Are You A Dangerous Listener?

What do people most want from us? Simple:

A soul-targeted question (implied or directly stated) that silences all commentary and returns them to the wondrous threshold on which they stand.

A question whose answer their body knows, but their mind cannot yet fathom, because the question is beyond their current ability to conceive. A question that, once seen, is immediately “owned” and impossible to turn away from, signaling the start of a holy destiny.

A question that, having imagined it, the answer is immediate, alive and self-evident.

This is, by the way, precisely what happens in a soulful astrology reading.

Of course, most people don’t know that they have within them such unrealized questions and, in the past, many spiritual teachers lacked the ability or calling to inquire alongside them.

Fortunately, this is changing. As politicians, preachers and “answer addicts” of every stripe “bite the dust,” something wonderful is happening. People are less and less tolerant of didactic masters and more and more hungry for self-inquiry coaches. Perhaps you’re one of them.

How to know if you’re a budding self-inquiry coach

1. You are interested in questions like, Who does this voice think it is?
2. You would feel dirty not palpating for a pointer that might interrupt another’s chronic “selfing.”
3. You instinctively practice infiltrating small talk with sly interventions and invisible redirects that ventilate the stuffiness of mind-on-a-countdown with the vast and timeless truth of who we are.

Fine. But how, exactly, does a aspiring self-inquiry coach go about excavating these hidden questions?

By becoming a “dangerous listener.”

Getting More Dangerous

A “dangerous listener” is a being naturally curious about the presence-activating question lying, like a loaded gun, on the table in front of every ping-ponging play of personhood.

You know the clunky classics:

1. Who am I?
2. What is my destiny?
3. What is this world?
4. What is my place in this universe?
5. What is my fullest potential in this world?

These are, of course, priceless.

What is needed now, however, is a way of addressing these questions in a more organically emergent and soul-attuned manner. This is the purpose of Astrology.

I like David Whyte’s use of the phrase, “frontier conversation.” Today’s teachers are people guided to tune into this frontier, and help souls resuscitate their waning wonder.

Why do people suffer? Because they’re living life in response to dead questions.

How does a teacher know when a student has found the question that’s truly alive for them?

They have an epiphany or light up with a self-evident answer.

How do you know if you’re a dangerous listener?

You lead by example.

As a service to others, before you could self-consciously choose to do so, your soul pushes you to vulnerably model what it’s like to inquire into your own existentially alive, here/now question.

Then, having arrived at a summarizing phrase or insight, you pose a question to the listener:

“How does this feel in your body?”

And so the dangerous listening begins!

Ready to take your dangerous listening skills to the next level? I now offer students a chance to deepen their self-inquiry facilitation skills via dynamic role play on 90 minute Zoom calls.

Hunter Reynolds
linktr.ee/hunterji