Open and honest communication is a cornerstone of any healthy relationship, but effective communication can only take place if both partners are able hear what the other is saying. Effective hearing goes far deeper than listening to the words that others utter. We need to be able to hear the needs and feelings behind the words if we want to connect with our partners at a meaningful level.
In fact, when it comes to listening, there are a number of important questions you should be asking yourself during any conversations. These include:
- What is the speaker feeling?
- What is the speaker wanting?
- What is the speaker needing?
- What is the speaker fearing?
The answers to some of these may not be so easy to discern. We don’t always share our feelings directly when we speak with someone. You can, however, determine what the speaker is feeling even if it isn’t obvious from what they are saying by allowing yourself to feel their emotions. Identifying a person’s memes may also help you to answer those questions. When you know these things, you will be better able to understand somebody and feeling understood is essentially to feel loved or to feel cared for.
When you are able to answer the questions I've listed above, you are listening with your heart. As a heart listener, it’s important to remember that the more we understand one another, the less we fear in ourselves and in others. The less we fear, the more we trust and the more we trust, the more our hearts open to others. This is the fabric of life. Feeling loved and trusted is what makes life worth living. It may not happen very often, but we should be able to open our hearts to love and to trust ourselves and know that other people, no matter what behavior they are displaying or how they are speaking and communicating, listening or not listening, are all after the same thing. They are after love. All people are doing their best to be loved. When you listen with our hearts, you’ll be much more capable of understanding those around you and being present with them. Even if the resulting interactions don’t turn out favorably for you, you’ll be in a position to understand the motives behind their behavior.
The goal with heart listening is to listen to understand. While practicing heart listening you may not agree the other person, but until you can understand the other person you can never come to know if you could possibly agree in whole or in part. It is this inability to listen with the heart and to come to a mutual understanding which is the primary means by which we create fear. With all the conflict in the world, now more than ever we need heart listeners.
But just what is heart listening? Heart listening is a method of listening that opens us up to dialogue. Dialogue is much more effective than discussion. The word “dialogue” comes from the roots “dia” which means “through” in Greek, and “logos” which means “word.” So “dialogue” literally means words flowing through. Dialogue encourages open-ended exploration and in such explorations we are less likely to entice judgment. At the root of many couple’s difficulties are emotions such as fear, shame and guilt. The crucial detail than many couples miss is that that those emotions are most often the result of telling someone what they want to hear, rather than what they need to share. When you make someone feel guilty or shameful, it’s very likely that they’re going to succumb to the pressure that you’re putting on them. You may tell someone exactly what he or she want to hear just to get them off of your back, but that doesn’t mean that the problem has been resolved. It’s only when we open up to each other through dialogue and let the words flow through the heart to be honest and non-judgmental that we have a chance of effective communication.
While heart listening focuses on emotions and feeling, soul listening is attending to the sum of one’s values, life purpose and direction. When it comes to soul listening, it’s important that we are alone enough to commune with our own soul. If we truly become present with what we are as an individual, it’s almost impossible to become a soul listener and equally impossible to understand anyone else at the level of their soul. When soul listening, listen carefully for changes in direction in life. Often events in people’s lives are part of their soul path, yet most people fear such changes even when they’re needed. There will be times for example when you’re listening to someone close to you that is on the verge of a divorce or quitting a job and these are soul decisions. There have been many times when I’ve listened to people who were been diagnosed with terminal cancer or some other sort of a disease. I look at their body, I look at their memes, and I listen to their heart. What are they wanting? What are they feeling? What are they needing? But most importantly, I try to see which direction it is that the events in their life are trying to take them. Who are they? What is their legacy? What decisions in their life lead them to where they are? How are their values guiding them now (if at all)? In my clients’ cases, no deep, genuine healing can take place until the both of us has met at this level. Apart from healing, in any relationship where there is soul listening, there is true, open and honest communication.
Soul connections can be made from any location in this universe. In space, all things are connected. The more you study physics and metaphysics, the clearer this fact becomes. Anybody that’s ever become skilled at meditation, has studied shamanism or worked with a shaman will know this. In fact, anyone that has felt a moment of serendipity – you wish that you could talk to somebody and the phone rings and the person is on the other line – has had experiences that are direct consequence of the fact that there is no distance between us. Quantum physics shows us that our reality is constituted of an endless series of relationships, and those relationships are observer dependant. When you are able to go behind someone’s programming to be present with someone’s soul, you are able to get to his or her highest truth. When you can learn to connect with somebody at the soul level, you’re actually able to go to a level of truth that often times sadly they themselves have not recognized. The more programmed somebody is, the less likely they are to be in touch with their soul truth. It is a very high form of evolution to be able to listen to somebody at the level of their soul and it is my dream that you will nourish yourself to the level that you are capable of being present with the soul of those that you’re conversing with.