Listening to Our Hearts

I've spent the last ten days in a coaching retreat (Academy of Leadership Coaching & NLP) and have learned many, many new skills and tools to help me be a better listener and coach, which is exactly what I expected to learn.

What I wasn't expecting was for it to break my heart wide open in the most wonderful way.

For the biggest lesson I've learned (or relearned, or reawakened to, or been reunited with), is the lesson of love and of truly seeing another person in all of their wisdom, all of their perfection, all of their innate knowing of themselves.

Each of us possesses all the knowledge, all the wisdom, all the answers we need. Inside. Just waiting for us to release them. We get conditioned, by our experiences, by our teachers, by our parents, by our successes and failures, to see things in a certain way, to filter our view of the world by those experiences, in order to help keep ourselves safe, or free from pain, or hidden, in order to play by the certain set of rules that have been set forth in our life as we see them.

But there actually aren't any rules but the ones we make for ourselves. For reals. I mean it. We. Make. All. Our. Own. Rules. We base them on whatever our deepest motivators are - safety, fear, a desire to be liked, a desire to be rich, a desire not to get hurt, a need to be loved. All of the things for which we continually course correct, to keep ourselves in check with inside forces.

We are so much more powerful than anyone or anything outside of ourselves. And we forget that. We forget over and over again, although there are little sparks here and there of remembering, throughout our lives. We hear that little quiet voice of wisdom come in and out of our hearts, but often we dismiss it for the louder voice in our head - the ego voice which tends to take over, yelling at us about this and that way to stay safe, to be practical, to think ahead and to think with our head, not our heart.

We all have that little inner-heart voice. We can all learn to listen to it, for it absolutely knows what we want and what we need, and it will keep telling us. It's just up to us to get quiet and listen, and when we do listen to it, incredible things happen: we realize our strength, we step into ourselves, we become more and more of who we are in our hearts, and when we do that, the possibilities are infinite.

There are so many books and so many speakers who offer us the answers to success, to how to get there, what to learn, what to practice, how to structure our days and lives to be successful. But the answer is nowhere out there. It is always and absolutely inside, and we know what it is. All of us, even those of us who might claim we don't know what to do, or what it is we want, or how to solve a problem we have in our life, or why we do things the way we do them. We do know, and if we are willing to listen, to be open, to be honest with ourselves, the answers are right there.

That part, that being honest with ourselves part, may be the hardest part. It may wake us up to our lives in a way that forces us to see the things that need to change - maybe even things we love - but things that need to change for us to be who we are really here to be.

That honesty is also the key to great joy and deep, lasting happiness. Far deeper than any spouse, lover, friend, car, home, vacation, can give us. They can certainly add great joy, but they cannot bring us to our hearts, we must do that ourselves. We must practice listening to our hearts. If we are brave enough to tap into the honesty and the truth of our hearts, it is the wellspring of everything that is possible in this world. It is the wellspring of deep, deep love and peace. It is the wellspring where we are finally at home.