word in English that can be used as a simple translation of the concept of dadirri. It might be described as an experience of deep listening that comes as a result of patient, silent waiting.
Dadirri is the choice to contemplate the value of what already exists. It is a listening, rather than a creation. Dadirri is a trusting way to approach the unknown, having the patience to wait for it to reveal itself without needing to be provoked first.
This episode features the voices of Rebeca Arbona, Jonas Altman, Betti Rooted Lionheart, Eric Christiansen, and Miriam Bekkouche.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast about the diversity of emotional experience. My name is Jonathan Cook. I’m a research consultant who studies the subjective side of humanity.
The tricky thing about subjectivity is that it can’t be standardized. Subjective experience is defined according to the person who has it. On the other hand, human beings tend to be motivated by social involvement. So, we want to share our experiences with the people we know.
We use language to help us bridge the gap between subjective experience and social reality. We collectively negotiate and manage the meaning of words so that they roughly represent aspects of our internal experience in a way that others can understand. We use words to describe our emotions, even though the words we use don’t capture the full flavor of our feelings.
Socially-recognized language can influence our interpretation of our own subjective feelings. That’s why emotionally-associated brand names are so powerful in the marketplace. These associations of power aren’t accidental. They’re designed, often by people who specialize in crafting brand names that will help businesses to occupy advantageous positions in the collective conceptual landscape.
Rebeca Arbona is one such brand naming expert.
Rebeca Arbona:
I am Rebeca Arbona, and I am a word nerd first and foremost. I grew up bilingual. Spanish was my first language and then learned English at an early age and my family was bilingual. So we, especially my mother and I played with language always. The correspondences or lack of correspondence between languages, oh, that one comes from the Latin, so it's similar in Spanish and English, that was just present from a very young age. And not surprisingly, when I went to college, I was a linguistics major and I also picked up a few more languages in school because to me that was just incredibly fun.
About ten years ago, I had the opportunity to be trained in the art of naming things, and I like to say it was like a radioactive spider bite that gave me my powers, because a lot of people who name things are naming, maybe coming from being copywriters, the language piece for sure, and it needs to be informed by strategy. Maybe I'm wrong, but my impression is that not a lot of people that are doing naming professionally are very much a strategist first. I have a lot of fun with that. So yes, I have a company called BrandTrue, and we do brand strategy and especially strategic naming work. I write a lot about names that I like or that I cannot understand and have questions about and issues around all that.
Jonathan Cook:
When Rebeca describes herself as a “word nerd”, she’s talking about something much more than completing a Wordle puzzle every morning. Rebeca works with ideas, and she’s fascinated with the conceptual nuances that are encoded within words. As someone who was bilingual from a young age, Rebeca has long understood that different cultures develop different kinds of words to describe the human experience of the world. Words in one language can be translated into another language, but often, there are some meanings that are lost in translation.
Rebeca Arbona:
Languages don’t line up a complete correspondence. That’s part of what's so beautiful about languages is that they, they, they miss they have different things that they hit and different things that they miss. There have always been tons of borrowings and words coming across languages and it is often a kind of an emotional space. So, I started thinking about that. You know, it's those beautiful places where one language has that word and it doesn't exist as a succinctly stated concept in another language, at least not yet, so then it gets borrowed in. To me, that's just delicious when that beautiful apt description gets appreciated across languages and then it gets borrowed.
There's this concept called code switching. I think it's more familiar now. People talk about code switching like black Americans will sometimes code switch in their language depending on who they're with. I wrote a little senior essay on it in college because as the member, I'm Puerto Rican. I grew up in New York, so as the member of a bilingual community in my family and with people that I knew, I shared Spanish with, we code switched. Some people disdainfully say it's Spanglish, but it's not. Bilingual communities do it everywhere where you go back and forth, and the thing about going back and forth is that it's about the aptness of the word, of course, that you need that word to say more precisely what you're thinking and you have access to it because you know it, and you know that the person you're speaking with has access to it, so why not use it? It's a thick communication in the sense that the act of switching itself is also communicative. The act of switching itself is you and me, we share this. It's like it's an in-group marker, as an anthropologist would say.
Jonathan Cook:
As Rebeca points out, words from different languages are often not precisely equivalent. A language is an expression of the complex cultural perspective of the people who speak it. So, the choice of referencing different languages is itself an act that communicates a specific meaning. Words that are shared between speakers of different languages can serve as in-group markers for communities that exist on the borders between culture.
There’s something similar to that sense of cultural marking that motivates my decision to include emotion words from many different languages as a part of this podcast. I’m a speaker of English with some education in other languages, but without the fluent familiarity that Rebeca enjoys. Nonetheless, although this podcast is just in its sixth week, it has already included descriptions of the Norwegian emotion of friluftsliv and the Chinese feeling of yugen, along with the English language emotions of curiosity, compersion, and being unmasked. These words from non-English languages were chosen because they refer to emotional states that speakers of the English language have not yet chosen to name.
By including both English and non-English names for emotions, I’m suggesting that we all can benefit from expanding our vocabulary of emotion beyond the boundaries of our cultures of origin. By acquainting ourselves with these unfamiliar emotions, we are marking our identities as something more expansive than what our own cultures are ready to recognize. We make a gesture to reach out to the rest of humanity, to the many sorts of people who don’t speak of their feelings in the same way that we do.
Of course, we can’t fully transcend our cultural boundaries just by learning a few words from outside our native languages. Words aren’t isolated bits of code that can simply be copied and pasted from one culture to another. Words are integrated into conceptual systems of cultures that use them. For that reason, taking words out of context can change their meaning.
If we simply grab words we like from other cultures, to use them as we like, we might be accused of engaging in cultural appropriation.
What’s the difference between cultural appropriation and respectful learning from other cultures? One factor that’s significant is the explicit recognition of the cultural source of the words and concepts that we use. We need to name and give credit to the cultures that have come up with ways of thinking about emotion that have yet to be articulated in our own culture.
Another distinction between appreciation of other cultures’ emotional concepts and the simple appropriation of those concepts is the motivation behind our use of other cultures’ words for emotions. If our purpose is to use these words cheaply, as a way to adopt a worldly, sophisticated posture within our own society, then we’re exploiting these words as if they’re trinkets, a mere matter of style. In the case of this podcast, my purpose is to acknowledge that no single culture has a complete grasp of the diversity of emotional experience. If I were to use only English words for emotions, this podcast would only be able to explore the extent of emotional perspectives that are contained within the English language, and to do that would be disrespectful of non-English perspectives. My motivation is to appreciate what non-English speaking cultures contribute to insights about emotion, and I think that counts for something.
Another factor is what members of a culture have to say about the use of a word from their language. If people are encouraging those from other cultures to learn about a term that is important to them, then it seems reasonable to accept that invitation. Such is the case with the emotion that is the subject of this week’s episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity. This week, the podcast considers the emotion of dadirri.
Artist and educator Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, a member of the Ngangikurungkurr people, indigenous to northern Australia, has asked that people of European ancestry take the time to listen to her culture and her language. She suggests her culture’s word dadirri as an apt concept to begin an effort of cross-cultural appreciation.
Ungunmerr Baumann proposes that by understanding dadirri, we can understand something about the values of her culture. In 1988, she issued the following message to the nation of Australia:
“We have learned to speak the white man’s language. We have listened to what he had to say. This learning and listening should go both ways. We would like people in Australia to take time to listen to us. We are hoping people will come closer. We keep on longing for the things that we have always hoped for – respect and understanding.”
One aspect to dadirri is deep listening, but there’s more to this perspective than simply paying attention. There is a patience within the concept of dadirri as well. Ungunmerr Baumann explained,
“In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’… the other part of dadirri which is the quiet stillness and the waiting.”
There is no single word in English that can be used as a simple translation of the concept of dadirri. It might be described as an experience of deep listening that comes as a result of patient, silent waiting.
The waiting patience of dadirri is something that’s challenging to me. I am used to pursuing opportunities to listen, and eliciting communication by asking questions. Dadirri, as described by Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, begins with a willingness to allow others to express themselves at their own pace and at a time of their own choosing. To enter into the state of dadirri begins with the surrender of control, the release of the power to dictate when sharing will take place or demand answers that match our questions. Ungunmerr Baumann describes this attitude of dadirri as an aspect of her culture’s approach to learning.
“We learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.”
When I spoke to Jonas Altman, he told me that he was never encouraged to learn through this kind of patient, listening silence. He grew up within a Canadian formal educational system that values active learning, and was raised by a family of lawyers who didn’t just ask each other questions, but asked pointed questions, in a kind of intellectual sparring. The deep listening of dadirri was something he needed to cultivate on his own, after he became an adult.
Jonas Altman:
I think of good listening, active listening, empathetic listening, and global listening are all words that I've used or I've read about. So that was interesting, because I come from a family of lawyers that never stop talking and basically use a tone of argument. Their tone is agitated because their clients are agitated and they match that frequency. They're calling about, my dad does wills and estates. He's retired. My brother works with entrepreneurs, and everyone has like this thing of like, I'm in a rush and you need to be in my rush and my urgency. I'm really glad I didn't follow that path.
Jonathan Cook:
The professional life Jonas has cultivated is centered around vigorous activity. He’s an entrepreneur who, as author of the book Shapers, encourages others to “reinvent the way you work and change the future”.
Jonas Altman:
I'm Jonas Altman. I am a curious human. I am a British Canadian entrepreneur. Or I could say Canadian. British entrepreneur, because I was born in Canada. I don't know which half of me is British. I show up in the world as a deep listener, life and transition and business coach, educator, and writer, and those are all identities. So really, take what you will with what comes up for each of those. I write to think, I teach to make sure that I'm in touch with reality.
You can go to Shapers.life and you can grab my book or read some of the chapters. You can go to JonasAltman.com and read a few things that were popular, especially during or before the pandemic. Then probably the best place is to go to my Substack, where a lot of people are writing now, sort of trying to democratize writing and that is shapers.substack.com. Every month I host what is dear to me or what I'm really chewing on.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonas Altman advocates a vigorous “unyielding commitment” in professional life. Nonetheless, to inform that commitment, he has discovered the importance of a listening so deep that it involves the loss of his own agenda.
Jonas Altman:
The things that aren't being said, the tone, the body language, the hesitation in voice, all these things that are actually much more powerful than the actual vocabulary. Full attention, full presence, not in your head, hearing and listening to everything that this person is being and saying, and losing your agenda, if you had one.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonas retains a respect for his family’s passion, but chose a different path, one that acknowledges the differences of the people that he encounters, working to understand where they’re coming from rather than viewing their differences as something that he needs to fix using his knowledge and expertise.
Jonas Altman
The frequency that my brother and father speak at is agitated and high. That's, in my view, a value judgment of like, that's cancerous. Keep talking like that and keep being like that and you're going to die a few years early. It's animated and it's part of their bloodline. My last name is Altman, and in German and Yiddish, it means old wise man. So there's a part of my grandfather, my brother, my dad, and my dad's two brothers who are all lawyers.
What is the quality that is there is about someone needing to be fixed? That's what I wanted to say, and the therapy language is no one needs to be fixed. We're all imperfect, we're all fallible, we're all flawed. We're all irrational. And I don't like coming at a conversation or energetically meeting someone and having, whether it's a belief system or a way of being, that is I can fix. I'm a problem solver. I know the answer. The reason is that it can come off as or is self-righteous, arrogant and rooted in pride and rudeness. And so, I've been doing work to undo those things and see new ways of seeing.
I still have to quieten those impulses, but they're getting fainter as I get more comfortable with oh, I want to solve, but I'm in a conversation where they are going to solve for themselves. My family's frequency is in a heightened state of neuroticism and in an eccentric kind of like over the top. There's a place for that and there's a time for that. I prefer to come at things from a more even keeled baseline and then be able to move within that range.
I'll be like, do you want to take a little bit of time to just breathe? Or, I'll be walking with someone to be like, should we just walk through the cemetery once in silence together? Game changer. We’re talking, after 40 minutes, just taking 5 minutes to like, listen to the body and you are not listening to what your intelligence of your somatic awareness is giving you or gifting you lets you have vocabulary or words to describe what you're actually wanting to talk about instead of just talking. They go, 'Wow, like there was eight things that came up in our circle around the cemetery, and none of those I need to talk to you about. Here's what I want to say. So that's interesting about like meaningful conversation. Meaningful conversation I think is quite subjective.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonas has learned the power of silence. Silence is something that’s rarely heard, and that’s what makes it so powerful. In a world of fast talkers filled with machines for talking over great distances, Jonas opens the minds of the people that he works with by immersing them in periods of purposeful silence.
Jonas Altman:
I think the silence is an equalizer. I also go inwards and I'm like, I wonder what I should ask next, and then I'm like, that doesn't really matter because I probably don't need to ask anything. They'll tell me what I need to ask next by sharing whatever has come up for them. It's a mechanism or a tool to go a little bit more inwards, you know, get in touch with your inner landscape.
Jonathan Cook:
Remember what Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann said about dadirri? It’s a way of listening and learning without asking questions. Dadirri is a trusting way to approach the unknown, having the patience to wait for it to reveal itself without needing to be provoked first. Jonas doesn’t belong to her culture, and so some aspects of his experience of deep listening are going to be different from what she knows. Nonetheless, there are significant overlaps.
Across the border and over to the east in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York, Betti Rooted Lionheart pursues her own version of deep listening as a leader in a shamanic community.
Betti Rooted Lionheart
My name is Betti Rooted Lionheart. It's coming up to share that I was, well, it's a spiritual name, Rooted Lionheart, and I was born with the Lionheart part, and I had to earn the roots. I'm someone who from about the age of seven, for probably a good 30 years of my life, I lived in a state of despair about what humans are doing to the planet.
We humans tend to talk about who we are in terms of what we do, right? So, I'll do a little bit of that. Because of my outlook on life, my despair for the planet and through the twists and turns that I guess we all take, I've come to finding my way as a shamanic healer and as a minister of the Church of Earth Healing, which is a shamanic church. I also facilitate something called the Work That Reconnects. The Work That Reconnects is all about helping humans come together and process our despair for our planet together so that we don't feel alone. All of these aspects of myself I'm bringing together in sort of my life's project, which is creating Braided Root Waters Healing Sanctuary on a hundred and five acres of land in the Finger Lakes of New York State.
Jonathan Cook:
Coming out of her despair, Betti works to create a setting in which deep listening becomes a tool of healing.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
One of the things I most love doing, and which I do, I’ve been doing for over four years in the Despair and Discovery Circle locally here, which is co-facilitated by my friend Virginia Metcalf, we sit together in a circle and we hold a council, We pass a talking piece around the circle and we take turns sharing deeply, sharing our emotions, our despair, and other emotions for what humans are doing to the planet, and also the despair and the emotions for what's happening in our own personal lives and always acknowledging they're connected. Those two things, they're not separate things. So that is definitely a form of ritual, and one of my favorite guidelines for that work is to ask people to listen with their full attention and notice when their brains wander or when their brains want to plan what they're going to say when it's their turn, and to let go of that and bring it back to really listening to the person who's speaking at the time. Deeply listening is something that is a big part of my work. I'm much better at listening than speaking about myself or speaking in general. I'm wanting to say there's there's kind of a crisis in the lack of listening and being heard.
Jonathan Cook:
The crisis in listening that Betti describes is not just a crisis in communication. It’s a crisis in our relationships with others.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
More superficial or more common listening is done more with selectively hearing what we want to hear, and also with a lot of impatience for the other person to finish so that we can get to what we're wanting to say in response to what we think we've heard them saying. Often, what we think we've heard them say isn't actually what they've said or what they mean.
Jonathan Cook:
Nobody is fully present as a listener at all times. However, Betti identifies an attitude of disregard for other people underneath ongoing patterns of superficial listening.
To fail to listen deeply to others is to fail to value who they are. The impatient attitude we have toward other people as they are speaking reflects a disregard for the idea that they have anything worth sharing. Superficial listening is a symptom of a disenchantment with other people.
The deep, patient listening of dadirri is a manifestation of genuine interest in what other people have to say.
Eric Christiansen has found a way to bring the practice of this interested listening into his work as a filmmaker. We first met Eric in last week’s episode, about the emotion of feeling unmasked. This week, he talks to us about the place of patient listening in the production of his documentaries.
Eric Christiansen:
I think it's just being human with them, you know? And I remember, I remember in my film Homecoming: A Vietnam Vets Journey, which was my second film, I was with the Vietnam Veterans. We were on the road going across the United States. We were in a four wheeler, but there are three hundred fifty Vietnam vets on this motorcycle pilgrimage. It's not a motorcycle run, a pilgrimage crossing United States to the wall in Washington, D.C., and I was documenting this for my film, and I remember somewhere in Colorado they did a KIA, POW, killed-in-action prisoner of war ceremony where they set a table. There's a missing plate, fork, etc., and they talked about the one that never came home.
I remember breaking down there, while I was trying to film this film. It was right in the first couple of days and the veterans all surrounding me, and then they go, yeah, now you understand? You know, I remember that connection. I remember being accepted into what they were doing on that run. That's an honor. I'm honored every time to be in the presence of these survivors when they open up to me with their sacred stories. But also, I understand, to receiving their stories, I've heard some of the time, ‘You're the only second person I've ever told this. You're the first person I might have told this.’ That's a sacred special time. It’s, I don't like to say the word 'technique'. It's accepting these stories and just being human with them and being being a conduit for what they need to achieve with their healing. I believe. And the people that are in my films have been drawn, I believe, been drawn to my film for other reasons, for their healing, for their progression.
I tell my crew, you know, our transparency, and the comfort and the, ability of the individuals, the subjects to be able to tell their stories is the most important thing on the set. Then the film really becomes secondary in a way to the to the people and our transparency and our ability to connect to the people. That's how I do it. Now it's been thirty years of doing it. You know, these people become lifelong friends. I mean, I could go on and on about what I would consider the technique, but that's kind of the main part of it. It's just, there's a technique that I believe it's called this holding space. It’s like creating almost a physiological or whatever kind of space around the interviewee, around the people that it's just open and comfortable for them by connecting with them as a human. In that way, they feel comfortable. Sometimes it's not even talking, it's just listening and active listening and I mean really an empathetic, active listening. It's exhausting, but it's also the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
Jonathan Cook:
Eric doesn’t make his films according to a predetermined script. Instead, he enters into the lives of the people who are the subjects of his documentaries, with an attitude of trust that stories will reveal themselves. Just as Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann teaches, he approaches the situation and patiently waits for an opportunity to learn.
Think about what it means to give someone the space to talk, to reveal something of themselves, without talking first, without even asking a question. Listening in this way requires a certain kind of confidence, not in oneself, but in the other person, a confidence that they have something worth saying, and that they know best the time to reveal it, and how to begin. Dadirri is in this sense an expression of a radical kind of respect. Dadirri begins with a trust that something of value will be revealed.
Ordinary listening involves being in the moment and paying attention to what’s being said. Dadirri takes listening further, when a person makes the choice to be present before anything is said, adopting a frame of mind that is ready and aware for anything that may be said, content to wait for a voice to arrive when it is ready to do so. With dadirri, listening begins before there is anything concrete to listen to.
This is what makes dadirri an emotion, and not just an action. Dadirri is the frame of mind of emotional receptivity. It’s the opposite of conventional listening, which selectively hears material in the moment for a speech that’s being prepared in the future. Dadirri is the decision, even before anything is said, to respect what is about to be offered.
Eric likens this emotion to the readiness that surfers cultivate as they wait for a wave. Surfers can’t know what a wave will do before it appears, but they can place themselves in a state of awareness that enables them to go with the wave when it appears, to stay in the pocket.
Eric Christiansen:
When I have the honor of being with an individual doing an interview, I call it surfing. I surf with them. I've surfed since I was eight years old. I surf with them. Once we make that connection, once we start talking, I try to like get in the pocket with them where they're going, what they're talking about, and then I'm like this literally with my emotions and I'm like, oh, okay, yeah. It's just like this connection. And it's just. And so, you know, it's exhausting for the individual, you know, reliving it. If you have somebody that's truly actively listening like that and they call it surfing with them, surfing their emotions, surfing their story, you know, with that connection, it's a beautiful thing. But it's also you're you're living it, too, you know, as the individual that's taking in the story.
Jonathan Cook:
There’s a powerful powerlessness for Eric in his experience of dadirri. It requires that he put his desire for control to the side, and give space to the people he interviews instead. He’s paying attention, but he’s following them, connecting with them and entrusting them to take him to where he needs to go. What’s the point in an interview, after all, if the person asking the questions already knows the answers?
Professional culture in business places a value on the performance of control. People refer to executives as “leaders”, as if they’re really making all the decisions about where a business will go. Even if we’re not in business ourselves, this model dominates our ideas about what it takes to be successful. It demands that take charge, that we impose a top-down organization and keep everything under our direct manipulation.
Miriam Bekkouche suggests an alternative approach: To pull back from the endless pursuit of control, and tell our inner boss to be quiet for a while.
Miriam Bekkouche:
My name is Miriam Bekkouche, and I am in Montreal, which is also where I'm from. I work on helping people reconnect with the art of rest, recovery and working with their awareness, really for all purposes, but particularly to help them fulfill their potential in a in a professional context.
Really, for me, it starts with mindfulness. I take a mindfulness approach to everything that that I might do, and it's about really helping folks still their mind, but recognizing that when we still the mind, the mind is actually going to also still be very busy. And so, working with that paradox, using tools that are mindfulness based and then resetting priorities around, what does it mean to, when we're in a period of time where we're reaching towards a goal, what does it mean to actually prioritize rest and recovery as part of that, which is something that we might do automatically if we're thinking about a physical goal, like working towards running long distances, but that we've completely forgotten in a world where productivity and, you know, go, go, go, go has taken over.
There’s that taskmaster, that inner boss, that voice that tells us that we're never done, and we should keep on going and we should try harder, by the way, while we're doing it. That's so, so, so predominant, and I hear it in other people and, you know, I have a lot of compassion for that, having had the experience of really noticing it in myself and seeing that it comes from all kinds of sources, it comes from within us. Sometimes it comes from the folks that are around us, definitely comes from society at large, just generally.
Jonathan Cook:
What if, instead of always having to have something to say, instead of always having to have a plan, we could allow ourselves to be silent, and pay attention to what’s happening around us?
Miriam Bekkouche:
I think deep listening and awareness are really something that go hand in hand for me. I've always been naturally gravitated toward, in particularly in conversation, this want, this desire to show up fully and listen fully, be present fully in conversation with somebody else. That was something I can't really put my finger on why, but that was something that was just very innate. What I learned or what I kind of discovered, through the burnout process, is that I need to be able to work with my mind in a new way so that I can truly listen and listen to myself first and foremost on many, many, many different layers and levels, and then bring that aliveness, I want to call it, into my ability to then listen to folks around me.
It's a really beautiful thing. It's a really deep felt experience of being able to get quiet and get still in such a way that all of a sudden, well, to speak about my inner world, all of a sudden there is a, I have access to all kinds of new types of, I call it information, things that I might be listening to. It might be thoughts, and it might be sensations, and it might be colors, and it might be stories, and it truly is open to it all. The point is being able to remain open to it all. There is, in doing that, again, new layers, new access points to new layers of then stillness and knowingness. So there's just this kind of shift from being able to separate my, separate is not quite the right word. It's more like the shift between feeling pulled into the things that I'm hearing and rather be really able to observe them and be in relationship with them from this kind of very subtle point. Being able to do that is feel so good. It's really as simple as that for me. It feels nourishing. The word communion is coming to mind. Like there's like some kind of very deep communion that's happening for me, and I love that I can then also share that in relationship with other people around me, but also with nature.
Jonathan Cook:
Acting decisive and in control isn’t an effective management technique if you’re not aware of your surroundings. A person who boldly goes off in the wrong direction because they didn’t bother to pay attention to the landscape is being a strong leader, but with disastrous consequences.
Miriam proposes the idea that we might be more effective if, instead of showing everyone else that we’re in charge, we step back and allow ourselves to listen to others. Instead of performing to impress the people around us, her version of dadirri allows her to be impressed by, and to learn from, her surroundings.
Miriam Bekkouche:
I really attempt to bring deep listening into almost every moment. Not that that's what's happening, but it's a kind of an orientation or an intention I have. But definitely some of the markers are that, listening to someone else, if somebody is talking to me and I'm just kind of listening versus deep listening, my reaction to what they're saying is going to be a little bit more front and center, so an emotional reaction I might have or an a quick answer I want to give or I'm not kind of letting the words sink in at a deeper level. Things that I'll notice when I'm in this deep listening is that I can fully receive somebody else's words. I can really appreciate them. I can hear something deeper about who they are. Maybe it's their values. Maybe it's the emotions that they're feeling. I can. I can. With have a lot of space for really fully connecting with them.
It’s the first time I'm ever putting words to it here, but it's like, it's like almost like those frequency like are frequencies are tuned in the same way as they can really hear. And then, the next thing that I notice when I know I'm in deep listening is that they'll be some interesting sometimes they'll be some interesting synchronicities, or to say it plainly, I really do feel at times like I've stepped into an alternate, I don't know, alternate universe is maybe a little strong, but like an alternate space with somebody. That's probably the best way. There's a feeling of shifting time and space somehow in an exchange or a conversation.
I mean, how beautiful when you listen so deeply that you allow somebody, including yourself and I'm talking about somebody else, to somehow excavate a new insight or a release into the world, into words, I turn into form. That's what I want to say. Like from a raw place inside, an insight has now emerged solid enough to take form in the shape of words and be shared in the world.
Jonathan Cook:
The kind of deep listening Miriam Bekkouche describes is similar to the dadirri offered by Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann. It is a subtle willingness to appreciate the beauty that already surrounds us, in the natural world, in our own footsteps, and in the words of the people we encounter. We don’t need to make the beauty, dadirri suggests, because the beauty is already there for us, if we can just slow down and be quiet for long enough to notice it.
Miriam Bekkouche:
You know, I think deep listening is possible at any moment. It's kind of a choice. To me, it isn't about just a few people. Maybe there is something that needs to align that I don't really have the words for right now, but truly, in every interaction, there's that possibility, and so for me, it's about recognizing that and when possible and maybe when it feels a little bit more natural, or maybe it's required, but I like it when it's like it just feels a little bit more natural, like really leaning into it and going with that. And certainly what's helped me do that is practicing it with myself. Like you can deeply listen to on your walk and take in the busyness of a city, or take in the particular color of the sky at that moment and allow your inner focus to kind of bring you there and listen, with your eyes in this case, to the beauty or the majesty that's in front of you in any given moment.
The part where it takes a little bit of practice, I keep on referring to that, it's true, with the busyness comes also the tendency to jump around and be distracted or have other concerns on your mind, and that's okay. You know, that's natural. That's normal. That's part of our being alive. The practice then helps me at least I'll speak for myself. It helps me. Be able to remember my path back out of that busyness, out of that jumping around into the quality that allows me to fully devote myself to, you know, any kind of listening that I might be engaged in. For me, it's this process of, well, it's the process of mindfulness practice, truly. It's really like noticing the present moment, noticing how many thoughts might be involved as you're being in connection with the present moment. Recognizing that even with all those thoughts, you still have a choice of where you might direct your attention. And you have a choice in terms of how the quality of your attention is going to meet that particular moment. That choice can be helped by practicing.
Jonathan Cook:
Dadirri, Miriam and Miriam tell us, is a choice. Dadirri is the choice to contemplate the value of what already exists. It is a listening, rather than a creation.
Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann explained:
“When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words.”
There is no need of words.
That’s a good thought to end on.
Of course, that’s just the perspective of the emotion of dadirri. There are other emotions that we just can’t stop talking about, and prime among them is love.
Love will be the topic of next week’s episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity.
Until then, thanks for listening.