One of the good practices to develop listening skills is to hear a text being read to. When you hear a text, it falls in our ears and stays on for a while in our conscious attention. Our listening becomes sharper because, the curiosity to follow the text and and what for what is to come would reduce mental distractions. Although our ears can hear and understand upto 500 words in a minute, we speak and read only around 150 words in minute. So there is grater focussed attention on words, which make words speak a deeper meaning !
If following a silence of three minutes, a text can be read upto five minutes during a breakfast time followed by three minutes of silence, it can create an inward awakening to the text. The hurry of a meal time gets replaced by relishing food and resting our find on a text for sensing a discerning voice from the text. The conversations following the silence of reading would be meaningful as each person around the table would talk about how the text made sense!
One of the essential needs amidst our hurried pace of living is to call our mind to attention from all distractions to truth which can descend from the mind to the heart. Even in the management teaching, the emphasis is, 'think with the mind and lead with the heart' .
Anna and I have found such reading and listening times useful to meditate, one way of internalising what we hear! The breakfast time reading at a recent retreat was well received. One of the participants mentioned that, 'the words reached me with love'!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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