Welcome to the JoyLab Podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self.
Your host, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Amy Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and
scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark.
When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full JoyLab
program over at joylab.coach.
Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to JoyLab.
And I'm Amy Prasek.
Here at JoyLab, we infuse science with soul to help you uncover joy.
To do that, we focus on building the elements of joy, the positive emotions and interstates
that become the building blocks for a joyful life.
The element for this episode is curiosity, and we're working on the third aspect of
deep listening that Henry laid out in one of his books, Chemistry of Calm, which is called
Seeing the Persons Innocence.
I love this because I think so often when we are listening, at least when I'm listening,
we get stuck instead with seeing the other person's problem or seeing the person's
solution.
Yeah.
So we're looking at seeing the person's innocence here.
And actually in an episode we did a while back on listening, Henry, you noted that when
we listen with a focus on solving someone's problem, then we can't really listen well.
Yes, you're right.
I do remember saying that.
You said it.
And I might have also said that being a physician, I was trained to help solve people's
problems.
That is an important function for doctors and a lot of other professionals and other
folks too.
Sometimes it is best to listen with that intent to solve problems.
But you would be surprised at how poor a training that is for actually listening well.
And if you add in the time pressure that most health professionals feel under, you can
see why so many folks complain about not being heard by their doctors.
Yeah.
We all want to feel heard in the doctor's office and in daily life.
So let's jump right into the strategies.
Actually let's get into it.
A strategy we can use to shift out of judgment and problem solving mode is something called
empathic curiosity.
This means we have an intention to understand someone else's thoughts or feelings.
So empathic listening is one way to do that, to drum up that empathic curiosity.
And so with this aspect that we're talking about today, this deep listening aspect, seeing
the innocence of others, that offers a kind of intention to hold as we're listening,
I think.
One that opens up empathy and curiosity.
So to do this, I like to look to some of the work from philosopher Martin Boober on curiosity
and listening.
So Boober, particularly in his book, I am vow distinguished between hearing and listening.
And he identified listening as a spiritual act.
Love it.
He noted that if we want to really step into our spirituality to sort of access that transcendence
space, then it was this kind of deep listening and a continuous dialogue with the people
around us and also with a higher power, like those two things and equal weight to step
into that space, that transcendence sacred space.
And I don't think it means we have to have that conversation with a God, if that's not
your jam, it can be nature, but something bigger than just the individual self.
And I think also this idea of these conversations happening in equal weight means that conversations
with the people around us are sacred.
There's a paragraph in his book, I am now that just draws me in every time I read it and
makes me think of empathic curiosity, this deep listening, this sacred opportunity to
listen to the people around me.
As I usually do, I take some liberty to update the pronouns, but I want to read it to you.
So here's what he wrote when he confronts a human being with that kind of sacred listening.
There are no things among things, nor do they consist of things.
They are no longer he or she, a dot in the world, grid of space and time, nor a condition
to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities, neighborless and
seamless.
They are thou and fills the firmament, not as if there were nothing but they, but everything
else lives in their light.
What a way to approach a conversation, right?
You can't help but see the innocence in someone when you approach them without categories
or descriptions.
And this belief that they are offering you insight and wisdom that is sacred and part
of something so much bigger than just what you see right here or have seen or heard
before.
It's pretty beautiful.
You continue to surprise me, Amy, Martin Boober and that book you mentioned, those had
a big impact on me when I was younger and I'm just really glad to know that you're familiar
with it.
I can't believe it.
It's so cool.
We know our obscure philosopher is, I don't know if he's that obscure, but yeah, that's
great.
That's great.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, years ago, I started a program called the Inner Life of Healers, which was intended
to help renew the passion and purpose that most folks have when they go into a healing
profession.
And for so many reasons, which we probably all have an idea about, a lot of people have
become depleted somewhere along the line.
And so in this program, deep listening was one of the things we really focused on.
And in one of those seminars, I heard this story that really touched me and I still remember
it.
So the woman who shared it was a nurse who was nearing the end of her career at the time
of this seminar, but she shared a story from really early in her career, one of her
first jobs when she was working in the hospital with really sick patients.
So she shared that one evening, she was assigned to work with an elderly woman in the hospital
who was terminally ill.
She was dying.
And everybody knew she was dying, but nobody was talking about it, not her family, not
her treatment team.
And this young nurse, young at the time, she herself felt really intimidated by this.
So she tried to spend as little time in that patient's room as possible.
But one evening when she was working, she was in that room while the charge nurse came
in.
And this is a woman with tons of experience and somebody who clearly knew how to listen
well.
And so when this older, more experienced nurse entered the room, the elderly woman simply
asked her outright, am I dying?
And instead of avoiding it or giving her some kind of platitude, the charge nurse sat
on on her bed, held her hand, looked her in the eyes and simply said, are you scared?
So the woman who was telling us this story in the workshop, she was a newbie nurse at
the time and she said, I was scared.
But asking that simple question broke the dam and the woman talked for a long time
about how she knew that she was dying and the fears and other feelings she had about
it.
And this young nurse felt like she was a fly on the wall that she got to observe all
of this.
And it was sacred, just like your quote talked about.
She said that this was a lesson early on in her career about how to listen that she would
never forget.
There was no judgment, no need to fix things, no attempt to avoid an uncomfortable topic.
Just this simple, open-ended, empathic response that opened up a whole new level of acceptance
for this woman.
Now, it didn't change the illness, but it helped her to face it with so much more dignity
and authenticity.
That's it, right?
That's empathic curiosity, that's empathic listening, seeing the innocence of others is perfect,
Henry.
And you can feel that sacred space in like these boundaries dissolving between them and
even in that young nurse watching, like probably how that broke down some barriers and obstacles
for her.
It's just beautiful.
And so actually, I want to jump into an empathy researcher, reminding me of Dr. Jody
Halpern, talks a lot about the power of empathic curiosity to ease anxiety.
I think this is important.
It's a really interesting insight, mainly because it takes us out of the stories we might
be telling ourselves, like our biases, catastrophic thinking, maybe big generalizations we might
have, based on very little evidence.
These assumptions generally make us anxious, and we approach conversations with those oftentimes.
But when we get curious, it moves those things out of the spotlight, including our anxiety
and reactivity.
It gives us a more solid ground to start from.
Let's take an elephant in the room.
And donkeys in the room, as an example, imagine you have any conversation with someone and
you find out that they're not in your political circle, there's the elephant donkey.
Like the opposite of you, you know?
So I'm sure this makes sense to many of us.
Instead of seeing the innocence in that person, that's the opposite sort of political side
than you.
It's super easy for that ticker tape of sound bites to start moving through your head,
right?
But what you've heard from whatever media you might consume, and then you start to get
tight in your chest, coming back to a little bit of what we talked about last episode,
you might feel anxious or reactive.
These internal sensations start popping up.
You think this idiot doesn't get it?
That's what the thoughts start popping.
And then how does listening go, right?
It sucks.
It turns into a cold shoulder or a shouting match or just like, please, I don't have time
for you.
And I'm not on a soapbox here.
I'm speaking from experience and something that I'm really trying to work on.
But at each conversation, I think I do get a little better.
I channel that wisdom from Martin Boober and like that nurse that you just described,
Henry, I interpret this conversation and this person as sacred.
And I want to see the innocence of them because I want them to see the same in me too.
And seriously, I have had some really wonderful conversations with folks that I would have
never had without this approach.
Well, I love that you do that, Amy.
And I think it is such a great and relevant example about how our politics are changing
the way that we see each other.
And I admit, it can be hard to practice this in the heat of the moment.
So it is really good to do what you're doing and set that intention ahead of time.
To me, this notion of seeing the innocence in others boils down to just not judging
them.
And it's one of the core principles of mindfulness as I've learned it.
It's to see what is without judgment.
I like having the word innocence in here because it helps me to set these judgments aside.
It reminds me that, you know, we're each just doing the best that we can.
And it conveys this sort of childlike quality in a good way, sort of a like a purity that
exists in each of us.
There's a great poem by John Foxx that I think gets at this notion.
And I'm not going to read the whole thing, but here are the first couple of stanzas.
When someone deeply listens to you, it is like holding out a dented cup that you have
had since childhood and watching it fill up with cold fresh water.
When it balances on the top of the rim, you're understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin, you are loved.
You are loved.
I love with listening, with seeing the innocence and others, just a intention.
As we listen, we can actually fill someone's cup and help them feel more loved.
Just like we all want to feel it's a perfect poem.
So that's the challenge.
Seeing the innocence and others and listening with that curiosity and empathy, we'll have
this more sort of formally set up and described in our challenge area over in our resilient
community, which if you haven't joined yet, we would really love to have you there.
It's a place to share and listen, it's a place to focus on these skills that build up our
resilience and joy.
And when you join, you'll help keep this podcast going as well, which means you can listen
deeply week after week.
I might be the tagline.
Listen deeply.
To close our time here.
Just look back to a little bit more from Martin Boomer for some wisdom.
Here's what he said.
I do not accept any absolute formulas for living.
No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in our life.
As we live, we grow and our beliefs change.
They must change.
So I think we should live with this constant discovery.
We should be open to this adventure, in heightened awareness of living.
We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.