Story #074
Authentic Speaking Arises from Authentic Listening
Max J Miller
One of the great, wise elders who showed up unexpectedly in my life was an acting teacher at the University of Minnesota. I was thrilled to be in her class. Barbara Brynn had been successful on stage and screen, and she’d devoted her final years to passing on what she’d learned to my generation.
The class veered away from every convention and expectation I’d brought with me. In one of the first sessions, she put us in a circle and told us about the Lakota tradition of passing a talking stick from person to person. We would pass the stick around the circle, she explained, and give our undivided attention to whoever was holding it. When a person finished answering the question on the table, they’d pass the stick to the next person — who had to begin their own remarks by referencing something the person before them had said.
Native lore had always fascinated me; I’d studied it for years through Scouting. Still, I found myself thinking, what in the world does this ancient ritual have to do with acting
Then my fellow student, Mark, handed me the stick, and I couldn’t recall a single word he’d said. I flushed with self-consciousness. I wanted to leave the room.
She let me squirm for a minute. Then, gently, she turned my embarrassment into a lesson for the whole class.
“What were you listening to while Mark was talking?” she asked.
I had no idea. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “My mind just drifted away.”
“Take a look,” she said. Then, to the rest of the room: “As the stick passes from person to person, notice what you’re actually listening to. There’s a little voice inside your head. It never seems to stay quiet. Listen to that voice.”
She gave us a moment to notice it. “You think you’re listening to the person speaking,” she went on, “but you’re very likely listening to your own little voice instead. Maybe it’s rehearsing what clever thing you’ll say when it’s your turn. Maybe it’s just commenting on what the person with the stick is saying. Do you recognize this voice?”
We did. Every one of us.
“Authentic speaking,” she told us — and would tell us again, many times, over that semester — “arises from authentic listening.”
That single sentence has stayed with me for fifty years.
I recognize that little voice now under a different name. It’s the same doing-mind I wrote about a few issues back — the one that doesn’t retire just because a career does, the one that narrates and plans and judges instead of simply being with what’s in front of it. Barbara Brynn had a room full of twenty-year-olds noticing it in 1977, decades before I had any language for what it actually was. It turns out you don’t need Heidegger to catch it red-handed. You just need a talking stick and someone brave enough to ask what you were really listening to.
I’ve written a lot in this newsletter about storytelling as an essential practice for elders. But I’ve come to believe its real power isn’t what we usually assume. It’s easy to think our value as elders shows up when we pass along our experience as advice — instruction, lessons learned, hard-won conclusions handed down. That’s not where the real power is.
Storytelling, like great acting, arises from listening. Told well, a story doesn’t instruct a listener so much as it makes room for them — space to be heard and known, even when they’re the one sitting silently in the audience. I once had another teacher put it even more plainly: “The only valuable thing you will get from this class is what you discover for yourself.” The elements of a story belong to the storyteller. But if the story works, it gets assembled by that same little voice, now doing something worthwhile for once, in the mind of the listener: that’s me he’s talking about. That’s true for me too.
I learned the deeper version of this lesson slowly, over decades of ghostwriting, and it took me a long time to name what was actually happening in those sessions. Good listening turned out not to be enough on its own. What made it work — what made people trust me with the parts of their story they’d never said out loud — was that the listening had to be compassionate. Non-judgmental. Generous, in the sense Thomas Merton meant when he wrote, in New Seeds of Contemplation, that “the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not twist them to fit our own image.” I wasn’t there to shape my clients into a better story. I was there to let them become themselves fully on the page, which is a different thing entirely.
I think of Collin Ruiz, whose memoir of her time in prison became Buddha Behind Bars. Early on, she’d give me the facts — what happened, in what order, what she did. True, and not yet alive. I had to keep asking, gently and then less gently, for what was underneath the facts: not just what happened to her, but what she’d longed for inside it, what the anguish had actually felt like from the inside. It took persistence on my part and real courage on hers before she found it. Readers of her book now say they felt like they were in that prison with her. That’s not craft alone. That’s what happens when someone is listened to compassionately enough that they finally believe it’s safe to say the true thing.
More than one client has told me the process itself felt healing — that they came out of our sessions feeling more whole, more complete about their own life, than when we started. I didn’t do that by giving them anything. I did it by getting (my little voice) out of the way long enough to actually hear them.
Presence, listening, and compassion aren’t really three separate gifts, I’ve come to think. They’re one gift, showing up three ways. Presence is what makes real listening possible in the first place — you can’t listen from inside the doing-mind’s noise any more than you can meet someone from there. And compassion is simply what listening becomes when it’s generous instead of merely attentive: when you’re not listening to fix, or advise, or wait for your turn with the stick, but to let the other person be exactly, perfectly who they are.
This, I’ve come to believe, is the elder’s real work. We may have the most experience in the room. We may even speak the most wisely when the stick finally comes around. But our most important task may be just to make sure it keeps moving — and that whoever is holding it next walks away knowing, for once, that they were actually heard.
The stick is in your hands now. Who could you listen to this week the way Barbara Brynn taught me to — no rehearsing, no fixing — just enough presence to let them be perfectly themselves?
Shine,
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