Jennifer Pastiloff - On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking up, Living Real, and Listening Hard

W HEN WAS THE LAST TIME someone listened to you?

I mean really listened to you. Heard you with their whole body. Can you remember?

Jennifer Pastiloff practices radical listening. She is also mostly deaf, so when I tell you that she listens with her entire body, I promise you, there is nothing else like it. How we first met was she attended a writing workshop of mine in Portland, Oregon. She arrived with a broken foot. She was one of the most beautiful women Id ever seen. Her eyelashes alone were dazzling. I was mesmerized. Smitten. Immediately and ridiculously. After she left I Googled her late at night like a stalker. The next week she messaged me on Facebook to tell me that my workshop had changed her life. I was so scared to answer her message I disappeared into my own butt (a common introvert tactic akin to sea anemones).

And yet there was something so profoundly attractive about her; something radiating from inside of her that literally took my breath away enough that I transcended my idiotic shyness and introversion and eventually answered her. The profoundly attractive thing about Jen Pastiloff is this: her ability to be so fundamentally and authentically present alongside other human beings that you remember who you are, or who you might be, if you could be amazing. And when she sits down to listen to you, your soul comes back to life.

What does it mean, radical listening? Jen Pastiloff embodies a kind of listening that originates in the heart and the gut. Perhaps the fact that she has struggled with hearing loss has given her special sensitivity to what we mean when we claim we are listening to each other. To be honest, I dont know very many good listeners. I seem to meet more and more people who have forgotten that listening is the other side of voice. I am most in love with people who deeply understand voice as being able to tell their story in a way that makes room for other bodies and other stories to coexist. When Jen teaches an On Being Human workshop, a kind of magical hybrid of yoga, story-listening, and storytelling, a whole world opens up where our differences and our similarities are allowed to emerge, reminding us that even as we are individuals we can also make bridges to each other. Honestly, though, you have to take one of her workshops yourself so that you can experience what I mean when I say she listens with her whole body.

The first time I was in one of her workshops and she sat down in front of me to listen to what Id written, my entire body began to shake. No one had ever looked at me or listened to me or sat with me like that in my entire life (okay, except the times Joan of Arc and Mary Shelley each visited me in a dream, but most people think Im nuts when I tell them about that). It both scared the crap out of me and simultaneously unearthed a long, partly sad, partly joyous note in my own throat. A truth note. A glimpse of my own heart worth.

I suck at yoga. No really, I do. For one thing, I have scoliosis bad enough to have given me chronic pain since I was thirteen. I have a hip dysplasia that makes sitting, standing, driving, and walking super fun. As a fifty-five-year-old woman, Im also menopausal, arthritic, and generally stiff and cranky most of the time, even though I was a competitive swimmer for more than twenty years. What Im saying is, Im not up for yogi of the year or anything by a long shot. If I get down on the ground Im not even sure I can get back up by myself. My hips and knees and ankles make noises that sometimes frighten me.