Listening to the Heart

You listen to the Heart with something other than your ears. You listen with your awareness. What are you aware of now? You listen for (pay attention to) what is present now and arising now in the moment. You give your attention to what is, which may include a thought, but you don’t give your attention away to that thought. You notice it and then you notice what else is present. The Heart will communicate to you in this moment. What it has to say will be already present in the moment or arising in the moment. If you are busy thinking, you will miss its subtle, nonverbal communication because your attention will be elsewhere.

Compared to thoughts, the Heart communicates softly and unobtrusively. It doesn’t shout at you to get your attention. It doesn’t scare you or bully you or flatter you to get your attention. It just speaks the truth, and when you hear its truth, you know it because it rings true. But often, what it says gets lost in the noise of the mind. You experience it, not as words, but as energy: You sense your energy expanding, which feels joyful; you feel spontaneously moved to do something, which feels exciting; or you feel a sudden ah-ha, and some understanding or knowing clicks into place.

All of these subtle sensations and inner experiences are easy for the mind to discount and dismiss, but they are the secret to your happiness and fulfillment. They are the key that can free you from the unhappiness of the ego and open up a world of fulfillment and contentment. These subtle, simple, seemingly insignificant sensations are more important than any thought, desire, fantasy, or dream in bringing you the happiness you long for.

The trick is that you have to be listening for these sensations and inner experiences, and once you catch them, you have to be true to them. Catching them is not so easy because there are so many distractions, not just thoughts, but activities, responsibilities, and other people’s voices and opinions.

Anything can easily take you away from noticing what is most important to your happiness, so you have to commit yourself to paying attention to this more subtle side of life. If you don’t, you will automatically return to paying attention to your thoughts and the thoughts of others because that’s what you are programmed to do. To find happiness, you have to go against the programming that causes you to pay attention to the mind and pay attention to something else instead, something that isn’t as easy to hear as the mind.

Commitment to listening to the Heart is crucial. Getting good at picking up the Heart’s communications takes practice, so first you have to commit to practicing this. To make this commitment, you have to be convinced that it’s worth it. Not everyone is ready to see this. But at some point in your evolution, you do clearly see that the egoic mind is the imposter self, and that it doesn’t know anything about how to be happy. You not only want to stop the suffering caused by the egoic mind but you want to experience the Truth. If you really want the Truth more than you want your thoughts, desires, self image, opinions, fears, fantasies, memories, and dreams, then you will be willing to look—really look—at what else is present here. What is it that has been living your life? Who are you?

When you really look, you see that you are not as tangible as you thought. Who you are is more subtle than thought and certainly more subtle than your body. Who you are is more of an experience, or an experiencing of life, than a thing. You are the subtle experience of no-thingness, the experience of awareness of all thing-ness. You are the listening and the Heart. It turns out that the Heart and listening are the same thing. The Heart, itself, is not a thing, but really awareness of every thing. This Awareness is intelligent, but it’s not a thing or a being that is separate from what it is aware of. The egoic mind paints a picture of separation that isn’t true. It creates the illusion of separation and perpetuates it with thought. Without thought, there is only oneness, and this Oneness is Aware but it is not a thing.

This Awareness—your Heart—knows exactly what will fulfill you in this lifetime, and what will fulfill you in this lifetime is not the same thing as what will fulfill someone else or what fulfilled you in another lifetime. What will fulfill you in this lifetime is entirely unique from any other experience you have ever had or will ever have. So, you can’t look to the mind or to others to tell you what will fulfill you. Only you know, or rather, only your Heart knows. n