Deep Listening with the Land
Learning to Hear the Natural World Through Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Earth Sensory Perception is a subsection of Our Uncertain Future and represents a compilation of essays on animistic nature connections in the modern world. These essays are only available for free for two weeks before they are paywalled.
What is Deep Listening
There are many ways to connect with the natural world around you such as sit spots and forest walks but to truly be in sync with the living world, feel the sensation of communing with your environment, and be able to practice animistic nature communication, you must learn deep listening.
Deep listening is a spiritual concept represented across cultures that means to listen with your whole body to what is said and what is unsaid, listening to people’s hearts, listening to the heart of the land and listening to the heart of connection with all of existence. Deep listening is inner quiet, still awareness, and waiting. Deep listening happens when we turn off the chatter of our minds and drop into a softer attention, allowing us to receive intuitive wisdom from outside of ourselves.
My Experience Deep Listening
During the pandemic when we first moved off grid and my nervous system was dysregulated, I spent hours walking the public lands around my house through the sagebrush and into the forest. At the peak of my nature walks, I often stopped to sit with a tree. Without knowing it, I was practicing deep listening.
When we reach a sense of being at our wit’s end or hitting rock-bottom or in grief, when we feel like there is nowhere but up, we find ourselves willing to let go of ego, the perception of self that individualizes us from others. We suddenly realize ego is what got us to where we are or hasn’t done much to help us out of it so far and so it is easier to set it aside. That was how I felt sitting with the trees. Exhausted, kaput, done. It was in this state that I became most receptive and began to hear the nature beings around me in chorus with my own being, my own intuitive thoughts.
These moments led me to the path I am on now, becoming a Nature Therapy Guide and writing about nature connections and animism. Now my ability to listen and connect with the land comes more naturally to me and often messages arrive instantly from my surroundings. You don’t have to reach rock-bottom to practice deep listening though. You only need to set the intention and practice. Deep listening is accessible to everyone.
Aboriginal Deep Listening
Aunty Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, a Ngangikurungkurr elder from the Daly River in the Northern Territory in Australia, speaks on the concept of deep listening, she calls dadirri. She states, “In our Aboriginal way, we learn to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn—not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.”[1]
Aboriginal people’s practice of deep listening is a spiritual skill based on respect and used to build community. Ungunmerr-Baumann says, “My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness. My people today recognize and experience in this quietness, the great Life-Giving Spirit, the Father of us all.”[2]
When deep listening we bring reverence to that which we are listening to. We allow ourselves to tap into a state of receptivity without the need to project, interject or give advice. We wait patiently as we open to the stillness without jumping ahead to what we will say or do next. We are fully present in this state of openness and grace.
Indigenous Ways of Listening to the Land
New Mexico author on animism, David Abrams, writes in an essay about his experience discovering deep listening on his walks with a Pueblo man named Jacob. On these walks he notices his own way of listening is to blurt out insights as they come to him. He contrasts this with how his friend listens.
He writes, “When a fresh insight strikes my friend, however, he first halts his steps in order (so I’ve learned) to listen inwardly to the thought. But then he gazes around him, noting where he is on the land, silently questioning the nearby trees, or the sandstone cliffs, or the clouds drifting overhead, in order to discern which entity it was that gifted him with that insight. Only when he has settled his attention upon a particular clump of sagebrush or noticed the ghosting presence of a small whirlwind stirring the dust nearby, and has matched the character of that presence, somehow, to the quality of the thought that just found him, only then does Jacob relax back into our walk, and maybe tell me something of that insight.” [3]
While Jacob walks in a state of deep listening and a thought arrives internally, he looks outwardly for something resonant to echo this intuitive message. This is not because he believes the message came from outside himself but that it is a manifestation of the encounter between his mindful presence and the intelligence of the natural world around him. This reflects the Indigenous acknowledgment that rocks, animals, clouds, rivers, etc. are sensitive beings who can be “heard” if we’re properly attuned and who are co-creating and co-speaking with us in every step.
This Indigenous way of hearing simultaneously outwardly and inwardly reminds us that we are in relationship with all of existence. Deep listening allows us to tune into the living world around us and receive messages from spirit and earth.
For intuitive messages to come through from the natural world, our inner being needs to be in a quiet and relaxed state. Unangan Elder, community leader, and educator from the Pribilof Islands of Alaska, Ilarion Merculieff explains how he discovered this form of awareness as a child, “In my six-year-old mind, I decided that the only difference between those birds and myself was that they existed in a vast field of awareness rather than an intellectual thought process, although I did not use such words at the time. I wanted to be like a bird, so, after months of effort, I developed the capacity to maintain this state of ‘awareness without thinking’ for several hours at a time. That was when the magic happened: I could sense many things I’d never experienced before, and my world expanded enormously.”[4]
Deep listening allows us to discover the magic of being in an open state of awareness, free from the talking mind, and to experience life with a sense of belonging to the whole community of the living world.
Deep Listening in Modern Culture
The act of deep listening has been mostly removed from our modern Western culture. Constant busyness, multitasking, and digital distraction keeps our attention at surface levels. We are generally uncomfortable with silence, pauses or stories that take time. We prefer highly edited short videos without any silence. We want the information to come to us quick, or we’ll move onto the next thing. Our nervous systems have become habituated to incessant notifications and constant stimulus. The sustained quite focus required of deep listening is a skill we have mostly lost and this has only added further to our overall disconnection from the natural world.
How to Practice Deep Listening with the Land:
Quiet. In order to create space for listening, we must become quiet internally, clearing the chatter from our minds and opening into a more receptive state. You may close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Notice how your breath is connected to the air connected to everything. Let your thoughts drop away. You may imagine them melting away down the back of your spine. Become accustomed to silence.
Listen. Open and soften your attention to the world around you. Discover what a receptive state feels like and learn to become more comfortable with it. Potawatomi botanist, writer, and environmental scientist, Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her essay Becoming Earth, “If we listen very hard, can we hear the soaring sunlit chords of photosynthesis, the countermelody of decay? The quiet is so intense, it is as if I can hear the small suck of carbon dioxide entering a leaf, the prick as a fungal strand breaks through the wall of cedar tracheid.”[5] Can you listen this hard?
Wait. Retain this state of quiet mind for as long as you can. Perhaps focusing on your steps or the sounds in your environment. Remain fully present. Hold an attitude of respect, humility, and responsibility, listening in order to live well in community, not to extract information.
Receive. Trust the messages that come through when they feel relaxed, relieving and true. You may receive an idea, a vision, a visitor, words, or a sound.
Reflect. Pause to sense how a thought may be collaborating with the land and more-than-human beings around you, co-speaking with you in each moment.
[1] Brennan, Frank, and Miriam Rose Ungunmerr‑Baumann. “Reverencing the Earth in the Australian Dreaming.” The Way 29, no. 4 (1989): 38–44.
[2] Creative Spirits. 2023. “Deep Listening (Dadirri).” Creative Spirits. Published March 17, 2023. Accessed May 11, 2026. https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/education/deep-listening-dadirri.
[3] Abram, David. 2011. “The Living Language.” Shambhala Sun (now Lion’s Roar). Accessed May 11, 2026. https://www.lionsroar.com/november-2011/.
[4] Ilarion Merculieff, “The Indigenous Art of Following Wisdom from the Heart,” in Perspectives on Indigenous Issues: Essays on Science, Spirituality and the Power of Words (GCILL, 2018), accessed January 16, 2026, https://bioneers.org/the-indigenous-art-of-following-wisdom-from-the-heart-ze0z1903/.
[5] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2025. “Becoming Earth.” Emergence Magazine, June 25, 2025. Accessed May 12, 2026. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/becoming-earth/.
If you want to learn more about nature communication and modern animism for healing and deeper connection, you may be interested in my 4-week asynchronous online course, Earth Sensory Perception.
