The third of the practitioner skills is listening. It sounds simple. It is also the skill that most often takes practitioners the longest to develop.
Hearing vs. listening
There is a difference between hearing what the client says and listening to what is underneath it. Hearing is a receiving function. Listening is an active stance — quieting the practitioner's own field, sitting without agenda, and creating the kind of room where the client's signal can come forward without being interrupted.
I begin every session by quieting my own mind. Not perfectly — I'm not a monk — but enough that the loudest voice in the room isn't my own running commentary on what they're saying.
Letting the problem be there
A teacher of mine, John Chitty, used a phrase that has stayed with me: let the problem be there.
Many systems of care try to solve the client's complaint as quickly as possible. The biodynamic approach is the opposite — let the problem be there, in the room, on the table. Don't push it away, don't fix it, don't even reframe it. Just let it be there. Often, in the field of not being pushed, the problem begins to do something it has not done in a long time. It begins to move on its own.
The questions that open
Listening is shaped by the questions you ask. The questions I return to most often:
- "Is there anything you'd like me to know for our session today?"
- "What brought you to this experience?"
- "What sensations are you experiencing — and where in your body?"
- "Tell me a story."
The last is the most disarming, and often the most fruitful. Tell me a story gives the client permission to wander, to associate, to land somewhere they hadn't planned to go. The body and the story are connected; one often unlocks the other.
Pause and wait
The most important part of listening, after the question, is the pause. A long pause. Long enough that it feels uncomfortable. Long enough for the client's nervous system to register that the question was a real question, not a verbal placeholder.
What lands in that pause is often the substance of the session.