The Heart of Sacred Listening

The Practice That Transforms Communication

Most people think that communication is built on what we say—on the clarity of our words, the skill of our speaking, the strength of our voice. I once thought that too. But life has a way of revealing deeper truths when we most need them, and the truth I came to discover is this:

Communication only works when we transform the way we listen.
Not listening for agreement…
Not listening for what we expect to hear…
Not listening through the filters of the stories we inherited or made up

Over the years, I have discovered that a listening that nurtures, a listeing that heals, is a listening beyond those stories, listening for the human being who is speaking.

Really? Listening for the place where you and they are deeply connected. You could say, even, listening for the sacred within them.

I didn’t learn this principle from a book or a class or a theory.
I learned it from my commitment to shift my relationship with my father.

And learning it changed the entire trajectory of my life.

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The Story of How I Learned This Practice

It was December 1972. I was twenty-seven years old, sitting in a banquet chair in the ballroom of the Jack Tarr Hotel in San Francisco. Two hundred people surrounded me, all of us searching for something—meaning, direction, awakening. A charismatic man with a booming voice stood at the front of the room, leading a transformational training that promised to open our lives.

It was the perfect moment for me to be there.
I was in the middle of an identity crisis—newly divorced, untethered, unsure of who I was without the roles I had so dutifully played: wife, teacher, good girl, obedient daughter. My inner world was splintering in ways I had not expected, and I felt lost. Adrift. Without a lifeboat.

So I threw myself into the work, listening to people share, watching a new kind of honesty emerge in the room. I began to see how many assumptions, and how many unexamined stories, I had been living inside of, especially about my father.

The turning point came unexpectedly.

As I contemplated taking a year’s leave from teaching to explore this new path of developmental inner work, a fierce internal voice rose up and said:

“You can’t. Daddy won’t let you.”

I argued back at that voice.
I’m twenty-seven years old. I can do what I want.
But the voice persisted.
“Daddy won’t let you.”

Its tone was sharp, punitive, and rooted in fear.
And when the trainer asked us to look at the story we were living inside of around whatever issue we were dealing with, my story was unmistakably clear:

My father is a controller.
A manipulator.
A man who wants me to do what he wants, not what I want.

I had years of “evidence” to prove that story:
the hours of daily piano practice…
the curfew of ten p.m., even through my senior year in high school
the pressure for straight A’s…
the night he showed up at a high-school make-out party to take me home…
the insistence that I marry a Jewish man…
the constant vigilance over my choices.

I was sure I was right about him.

But the trainer didn’t ask whether I was right.
He asked something much harder:

“Can you find another story—one that fits the same evidence—but empowers you rather than disempowers you?”

I didn’t want another story.
I wanted my righteous one.

But something inside me—maybe the twenty-seven-year-old who was drowning in old identities— called to me to work on this. I wanted to feel joy. I wanted to feel aliveness. I wanted to experience freedom. And I knew I was stuck.

So I ran the “movie” of my life in my mind again and again, unwilling to stop until I saw something new.

And then, like a sudden flash of light, I did.

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The Moment Everything Changed

I saw my father not as the villain in my movie but as a man shaped by his own impossible circumstances.

He had been born in a Jewish shtetl in Ukraine, raised in hardship, his own father murdered by Cossacks. He immigrated at fourteen, worked through the Depression, educated himself through sheer grit, built a life through discipline and determination. He lived through my mother’s illness and death at my age of 16, raising me alone while holding a demanding career as a Mechanical Engineer.

He wasn’t trying to control me.
He was trying to forward me.
To give me the life he never had.
To contribute to my happiness in the only ways he knew.

The kaleidoscope turned—just one click—and everything inside it rearranged.

Suddenly, the father I had been resisting my whole life was a father who had loved me fiercely and profoundly and was committed to my success.

I felt my heart break open.
Tears came.
The world shifted.

And so did I.

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The Phone Call That Became My Awakening

I couldn’t wait to talk with him. The next morning, I called him from my home. My heart was pounding.

“How was the course?” he asked, the first question.

“Are you sitting down?” I said.

He wasn’t—but he sat.

Being with him, fully and honestly, I apologized. Deeply.

I told him I was sorry for the many years of resistance.
Sorry for how I had listened to him—through suspicion rather than trust, through resistance rather than a willingness to listen.
I apologized for the walls I had built.

He was very quiet. I could tell he was listening; listening, like something important was happening.

And then I told him what I had discovered:

“I realized, Dad, that all you ever wanted was my happiness.”

He was silent. For a while.
Completely quiet.

And then I heard him weeping.

He wept for five minutes—five full, spacious minutes in which the past -- who I had been being with him, who I had been being for me -- washed away between us.

And what was there was nothing.

Just respect and love.

When he could speak again, he said:

“That’s all I ever wanted for you, Marilyn. (Marilyn was his original name for me).
That’s all I’ve ever wanted.
And I thought I was going to have to die
without you ever knowing this.”

Hearing those words changed me.
Something dark and heavy dissolved.

And then came the next test.

“Before we hang up,” I said, with a little fear, deep down inside. “There’s something else. I’ve decided to take a year’s leave of absence from teaching.”

I took a deep breath.

Silence.
Then an explosion.

“YOU’RE GOING TO DO WHAT?”

He yelled. Loudly. Passionately.
I shut down. My heart retreated. My old story returned: There he is—the controller, the one who won’t let me live my life.

My inner voice roared back.

You’re an adult! You can do whatever you want with your life!

And then—thank goodness—I looked at the small piece of paper I had written before calling him, an important piece of paper.
A prompt.
A lifeline.

I promised myself that unless I could answer “yes” to the following question, I would not speak.

This was the question:

“Can you hear his commitment to your happiness?”

The answer was no.

So I said nothing.

He kept yelling.

My internal voice started giving up:
Fine. I’ll do what he wants. I won’t go.

Then my eye landed on the prompt again.
“Can you hear his commitment to your happiness?”
Still no.

I realized I needed to shift my listening, not his speaking.

So I took a breath, and with all the courage I could muster, I moved from the story I was hearing him through. I stopped listening through the filter of “He is trying to control me,” and instead I listened for the deeper truth:

His concern
was a form of love.

His commitment was to my happiness.

Once I shifted, the entire conversation shifted.

I became calm. Present. Interested.

“What are you worried about?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“What do you see that has you so concerned?”

And suddenly, he wasn’t yelling.
He was sharing.
He was a father who loved his daughter and didn’t want her to leap into the unknown when her life already felt unstable. He thought that it was a really bad idea for this time.

Once I could hear him—really hear him—his love came through as clear as mountain air.

And when I shared with him that part of the process of self-discovery was exploring the unknown, and that I was comfortable in that territory and wanted to explore it, he understood.
He even supported it.
He became curious, almost excited.

He asked me if I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

And when I shared with him I wanted to be in the mountains of Colorado during Fall and Winter, which brought him to the experience he had had as a boy, growing up, he said, with wonder in his voice:

“That will be so wonderful for you.
Do you think I might visit?”

A year later, he did.

This is a photo of me with my Dad at my piano concert when I was 16.

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The Principle:

The Practice of Listening Beyond Your Story

What changed that day?
Not my father.
Not his personality.

Not his worry for me.
Not his past.

What changed was my listening.

I shifted from listening through a hardened story called “he’s controlling” —
to listening for what was underneath his words:
his commitment to contribute to my happiness.

This is the heart of the practice I learned:

The Practice of Listening Beyond Your Story

is the practice of becoming aware of the filters, interpretations, and inherited narratives through which you listen—and choosing to set them aside long enough to hear the deeper truth.

When we listen this way:

• defensiveness softens

• understanding opens

• connection becomes possible

• communication, in other words, listening, becomes a doorway to partnership

• and a new world of relationships become available

This one practice transformed my relationship with my father. He and I had a loving relationship for many years. He lived to be 98.

The practice of what I call “Sacred Listening” — listening for good intent, for the Divine in another, gave me a new future, a future built on partnership instead of resistance, on possibility instead of fear, and on deep listening instead of old stories.

It also became foundational to my work, my teaching, my coaching, and the heart of my life’s purpose.

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The Teaching of this Story

And here is what I found to be true:

When we shift the way we listen, we shift the way the world appears before us.

And this is super important. Because if someone appears to you as a threat, you act one way. If someone appears to you as a partner, a friend, and a collaborator, you act another way.

In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge says that in the world of transformational leadership, you “re-perceive the world, and your relationship to that world.”

Listening is the key to transforming your perception.

Communication opens the doorway to connection.
Conflict morphs into understanding.
Relationships live on sacred ground.
And life itself becomes a place where love can enter.

That is the heart of listening.
And it transforms everything.

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This Story is one of many contained in my book “The Heart of Sacred Listening: Transform Your Relationships, Your Work, and Your Life”, which will be published in the spring of 2026. With love, and if you are interested, I invite you to become a paid subscriber to my Substack, which will allow you to read my book serialized as a pre-release to its publication. This will provide you with access to:

• The Key to Brilliant Leadership: Rediscovering the art and practice of listening from the heart

• Healing relationships by shedding judgments, resentments, and old stories

• Allowing inner criticism to soften into compassion

• Meeting life’s obstacles with resilience, grace, and creativity

• Creating a new future aligned with purpose, meaning, wonder, and joy

Did you know that you can like and comment on my newsletter? Follow the link below to join my Substack community —it’s free— on the Substack app if you feel called to. I would love to create a community of readers who join in a conversation about living with an awakened heart and deepening the power of Sacred Listening.