Deep Listening

The way Pauline Oliveros told the story, she and two of her colleagues and friends took an opportunity, more or less on a whim, to experiment with improvising in an immense underground cistern in northwest Washington state.  When the group listened back to the recording of it, made also essentially on a whim, they realized they had an album.  They settled on "Deep Listening" as a title for it because they liked the pun; their 1985 performance is now legendary.

That was the origin of the name Deep Listening, but the work it has come to be associated with represents the entire oeuvre of Maestra Oliveros.  From her teen years, PO, as she is known among her friends and followers, was committed to "listening to everything all the time" and this imperative led her to a richly holistic approach to life and art, one that was eventually developed into a series of trainings in her approach.  I was privileged this fall to participate in one of those trainings and it had a profound effect on me.  I want to talk here about some of the insights I had, not only by way of sharing but also as an enthusiastic endorsement of the work and invitation to readers to explore it.

Deep Listening as a practice encompasses three broad domains or modalities:  listening, in the sense of both an auditory and attentional function, movement, in the sense of somatic and kinesthetic awareness, and dreaming, as a receptive experience, a lucid engagement, and a domain for practice.  Each of these modalities leads naturally into the next; indeed, in retrospect, the path seems obvious, as such trails do once they are clearly blazed.

PO's approach to listening appears to have a great deal of overlap with meditation; indeed, she often discusses it in such terms.  Distinguishing it as a perceptual process, as opposed to the sensory process of hearing, she breaks it into several subprocesses:  inclusive, exclusive, external-distal, external-proximal, internal-somatic, and internal-intrapsychic (some of these are my terms, as I've heard different labels used for these various concepts).  Inclusive and exclusive map closely to attentional processes in mindful and concentrative meditation, respectively.  External and internal listening are straightforward, essentially the public vs private soundscapes, while the subcomponents of those break down thusly:  proximal external sounds might be the soft sounds of your breath through your nose or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, while distal external sounds are those from the room you're in, other people, the world outside, etc.; somatic internal sounds might be the creaking of joints or saliva bubbles moving about in one's mouth, while intrapsychic sounds are entirely auralized -- music, self-talk, memory, etc.  In Deep Listening, then, listening is global perception across several dimensions, demanding and producing a level of mindful awareness richer than what had ever occurred to me in a life of exploring mindfulness.

By listening at this level, one's awareness of self as an embodied being naturally expands and intensifies, leading one to the next modality, movement.  Again, the theme of open perception pervades this aspect of the work and the training focuses on embodiment as an experience.  Practices take the above subprocesses of listening and bring them to bear on attending to inner experiences of movement, e.g., through solitary practice of T'ai Chi, yogic, and Taoist exercises, and to experiencing moving with others, e.g., group practices of improvisatory dance, vocalization, or other collective performative activities.  Participants observe their own reactions and others' and practice bringing acceptance to the creative kinesthetic process. 

The imperative to listen to everything all the time led PO to consider one form of consciousness not usually considered when listening:  dreaming.  What are the sounds of dreams?  What are our embodied and other experiences while dreaming?  What if we could practice listening intentionally in our dreams?  Deep Listening explores our dreams from contexts that were new to me, taking a dream at face value, an experience valid in its own right, rather than as a section of consciousness that only has meaning in relationship to waking.  I've spent my entire adult life exploring dreams, their interpretation, their neurological substrate, and practicing active and lucid dreaming, and never before had I thought to just be in my dreams, the way I might just be on a mountain or in my studio.  In Deep Listening, dreams are explored as valid realities, both receptively, i.e., practicing being open to the experience and to creative ideas, and proactively, i.e., lucidly, but lucidity not to produce virtual reality- or videogame-like experiences, but rather to make use of the dream space to practice mindfulness, yoga, or other consciousness-raising activities. 

Two themes run through all of the Deep Listening training, and, indeed, through PO's work:  community and acceptance.  Although almost all of my fellow trainees were professional artists in one domain or another, the practices are designed for lay persons; there is no expectation or requirement of special skill or background.  This is not to say that building skill is not encouraged -- far from it -- but the skills most encouraged are those associated with this kind of global listening and unconditional acceptance.  PO's commitment to community as a core of her work has its roots in the social upheavals she lived through and synergizes with the practice of acceptance to create art activities that are the-thing-in-itself, performances that are experiences that are art. 

Although I had been introduced to PO's work in the early 80s as part of my coursework in music school, she remained mostly in the background of my musical interests until the last several years, when I began to take a more healing, inward-facing orientation to music and music making.  It was two years ago that I discovered the first Deep Listening Band recording described in the first paragraph above and made my first foray into what Deep Listening might mean to me as a musician and composer.  In my initial reading of PO's book "Deep Listening:  A Composer's Sound Practice" I found it hard to get the gist of her, but something called me back to it and each time I read it, I gleaned something more and eventually realized that she was talking about music as a kind of mindfulness -- and this rung my heart like a temple bell.  PO had brought a quasi-Buddhist, present-focused awareness to music in a way that I had felt was possible but had failed to get my hands around on my own.  I had to pursue formal training in Deep Listening. 

Having completed the first round of training at the end of November, I have since been consolidating what I learned and building Deep Listening practices into my life.  I am endeavoring to make time daily to practice formally listening, moving, and dreaming.  Deep Listening clicked immediately into my efforts to take a more meditative approach to viola playing and renewed my interest in singing; too, it folds into my practice as a clinical psychologist in meaningful ways, helping me to be more thoughtful and grounded with patients.  My physical wellness has been a particular focus recently, as I approach my 60s, and bringing lessons from Deep Listening movement has supported several positive behavior changes as well as added to my general sense of groundedness.  The new perspective on dreaming has broadly rekindled my interest in and experience of dreaming, but, more importantly, shown me new possibilities I had not seen or had forgotten:  dreams -- along with hypnogogia and hypnopompia -- are incredibly creative spaces and practicing being open to that has already changed my creative process significantly.  It has also led me to make a critical connection with a concept I rely on clinically, the constructed nature of reality:  given the nature of our perception as entirely limited to physical sensory systems and the epiphenomena arising from their processing, waking and dreaming experiences have more in common with each other than they don't.  By purposefully blurring the boundaries between these realities, it is possible to bring the best of each to the other, awareness and agency to dreams and creativity and numinosity to waking. 

As a fundamentally communally-oriented person, PO did not create or develop her work alone.  Her wife and partner of decades, IONE, and Heloise Gold, both artists in their own rights, collaborated with her on the initial ideas underlaying Deep Listening and continue to teach in the wake of PO's death in late 2016.  Having taught Deep Listening workshops, retreats, certification programs, and even academic courses related to Deep Listening since the late 80s, PO and her collaborators have built an international community of artists and teachers dedicated to exploring, expanding, and sharing its insights and processes.  Participating in the first part of the certification training tapped me into a robust, active, and creative network of fellow travelers; I hope and intend to continue to engage with and learn from them. 

I am deeply grateful to have found this body of work and its community of practitioners.  My own work as a musician and a psychologist have been and will continue to be informed by Maestra Oliveros' insights and I feel great personal resonance with her ideas and goals.  I look forward to my ongoing exploration of the worlds she discovered, attempting to listen to everything, all the time.