Listening With Water: A Practice Of Presence

What if listening extended beyond the ears? This guided practice invites you to experience listening through your whole body. Using a simple performative score, you'll be guided to accompany a nearby body of water—not to analyse or interpret it, but to cultivate presence, curiosity and relationship. This practice invites you into a dialogue with the more-than-human world through movement, silence and embodied attention. Each experience is unique, shaped by the place, the season and your own way of listening. This is suitable for anyone wishing to deepen their connection with nature, themselves and the places they inhabit. To dive deeper, explore the related course, The Power Of The Creative Cycle II: Attuning To Great Nature.

Transcript

Listening often begins as a personal practice. Before we can listen with a river. We first learn how to listen within ourselves. From there, Listening expands outwards, Towards another, And eventually beyond the entire field. Which encompasses self, Other and the more than human. This movement forms the listening continuum. Attunement. Listening to Accompaniment listening with Resonance Listening Beyond. This call is an invitation to explore these three modes of listening. Through accompaniment. With a body of water. Which may be a river. Stream. Late. Fountain, Sea. Rainfall, Puddle, Canal Wetland Glacier or any other form of living water. This call may be undertaken alone or with others. Before attending to the water outside of you. Notice the waters within. Attend through your whole body. Through your ears. Through your skin. Through your breath. Through your bowl. Through movement. Through a sensation. Continue to attune to yourself until you feel yourself becoming available. Allow your attention to extend towards the body of water external to you. Approach water as if you are encountering a stranger you do not yet know. Stop at a distance that feels comfortable to you. Allow the water to speak to you. Notice what arises. Through the water within you. Accompany the water external of you. You may accompany water through walking. Sitting. Drawing Righty. Moving conversing. Remaining in silence. Or another form that emerges through the encounter. Now. Allow the distinction between listener and listened to, To soften. Allow yourself to be listened to. Receive all that is within. And outside of you. Remain available. Allow this encounter to unfold. According to its own time. Before leaving. Pause. Notice what wishes to travel with you. Offer a gesture to water. Carry one quality of this encounter with you. Into the rest of your day.