DECOLONISING LISTENING

TALK FOR AURAL PLURALITIES


Workshop Structure
1. Welcome & Intentions (5 minutes)

Purpose: Set tone, open space, invite presence

* Brief welcome and acknowledgements
This is a workshop that combines my own sound practice, some traditional practices including meditation and Yoga, and then uplifts indigenous worldviews on relationality. When I write this up I’ll provide a list of reading material, and I’m going to record the audio for this - is that ok with everyone? I also just want to stress that the opinions I have are only within the limit of my experience. I just want to note the privilege I have had to allow me to be here, and therefore my truth and opinions are always malleable. I’m looking to learn from you and your experiences as well as talk to you about mine. So fully open and very glad to have you here, and very grateful to Alice and the Aural Pluralities Team for having me here.
* Intentions: to explore:
   * 1. how our listening has been shaped,
   * 2. how we might unlearn and rewild it
   * 3. how we can take this further into body recognition, relationship and community, and probably I should add active becoming, I’m jumping ahead a bit, but Anne Stoler (New York postcolonial professor postcolonial studies) describes as “colonial aphasia”. She uses the word aphasia to move past notions of “amnesia” or “forgetting,” to rather see our problem as an occlusion, a blocking of knowledge, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that make sense for chance.
* This is not a typical listening skills session—this is about confronting ourselves, unstructure, and re-embodiment. I say this because we do this already it’s just about really really letting it guide us past our learned experiences. And we’ll do this mainly through some fun listening exercises where we go deeper bit by bit, I think it’ll be interesting because everyone here is probably here because they have a listening practice of some sort, or are curious about it, so hopefully there’ll be something for everyone.

Got some notebooks and pens, this is to write things down whenever you want, then maybe I’ll ask some statements at the end about how you’re feeling and how you might take anything we’ve discussed forward.


1. Exploring how our listening has been shaped
Our listening, defined as the conscious interpretation of sound, is colonised. This is a provocative statement, Listening itself (as a physiological phenomenon) is not colonised—but our interpretation, value systems, and practices around listening are. What we think of as listening has been shaped by hundreds of years of extractive human development. However, our physiological response to sound, evolved over many millennia, and including entrainment with sounds of the natural world, is where we can break our conditioning and remember our relationship as nature.

So first of all it’s important to understand what I mean by decolonisation.
It is firstly the undoing of colonialism / neocolonialism.
This means action, specifically the return of stolen lands and the dismantling of colonial infrastructure. Then secondly an ongoing critique and transformation away from dominant structures, challenging norms that stem from colonial impositions of religion, language, economics & culture.

We are part of culture need to become aware of the extent of our colonisation, become comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, and understand rewilding as a bodily felt experience, “we can’t rely on our minds to save us now”. With decolonising listening, the amount of joy one feels is immense, and I think it’s about following the movement of that joy as we become less isolated, and more part of things, including nature.

So let’s try a fun exercise to break the ice. For the next minute I want you to pay attention to not just to the words I’m saying but really listen to the sound of my voice and sort of feel it with your bodies. What is happening in terms of trust, what are you learning about me as person, am I warm or cold, what’s my sense of humour like. Do you notice a difference, is there a difference in your awareness? So now I’d like you to try this out for yourselves. Find a partner, someone you don’t necessarily know, but if you know them that’s also fine. So introduce yourself, and tell each other why you are here, and allow yourselves to feel the other person through the sound of their voice and feel yourself through the sound of yours. I’ll bring you back in about 1 or 2 mins. Ok go :)

>>>Quick discussion

Ok this is still within the realms of Western definitions of listening, but you’ll find that these definitions prioritise cognition and spoken language much more than non-verbal comms. A 2017 study by Debra L. Worthington & Graham D. Bodie collecting definitions of listening from 1925 to the present day contains 19 definitions, of which I’ll read a few, but they’ll all be listed in the writeup

Rankin   1926   The ability to understand spoken language.
Nichols   1948   The comprehension of expository materials presented orally in a classroom situation
Kelly   1975   A rather definite and deliberative ability to hear information, to analyze it, to recall it at a later time, and to draw conclusions from it.
Cooper   1997   Listening competency means behavior that is appropriate and effective. Appropriateness means that the content is understood and effectiveness deals with the achievement of interactive goals.
Bostrom   2011   The acquisition, process, and retention of information in the interpersonal context.

Almost all of these definitions present listening as a cognitive and behavioural skill—a linear process that can be utilised by an individual listener. Imagine learning this as a kid, but at the same time losing yourself in your favourite music. Or just enjoying the sound of the wind in the trees, or the sound of the ocean, what is happening there, is it cognitive? What is the disconnect and why did it happen in the first place? This is in stark contrast with non-western definitions.

Audre Lourde (who was a Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, writer and poet" talks about ancient and non-European ways of being as part of reclaiming our lived experience - “we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes.” Similarly, as we rewild the way we listen, the knowing we have in our bodies becomes the DNA for change on a fundamental level. By that I mean change in how we relate to the world and each other.


2. Unlearning and rewilding
Ok we’re going to now take a walk - around the area, and this time we’re going to try listening across cultures. This means we’re going to bring in relationality to place, objects and community. This will be the place, the things in it will be the objects and we are now a community. (talk about conditioned and intentioned modes). Write these questions down
- listen not just with your ears but with your heart.
- Tune into the land with deep respect and patience
- Listen with responsibility, what is your responsibility to place?
- how does listening become part of sustaining harmony in the community
- How is nature speaking to you?

About 10 mins - remember you are weaving together, you are all connected, go as a group and come back as a group. Even if you find something of interest and move away from people, still keep that connection and do not become an individual. Leave here as a group, and when you hear the sound from the speaker, I want you to gradually filter back in as a group. Feel free to weave in and out of each other, and listen to the sound of things.

>>> Would anyone like to reflect on what they experienced?

Reveal the origin of these instructions:
- listen not just with your ears but with your heart (Dadirri from the Ngangikurungkurr people in Australia)
- Tune into the land with deep respect and patience (Dadirri)
- Listen with responsibility, what is your responsibility to place? (Native American)
- how does listening become part of sustaining harmony in the community (Ubuntu - Southern African philosophies, common in Zulu, Xhosa, and other Bantu-speaking traditions
- How is nature speaking to you? Andean Indigenous Traditions (Quechua, Aymara)

These are living, contemporary practices, not just ancient wisdoms. The origins of these practices need to be honoured, they are not practices as tools to be "used" or extracted for personal growth—frame them as invitations to shift one's worldview and enter into relationships of care and reciprocity.
“What does it mean to receive this practice as a guest?”
“What does listening with responsibility mean if you’re not from the culture that birthed the practice?”
“How can we give back or remain accountable after receiving wisdom?”

Decolonised listening is not always comfortable. Build in moments where participants can reflect on:
   * The responsibility of being a respectful witness or learner.
   * The discomfort of decentering the Western self. (England and London represent Babylon as the center of colonial, racist, and spiritually corrupt systems that must be resisted.)
   * The awareness of colonial histories.

This move listening from something passive to something transformative.

It’s imperative to understand where colonised listening comes from and how deeply it’s rooted in our collective psyche. Over the last 12,000 years we have separated ourselves from nature in a number of social and energy transitions including agriculture, Colonialism, fossil fuel extraction and unbridled exponential Capitalism. We’ve taken from our environment, and our fellow humans, to the extent that we are now in polycrisis - multiple crises that are environmental, economic, social, technological and geopolitical - that overlap and unfold at the same time.

Part of the social crisis is a crisis of the imagination. We have an opaque understanding that we have lost our way, but with no pathway to change, even as it gets harder to survive in increasingly volatile times. This is no accident, as dominant narratives impede any progression from an extractive way of life to an ecological one, in what Anne Stoler (New York Professor has made significant contributions to the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies) describes as “colonial aphasia”. One could suggest that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where relationships with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of a trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth.

It’s a very interesting thing to present - the idea that even listening can be colonised. What do you think about that, what does it mean for other aspects of our psyche, how we identify and our beings?


3. Embodied Practice: Listening as Nature (12 minutes)
Purpose: Move from theory into body, experience listening beyond cognition
Facilitator leads a guided listening journey:
Question about intention and commitment to using this knowledge to shift our worldview, and to uplift and protect the marginalised communities that are part of this wisdom. If you start treating this in the future as something that you’re claiming ownership over, or using for self gain, listen to me now, you are part of the problem. This needs constant vigilance because systemically we are pushed towards using knowledge for our own self gain, and I’m not immune to it either.

1. Settling (1 min): Close eyes, breathe
2. Tuning (1 min): Bring awareness to soundscape—internal and external
3. Expansion (3 min): Listen to sound without naming, simply feel vibrations
4. Relational (3 min): Imagine you are the sound. No self/other.
5. Memory (2 min): Recall first moment of becoming music/nature as a child
6. Integration (2 min): Open eyes, feel sensations in the body
Then journal or draw:
“What did you notice about how you listened just now? What changed in your body, mind, or sense of self?”

Close your eyes / lower your gaze. Breathe fully. Become aware of the sound of your breathing
Listen to the sounds around you, what can we hear? List sounds
Allow these sounds to become connected with your breathing. Allow them to join with the sound of the air, the movement of the plants, the huge vibrations of the earth.

Now blur the boundaries between those two things

What does it feel like to have this liminal feeling between you and these living things, these parts of nature? What does it feel like to listen with your body?

With your next breaths see if you can let go of definitions
With your next breaths let go of language
And with the next breaths let go of thinking, of thought forms, to just be the sound in unarticulated space.

In this space where you are nothing but these sounds, now just allow yourself to become the wind, become the grass, become the soil become the being next to you. You are a spectrum of vibrations resonating with the vibrations all around you, like when one piano note is played the other strings vibrate in sympathy, we are vibrating

You are the wind in the air, you are the sparkle of foam on the waves, You are the powerful movement of the earth below us, we are the rich communication of life in the soil.

Here there is no division, no barrier between us and our surroundings. Through reclaiming the way we listen we remember we are nature itself. There’s no me, there's no you, there's no binaries.

And in the sound we can hear a voice, a language that doesn't use words.

You can hear it in the sea.
You can hear it in the wind in the trees.
You can hear it in morning bird song.
You can hear it in the sounds we make before they are understood as words.

We've been responding to this voice for many millennia.

This is our true relationship with nature and with each other, and it feels good. There's limitless space, and limitless potential here because nothing has yet been defined.

Let’s allow this space to be our point of knowing, and with that knowing, resilience.
A space where we find that we can question and redefine mental structures that have been inherited, colonised, designed to oppress or call something an “other”. Because these structures no longer serve us.

We are aware and even as we participate we have the power to choose. Stay in the space...
Stay in the space...
And now open your eyes.

>>>Then journal or draw
“What did you notice about how you listened just now? What changed in your body, mind, or sense of self?”


4. Dialogue: Rewilding the Collective Ear
Purpose: Sense into what listening-as-nature might mean for culture, action, and ecology
>>>Prompted group discussion:
* What does it mean to listen as rather than listen to?
* How might our listening become relational, not extractive?
* What becomes possible when our bodies remember we are nature?
Encourage weaving of personal insight and systemic implications

5. Closing & Commitment
Purpose: Ground insights into something lived
Offer:
“We end not with answers but with invitations. Listening might be a guide—not just an action but a way of being.”
Final prompts (write or share):
* “What’s one way I can decolonise my listening this week?”
* “What does my body now know that my mind forgot?”
* How do I do this responsibly what actions can I take?

Thank you for being here
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