Deep Listening

An extract from an edition of the ABC podcast All in the Mind, on how non-Indigenous mental health professionals entering Aboriginal communities can be adequately equipped to work with the particular psychological distress they encounter. Natasha Mitchell interviews Dennis McDermott, psychologist and senior lecturer in Indigenous health at the Muru Marri Indigenous Health Unit at the University of NSW.

Natasha Mitchell: Well the key Indigenous way that you weave in to your workshops is this concept of deep listening -- tell me what it is.

Dennis McDermott: It's definitely not an original idea, definitely not. I've picked it up from a number of sources, most notably from a woman called Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann who is from the Daly River mob in the Northern Territory. But from her cultural group comes this notion of dadirri, and she describes it as a kind of inner deep listening, a kind of still awareness.

But there's similar ideas I found when I started to look around, around various Indigenous cultures around Australia, in Sydney from the Eora language there's a word called ngara. And ngara in this language means to hear, to listen. But with the added dimension of thinking at the same time, a self reflection. And as a Victorian Koori organisation board member pointed it out to me just this last week in Melbourne, it has the additional dimension of actually finishing off what you're hearing with an action. So if someone is actually telling you something, your obligation, if you like, is to follow that through. So it's a link and a reciprocity going on.

So from these and lots of other cultural notions I started to pay serious attention to this idea of deep listening, Indigenous ways of listening, that involve tuning in with the whole being if you like, of listening to the silence, or listening to that noise as well as the signal. It makes sense -- the hiss.