This great unknown that we often fear…Is the “unknown” actually just the heart? Is it a place beyond control and the mind? Beyond a sense of separation? Might this fear of the unknown actually be a fear of unity?
There is a secret teaching passed down by the ages, shared universally by masters who’ve gone before us and shared their inner wisdom. This one simple secret is at the core of spiritual teachings throughout time and space: listen to your heart.
In our search for happiness, we can tend to make life so complicated, placing much attention on the next “thing” that will get us there. This “pursuit of happiness” has a huge shadow side in its tendency to over-complicate the simple wisdom available to us about 18 inches below our head.
In our pursuit of happiness, we may often find its opposite, sadness or depression, if the search is an external pursuit or if we are seeking happiness with a faulty compass. A healthy, heart-based compass is our capacity for discernment.
Because of our faulty, mind-based compass, we may fall into the trap of pursuing elusive emotional states that can be quite dependent on particular conditions being met. You see that’s just it, it’s conditional. These conditions we often dream up are only conditional to our minds in their attempt to understand discernment and this path of following the heart’s unconditional nature.
The heart, on the other hand, doesn’t judge. It loves! In the heart, there is clarity, acceptance, embrace. There isn’t understanding. There is inner-standing.
Listening to the heart is practically a common cliché at this point. Really? That’s it. I just follow my heart?” says the mind? “What does that even look like?”
In my experience so far deepening into this secret, I’d say it depends on from what place you are answering that question. Again, it depends on your discernment.
So what exactly is discernment? The dictionary says it is an “acuteness of judgment and understanding”. No wonder we’re often so mixed up! This isn’t the discernment I’m talking about. True discernment, the truly essential, helpful, life-changing kind, is not of the mind, judgment, or understanding. In fact, it’s placing the heart before the mind. It’s operating in the heart foremost with the support of the mind as secondary.
Simply put, discernment is recognizing or hearing the voice of the heart from the voice of the mind. So what’s the big deal with living and embodying this? Why can’t that quality of being truly emerge on a more regular basis? What makes us give up this natural proclivity, like a child unwavering from wonder in the presence of everything?
Many of us have truly remarkable experiences when we’ve touched into that timeless flow state. Then we go back to the “real world”. A kind of hopelessness can even be part of our experience if we sink into the objective stance of the “real world” that tends to minimize the magic of the heart and love. And “real-world thinking”, where there is a separation from our dreams and practical lives tends to fall short of doing one thing: listening.
When we don’t listen to the heart, we can’t really shift our belief in its sacred power. There’s just too much static and noise in our minds…too many layers of protection around our hearts.
But this truth remains. Can you really allow yourself to believe it? And if you did, what would you do each day to listen a bit deeper? What would it take for you to begin to trust this listening? What would it take to believe in your heart’s wisdom and guidance? Can you really surrender your mind over to your heart?
This awesome transformative skill of listening to the heart goes beyond the societal programming to incessantly worry about life. It creates a life-giving resonance.
The mind will still whisper faint echoes of the buy-in from our old limited self operating primarily from ego and the mind thinks it has: “certainty”. You see this mind thinks it can have security by knowing exactly how to handle itself, by over-preparing for what to say next, what to do, what to think just to stay safe, just to survive.
But the heart’s intelligence is intuitive—directly perceiving truth outside of “content”, and through frequency. It may actually feel counter-intuitive to operate from this level of uncertainty if you’ve been operating primarily in your mind. Being in the United States for most of my life, I can say that this has been my case.
But oooo the inflection into this new place feels soooo good! There is such delight! And it makes the limited self (ego) uncomfortable! And this is the heart-art: to make the limited, thinking, ego self uncomfortable, because a bigger, unlimited, spiritual self (in-spiration) is chalked full of possibilities, luminous possibilities, you could say, for finding an illuminated, radiant frequency really worth rooting life in.
The light pouring forth from our being, when we’re fully inspirited, inspired, lit up, radiant, and fully present to the power of love, emanates from the heart, not the mind. And this resonance is on a higher plane than the mind, connecting us to each other, to the world around us. It’s what allows us to enter the heart of another and listen to it (empathy & Christ Consciousness: knowing another as one’s self). It is the art of sitting in council with one another to listen and build a coherent field of synergy operating as a transcendent harmonizing self-organizing force of order. In this synergistic place, there is no telling what creative intelligence will emerge, and that’s the beauty of surrendering to a lack of certainty, to the unknown, to fear initially, if the mind has secured itself so comfortably in one’s self as the primary operating system’s control.
We need to listen to each other. We need to listen to our hearts. Without listening deeply, we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t trust each other. And we certainly don’t trust our power, this sacred power within us that is the frequency of love itself. Without this love resonance, we enter into dissonance, and the misanthropic discord of hearing heaviness in our wound, disconnected from the mysterious purpose of the present moment unfolding before us.
Beyond the worry, anxiety, and discord over a fear-addicted ego consciousness consumed by pessimism, is simply the frequency of love, which dissolves and digests this darkness through its purifying energy.
Our human experience is art itself. It is light or energy woven poetically and beautifully in symphony with all of existence. And the resonance it puts out is life-giving and generative. It is a guiding force for the magic of life to show up, and synchronicity is the positive feedback mechanism that we are in alignment with this intelligence of the heart. When synchronicity shows up, you know you are embodying your sacred power, your union with all, your divine essence because the personal energetic field of the heart plugs into the universal heart, which has longings beyond what we may be able to personally imagine for ourselves.
This is the shift…the shift into a higher purpose of embracing divine desire in a creative unfolding of this now-moment where rhythm and harmony weave together. And one simple word captures it all: listen.
