You're Listening But Are You Fertile Listening?
I'd never heard of 'fertile listening' before a solo trip to Arizona and now I'm trying to do it more.
Arizona, April 2023
“We’re gonna need a bigger goddess” – Jessica Hopper
We’re sitting in a circle – women to my left, women to my right. In the mirrored wall I’m facing, I can see us all in this ritualistic shape. I see my face, pale and timid, not quite comfortable with this level of intimacy and softness among strangers. The room is warmly lit with a salt lamp and red LED lights. There is no place to hide or pretend and certainly no way to navigate this experience protected by a very British generalised embarrassment at self.
You might say this shape is important. Consciousness raising circles were popularised by feminists in the late 1960s United States, who argued that women being isolated from each other meant that problems in their lives were misdiagnosed as personal and petty, rather than political. If women got together in these groups, everyone involved could discuss and analyse their day-to-day issues without inference from the presence of men.
The circular formation is similarly found in AA and any kind of anonymous meetings. It’s a symbol of equality, completeness. It’s the opposite of the ‘me versus you’ of therapy: me on the madness couch, the psychiatrist behind the desk. People in programmes where they’re used talk about these circles being a protective container of safety for all. What goes around comes around, what happens in the circle stays in the circle and, in case the metaphor wasn’t pummelling you over the head already, there is no leader or guru. The last part is not strictly true at this Goddess Yoga session in a yoga studio in Arizona, which is being led by the creator of the movement-based practice, Holly Kellogg.
Before we begin the yoga – not like yoga at all, instead based on belly dancing-inspired rotations of the hips and heart-area, free-movement and dancing with your shadow against the wall, all intended to break down women’s shame around their bodies and promote sexual strength – we have to get real with each other. An orange essential oil is passed around the circle and we’re each instructed to take one or two drops and rub it into our palms to inspire self-confidence so I free-pour it into my hands until they’re dripping with it. We smell our palms for thirty seconds or thereabouts. Then it’s time to “speak our truth” for about sixty seconds (notably all the women go well over that time).
What is “your truth”? It’s what we’re all supposed to be vocalising these days. Some people in the self-help and spirituality space on Instagram and elsewhere misuse this to mean whatever the fuck I feel and think above the reality of others. That’s valid. Burn bridges, check out. But I think it’s a little closer to the objective truth than that. It’s the blank reality of your situation – stripped of others opinions, societal expectations – and how it makes you feel and then what you intuitively feel or know you should do about it, if anything. It’s the truth and then some. We’re supposed to merge our truths where possible.
When each woman shares their truth about their life right now, we’re supposed to listen really hard. We’re supposed to practise fertile listening. I’d never heard of it before but I immediately love the phrase: it feels more tender than the masculine “active listening”, coined by a dude called Carl Rogers. Active listening is whatever you’re supposed to do when you interview someone (which is how I learned about it) or generally communicate like a respectful human being: you listen with all the senses and to their cues, repeat what they’ve said to clarify, ask open ended questions.
Fertile listening, as Holly explained it, is just listening hard, giving your undivided attention to what each woman is saying. You don’t say anything until they’re completely done, when you look at them directly and smile and thank them. This, she suggested, would help tell the nervous system that being unflinchingly honest and authentic about your life and problems was a good thing. You will be rewarded, not punished, for speaking your truth.
Different women had varying problems that all felt relatable though their specificity. They were feeling their way through loss, grief, compassion fatigue, building new lives and finding a place in the world for their gifts and talents. It was an exercise in remembering, before every new thank you, that despite variance in our personalities and backgrounds, our inner monologues were barely distinguishable. Everything weird and troublesome and funny we think and feel has been thought and felt before.
I tell them that I’m here in Arizona to learn and meet people and be open to experiences but mostly what I’m doing is obsessing over a situation that caused me pain and came out of nowhere, a new and impossible reality. I’m trying to drain the last rivers of poison out of my system, not knowing if any of my methods are working, if I was “healing” the right way. That I feel like a base person, a simple idiot; I can’t even do time away right and completely shut off, be present. But that that day I had stepped into a natural creek with some new friends I’d made, the sun sparkling on its surface, dragonflies and hummingbirds dropping by. My feet sank through pebbles into the red sand and rooted into the riverbed. The water was flowing from my left, past me, and down towards my right. Whatever it had to traverse, it would manage: rocks jutting out, fallen trees, the weight of heavy branches, negotiating with wind, legs, animal bodies. It wasn’t trying to push through the solid unexplainable facts of the journey – it was flexible and didn’t fight the inevitable flow. This is how to do it, I had felt rather than thought. A cliché learning-by-nature moment that nevertheless brought me some calm.
And when the women all said, “Thank you, Hannah” and smiled at me, my heart palpably felt like it began to glow. The warmth expanded in my chest like when the Grinch learns the spirit of Christmas. There were no reassurances that everything would be fine, no lightly patronising therapeutic validation that that must have been difficult, no trying to intellectualise the problem to decide on a route out. Just listening in its most reduced and magical form.