Council: Remembering How to Listen
On the ancient practice of listening beyond agreement.
We live in an age of endless speaking and very little listening.
Every platform rewards reaction, performance, and certainty — while the slower work of presence, humility, and deep listening has nearly vanished. In such a world, the ancient practice of council offers something radically simple and necessary.
Council is not a technique for problem-solving or for sorting disagreements. It does not aim to fix or persuade. Its purpose is more elemental: to help us remember how to be together.
In council, people sit in a circle and speak one at a time, from the heart. There is no debate, no cross-talk, no hierarchy of voices. A talking piece — sometimes a stone, feather, or stick — moves from hand to hand. Whoever holds it has the floor, and everyone else listens. Not listening in order to respond, but listening to receive.
This small act of shared attention has profound consequences. When practiced with sincerity, council begins to undo the habits of isolation, defensiveness, and superiority that define much of modern social life. It reveals that our differences — of opinion, history, identity — are not obstacles to community, but the very ground on which it is built.
We don’t come to council to become the same.
We come to learn how to stand together as we are, without erasing what makes each voice distinct.
Respect grows not from agreement, but from the willingness to stay present when we don’t agree.
In many traditional cultures, forms of council or circle were how people oriented to truth. Decisions were not forced through majority rule, but ripened through listening — until something larger than any one person could be felt moving through the group. This was not efficiency; it was wisdom.
Modern society, by contrast, runs on speed, polarization, and the illusion of control. We have built systems that value being right over being real, and so we find ourselves surrounded by noise, yet starved for meaning. Council does not fix this, but it offers a way through — a practice of slowing down enough to hear again.
In a time of ecological and social fracture, sitting in circle may seem too small, too humble a response. Yet perhaps this is precisely what’s needed: a place where the old reflexes of dominance and certainty can rest, and something older than opinion can begin to speak through us.
When we practice council, we practice coexistence.
We practice reverence for difference.
We practice listening for the whole — the voice of life itself, which speaks through each of us differently.
Council will not solve our conflicts, but it may rehumanize them. It reminds us that before we can heal the earth, or our societies, we must first remember how to sit together — as people, as kin, as parts of one living world.
At Vanaprastha, council is both foundation and compass — a way of walking and witnessing together that invites humility, truth, and belonging.
