Learning to Listen
Learning to Listen
Over many years of study and practice, I’ve returned again and again to a small group of thinkers whose work helped me understand inner change not as something to force, but something to listen for.
I don’t offer them as authorities, but as mapmakers — people who helped articulate a way of relating to psyche that makes room for uncertainty, imagination, and depth. This page is here for those who feel drawn toward that kind of listening, even if they’re not yet sure how to begin.
Bayo Akomolafe speaks from a place where uncertainty is not something to resolve, but something to stay with. His work has helped me imagine futures that feel worth moving toward, even when answers are not clear.
James Hillman offers a way of thinking about psyche that resists simplification and moral certainty. His work insists that symptoms, images, and disturbances are not problems to be eliminated, but communications that ask to be listened to more carefully. Hillman’s willingness to remain in tension — and to speak from within it — continues to shape how I understand inner life as something that unfolds through discomfort, imagination, and depth rather than resolution.
Carl Jung’s work marked a decisive crossing in Western psychology: a willingness to engage the symbolic, mythic, and imaginal dimensions of human life as real psychological forces. I return to Jung not as a figure to idealize, but as a mapmaker who took seriously the inner abyss at the heart of Western culture — and the necessity of engaging it if human life is to remain meaningful, creative, and alive.
These are all men, and they are not the only voices that matter. They are, however, the thinkers whose ways of mapping psyche have most deeply shaped my own work over many years of study and practice. I name them here not as authorities to follow, but as orienting figures whose ideas continue to help me think about suffering, change, and responsibility in complex and uncertain times.