How To Listen To Your Heart

Living from our hearts is mysterious at the best of times. How do we listen deeply when our conditioning and fear is so loud and the world seems to be in constant chaos? Listening deeply is a choice in support of activism because it requires some kind of ethical code and trust in our own intent. In this meditation, I explore some of the somatic, mental, emotional, and spiritual sensations of listening to the heart.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

The following is a guided meditation by René Sills,

A somatic movement educator,

Energy worker and astrologer.

This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.

If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,

Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.

Please also note that the content of these meditations sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,

And sometimes guided visualizations.

You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.

If any of the guidance René offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,

Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.

These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.

We hope you enjoy.

Hello everyone.

Thanks for joining me.

This is René and I'm happy to offer you a somatic meditation today on listening to your heart.

Listening to one's heart is something that we hear about a lot.

It's an intention that many of us have and also a question.

How we listen to our hearts can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

The microphone I'm using right now is positioned over my heart.

One way of listening to our hearts is to actually tune into the organ.

So let's start there in the most basic and in some ways most easily attainable space.

Close your eyes and let your attention move away from whatever objects in the external world and that includes times and places and people,

Things that you might have to do.

And as your attention recedes,

Allow your eyes and your ears and your nose and your mouth and your skin to soften.

Feel that you can draw your senses away from whatever they've been attached to,

Whatever stories they've been telling you about the world around.

And then notice how your senses being less attached,

Kind of create an open field of awareness and sounds can come in and out.

You might feel your breath moving across your skin as your lungs expand and contract.

And light might dance across your eyelids or you might see colors and shapes.

But there is no need to move towards the story or the names of those things.

See if you can hear your own heartbeat.

You can hear your body through your felt sense as well as through your ears.

You might hear your heartbeat reflected back to you through sound.

You might feel your pulse.

You might sense a subtle vibration through all of your cells as your blood gets pumped and drawn back in.

Your heart is an amazing network that includes your arteries and your veins as well.

It's a closed but continuous system.

You might imagine how throughout your body spiraling from this organ right at the center in front of your spine.

There's movement out and movement back in.

Notice if you can feel the way your heart accepts blood back,

The venous pool,

As well as the arterial pump.

Can you soften around your sternum,

In between your lungs,

Below your throat,

Above and a little bit in front of your stomach,

In front of your spine?

In order to listen to our hearts,

It's important that we can trust what we hear.

In this way,

Listening to our hearts becomes an ethical practice.

When we continue to make choices that we know we've really put our best intent into,

Then we feel that we can trust our own choices and our own intent.

And until we get to that point,

It's very easy to push past our own intuition and to misjudge the intent of others in such a way that we can contribute to making dramatic situations that are pretty unnecessary between people.

I think that a very important part of a non-violent choice in life is noticing the places where we're violent to begin,

The ways that we might subtly put out aggressive or defensive energy.

And I've certainly felt this for myself in mistrusting the intent of others.

And that leads to a guardedness around my heart,

Literally and emotionally.

So now just check back in with your heart space.

And again,

One of the most immediate pathways is through the physical space,

Through this pulsation and movement of blood and air.

When you allow yourself to attune to that movement and pay attention to the environment in a really open way,

You might sense how you're one with the nature or space around you,

That literally you are breathing it in and it is becoming the energy of your awakeness,

The thing that your cells need to be alive and to be present in this time and in this space.

The root word of respiration you might know from the French,

Inspir,

And of course inspiration or spire,

The Latin word,

Is the root of spirit.

The feeling of being in your heart has a lot to do with the feeling of being inspired.

There has to be some reason to breathe in and some reason to breathe out.

And so often we reach out of ourselves for inspiration.

We perceive that other people are more inspired or more creative.

We put it on a label and think that it would look a certain way.

But anything in your life can be a work of art and you can be inspired in your creativity in the way that you arrange your room and home,

In the way that you cultivate your relationships,

In the way that you foster the growth of your own mind.

Recognizing that you're an artist is one way you might think of being able to trust your own heart.

That whenever something is truly inspiring,

There is a feeling of expansion,

A willingness to learn,

And total joy,

Even if it's frightening and even if it's challenging.

Inspiration can come through all forms.

Think back right now on a time in your life that you really felt inspired.

Inspired to love something,

To try something.

Inspired somehow to express.

In the feeling of inspiration,

There seems to be the spirit of collaboration.

And I think that might be akin to what could be called the beginner's mind.

That competition isn't really part of the equation.

There might be a desire to grow and a will force that seeks to evolve.

But there's not comparison to other people.

There's excitement.

There might be the instinct to draw them in,

To let them in on the joke,

Or invite them to be part of something.

Other people can feel very inspiring to be around or inspired and can evoke a sense of longing in you.

But the difference between true inspiration and competitiveness would be this feeling of expansion.

And competitiveness is one kind of a malintent.

Not really trusting one's own intent or someone else's.

A desire to be better than.

See if you can feel into your heart for a time when you've collaborated.

When you've really felt someone as your equal.

When you've honestly loved for the sake of loving and not to gain anything or to relieve anything.

Listening to our hearts takes a lot of courage.

Generally our hearts don't know what's right or wrong until the moment that it's happening.

So let yourself attune again just to the present.

And notice what's happening right now.

This breath.

This heartbeat.

And while you keep an open field of awareness,

Your senses and sense organs,

Soft but wide.

Notice if you can feel your heart at the same time.

Listening to our hearts on some level requires learning to perceive without attachment.

Learning to hear the words that might come out of someone's mouth and love them anyway.

To recognize that our perception of others behavior can never really understand the truth of another's experience.

And that willingness to be in an open field of perception without grabbing on to a sensation or a story.

Is what we need in order to trust.

We carry within us so many reasons to not trust.

All of them things that we're capable of.

And of course in relationships we observe qualities that remind us of ourselves and of our own capacity to hurt and be hurtful.

And so often we misjudge the intent of others because we're really just seeing ourselves.

We're seeing the parts of ourselves that we're afraid to see.

So now think of a time in your life when you accepted someone or maybe when you felt accepted for who you were.

When you accepted them for who they were.

When you felt the understanding that no one was perfect.

That pain happens.

And that the love was there all the time.

To me listening to my heart feels like freedom.

And just like freedom it's slippery and isn't something to grasp on to.

That's the thing about freedom is you can't grip it otherwise it's not free.

Freedom is the willingness to let go.

It's also the courage to receive.

And you feel around or look around at your life right now and let in all of it.

Recognizing that there have been plenty of hurts but also plenty of love,

Friendship,

Opportunity.

Letting ourselves to receive or allowing myself to receive feels like letting the world in.

There's a recognition that everyone's going through their own thing.

And no one's better,

No one's worse.

When we get given what we're given to work with we can see very clearly that people who are given a lot of material wealth have just as much struggle and pain and just as much dysfunction as people who don't.

We can see very clearly the impact of kindness,

Of acceptance,

Of collaboration.

It's almost immediate.

When you see communities who've adopted attitudes of trust towards one another there's resolution.

And it's not so much trying to figure out how people will get along as a basic understanding that there's love.

There's the opportunity to feel each other and to appreciate what's there.

Can you feel into yourself a memory of a time when someone was just overwhelmingly generous with you?

And that might have been something material that they gave but likely it was attention or kindness,

Patience.

Can you scan back through maybe just the last week of your life and accept that any kindness that you've been shown was completely worth it?

You can receive that.

Can you accept that the mal-intent or mis-intent that you've perceived may or may not have been true?

That there is absolutely no knowing what the intention of anyone who hurt you was?

And can you feel inside to a place where you can sense your own intent?

And the thing is is that if you intend hurtfulness on some level you'll feel it.

And hurtfulness can come out as stinginess,

As revenge,

As competitiveness,

As manipulation,

As neediness.

Can you feel the ways that you don't align?

And then can you remember and feel the ways that you do?

This is learning to sense the internal difference of being centered in our hearts or being out of center,

Out of alignment.

And trust that when you feel it you're no different than anybody else,

That we're all struggling,

Really day by day,

Minute by minute,

To be good people in the world.

That there's so much mistrust and mal-intent in all of us.

And I think that part of being able to listen to our hearts is being able to listen when we're not in our hearts and to hear it,

To recognize that there are shadowy places and that's okay.

It's the same feeling as when you decide that you can love someone even though they're faulted.

Can you feel that to yourself?

So check back in now and feel your heart space.

Feel the way that your blood circles out and spirals through all of your tissues and cells.

Feel the way your blood is linked to your breath,

Your inhales and your exhales.

The inspiration of life channeling through all the spaces and the trees and the other bodies into your body and out.

The mortal wound is to think that we're separate and that our experiences are somehow unique,

Maybe special but potentially very shameful.

Something to hide.

It's important now that we all practice listening to our hearts.

There's a lot of fear in the world.

There's so much depression.

There's so much to feel.

It can be very,

Very overwhelming to be alive right now and yet it can also be very simple.

I hope that you can bring it into your practice,

This heart listening experiment as you head out into the world and the next time you find yourself in conflict with somebody you might try taking your ears away from the words coming out of their mouth and tuning in with your heart to theirs.

It may or may not make any difference in action and it might make a profound difference in essence inside of you.

So thank you for being here and thank you for enjoying and using these meditations.

I hope that they are helpful for you.

Much love to all of you everywhere and until next time.

Reviews

This was really beautiful. Such a soothing voice and so very good for my heart. Thank-you Renee for sharing

Very soothing. Many thanks 🙏

I love it, very authentic and insightful. I could really drop in the heart fild of embracing what is. Thank you

Great Insight! As the meditation finished I began to hear Rod Stewart sing "My Heart (I don't want to talk about it)". Showing my age perhaps but it was lovely.

I just lost a co-worker and a friend unexpectedly from cancer...he was very giving and a very funny person. Thanks for this beautiful meditation❤️