We have come together to discuss intuitive listening. So far, after two meetings, we are ten women and one man. It has interested us, although not exactly surprised us, that when we put out the word about a graduate program in intuitive listening mainly women showed up. It also didn't surprise us that none of us asked for or offered a definition of intuition. Intuitive listeners recognize themselves. They also recognize their friends and relatives who might be interested in studying and refining something they've done naturally all their lives.

A church without walls, a University without a campus, a graduate program established on intuitive ground--we need a place to meet. So far that has been the dining room table upstairs, where we have introduced ourselves and found that we had responded intuitively to the invitation to study intuitive listening. Our most common reason for being there seemed to be not exactly knowing the reason. Not knowing, not exactly, but sensing it was right. This is quite naturally the language of intuition, whether or not any of us, if called upon at these first meetings, could have defined the word.

Of course, intuition being what it is it is not urgently seeking a definition. For some people it is akin to witchcraft, for others it is their natural way of being in the world. If pressed, an intuitive person might offer a few, vague statements. "I just know things; it's hard to explain but I have a sense about it; I have a hunch and I tend to follow my hunches; well I just know, that's all there is to it, I just happen to know." Our group will pay a lot of attention to expressions of this type, to what they tell us about the nature of intuition. This, in itself an intuitive approach, has certain qualities: curiosity, an eagerness to explore, to set out on an adventure together; just sensing that it's the right thing to do because it will probably take us where we should be going; or in our most secret heart of heart's where we want to be going, although we cannot yet name the wish, the intention or the goal.

Intuition stands in a meaningful relationship to what is possible, what might develop out of a circumstance, what might take form because this particular group has come together. Intuition has its eye on what is not yet visible, its ear tuned for what has not yet been spoken. But maybe it will be spoken in the next moment if we are listening with the right kind of attention? The idea that we could study, refine and develop this intuitive capacity, that we could evolve a way of listening that does not belong to any psychological school or therapeutic approach, interests us; it also carries its own urgency.

In a polemical mood, I find myself talking about the way therapy has usurped all the legitimate listening space in our culture. Therapy, with its diagnostic categories, its notion of pathology, its trained professional who is there to administer a treatment to a sick psyche, surely that cannot be the only way to listen? Do troubled souls seek therapy; is that what they really want; or do they just not know any other place to go? A minister is of course a good place for a troubled soul to go, but most ministers belong to churches that have doctrines, just as most therapists belong to schools that have theories. Strangely enough, for such a highly organized profession, therapists are not required to tell their clients what their theories are.

I have been worried for many years about the tendency of patients to end up thinking like their therapists. An individual talking with a Freudian analyst will be ardently concerned with his oedipal complex; a person seeing a Jungian will vigorously explore the cherishing and nourishing goodness of the archetypal mother. The primal scream patient will be screaming, the individuals in existential therapy will be talking about dread. Enter a therapist's office and you have entered a world with its own rules, its own language, its own citizenry. In the Freudian school the most prominent citizens are the unconscious, repression, dreams, the drives, etc. These theory-laden words offer us explanations for why we are the way we are: heart-sick, violent, bitter, empty, living lives without meaning. But are troubled souls seeking explanation? Perhaps a troubled soul wants most of all to lament its troubles, to sink deeply into them with a listener who is there to listen, to care deeply, to understand the urgency of the endeavor, to help make the troubled soul feel safe?

In preparation for the study of intuitive listening I have been asking myself, and Randall and Renate and I have been asking one another, if it is possible to develop a way of listening that does not enclose itself within a theory, that leaves room for the individual to discover her own voice, her own way of accounting for herself; a listening style that offers the possibility of discovering the way this individual is not like any other, rather than the way she is like the other people in her diagnostic group or in our particular theory. We like to think about a listening that does not have a treatment in mind, or any notion of how to get better, or any assumption that one should get better or even that one should want to get better. "Practicing therapy without a license." Does this phrase mean to tell us that listening has to be licensed? That the only kind of listening the law recognizes as legitimate is therapeutic listening? End of polemic.

Before I started writing I was intending to approach everything in a calm and thoughtful way. It seems however that the polemical voice needs to be given a space, a chance to express itself. It has taken me a good thirty years to work my way out of the therapeutic, largely psychoanalytic way of thinking about things. Nevertheless, therapy is not my enemy; psychoanalysis has offered me many useful years of holding and insight and understanding. To this I pay tribute, I honor my colleagues who practice in this way, respecting them for the serious, devoted work they do. (I have noticed however that most of them, over the years, abandon the techniques they've learned and return to the intuitive listening that brought them to study psychology in the first place.)

No therapy has ever given me the experience that I myself was being heard, as myself, speaking in my own voice about the things that mattered to me. In a therapeutic situation the authority for knowing rests with the therapist, the voice of authority is the therapist's voice. The individual, in free-association or dreams or slips of the tongue or in narratives about her life, brings up the raw material the therapist then shapes and orders. But what if the self resents being translated into any idiom other than its own? This self that has perhaps come to seek itself; so often hidden away, deprived of growth and expansion and expression. Why? Because from the outset there were pressures at work to make it adapt itself to its environment, speak in the language of its family, be concerned with its parents' concerns? I ask, how many clinical practitioners have been sufficiently troubled by the way therapy reproduces this dilemma? An individual enters a consultation room, sits down in a designated chair and undergoes translation into the therapist's way of thinking. A person emerging from an analytic process with self-explanations based upon repression, an oedipus complex, etc. is speaking Freud's language, not her own.

When I have raised this issues with colleagues they tend to answer in one voice: "Of course, every therapeutic orientation is wedded to its origins, its theoretical forebears, how else could it be? Listening," they say, "cannot be unorganized or you won't t hear anything; there would just be a chaos of undifferentiated information flowing in from the person who is speaking." In this view, a theory is necessary if we want to hear. But what happens to all the material that falls to the side of the theory, or beyond its formulations, or slips between the tenets of its world-view?

Intuitive Listening, as we have been thinking about it, will take up this problem, which has no easy solution; or rather, it will take up both problems: the organization of listening, the escape from the tyranny of one's own world-view.

Of course there are organized ways to listen without theories. An observant approach might be one such way, employing close attention to detail and careful noticing. A listener might for instance be oriented to the flavor of a language the speakers uses; the words she tends to use most often; words used in a special way; the metaphors spontaneously produced, the pacing of narrative, the absence or persistent building of suspense. Kinsey collected twenty thousand bees in order to demonstrate that no one of them was like another. The same is said of snowflakes, no two ever identical. In this program we ask: How might we draw closer in our listening to the idiosyncratic individual who comes to speak with us? How can we be still, attentive, watchful enough, sufficiently unburdened by ourselves to catch that fleeting uniqueness before it enters our particular organizing system?

Intuitive Listening may have more in common with the reading of literary texts than with most forms of therapeutic listening-one reason literary texts and critical readings of them have a place in the program's reading list. Textual criticism however tends to assume an odd kind of authority over the written work, as if the critic were in a better position to know what the work means than the work itself; as if the work's meaning required translation and interpretation, rather than the concrete and detailed study of how the work is composed. In this respect, literary criticism has a great deal in common with psychoanalysis, but also much to recommend it to the study of intuitive listening. If we could imagine a literary critic who approached the text gently, pointed out, looked closely at, observed patterns, discussed narrative styles, etc. but left to the reader the task of interpretation, we would have a good model for one way intuitive listening might be organized.

A very wise psychoanalyst once said to me, after some 50 years of clinical practice: "Just help them to feel safe, the material will arise of itself and they will know what to make of it."

Yes, they will know what to make of it if we, the listeners, learn how to keep out of the way. But what does that mean? Keep out of the way of the other person's discovery of herself while simultaneously being present enough to help her feel safe? Certainly, it is a tricky business; more likely an ideal than anything we will be able to practice consistently, but as an ideal it points us in a direction that may define one aspect of intuitive listening, which in this sense would not require a training in mastery of techniques but rather a meditative practice of self-awareness.

And so, to begin with, we study, recognize and name our own listening-filters. These of course are easily recognized if they have been drawn from a particular school of thought (the Freudian filter, the Jungian filter, the behaviorist filter, etc). The personal filters are harder to name. For the most part they are habitual, they ARE us in our listening, and therefore hidden from us unless a determined study is undertaken to name and know them. I can identify a few of my own by way of example.

I have noticed, over my almost thirty years of listening, that I am always looking for the soul of the person who has come to talk with me. I believe that the meaning of life is found in the transformation of the self, back to what it was before it was shaped by its environment, onwards to the realization of the full potential it carries. I think the study of one's childhood is helpful in seeking the original self, it seems to me that dreams hold many answers to the mysteries of self-knowledge. I believe this approach helps people uncover their inherent self-expression and creativity.

No doubt, these are worthy interests, well suited to a minister who is also a writer. Yet, at the same time, these are MY interests, they reflect my life-experience, my own subjective system of value and meaning. No doubt they can be felt in me by people who come to speak with me; therefore I feel it incumbent upon me to identify them, concretely and clearly, so that people who speak with me know that I regard these values not as truths, not even necessarily as relevant to them as they are speaking, but simply as part of my own listening apparatus. I have found myself saying, when the occasion seems right, and the speaker seems interested, "I will tell you some things about myself so that you will know who is listening to you, with what sort of bias, so that you can then choose to ignore it if that's what seems best."

This approach is, as I have mentioned, an ideal, not something I can consistently offer. But in the moments when I can make these values known, without imposing myself on the self-reflection of someone who has come to speak with me, I feel that a wonderous connection takes place between us and that we meet in a real space, here in the present, as two individuals who respect each other, and who struggle to keep the authority for knowing, naming and discovering with the individual who is speaking.