Seeking Your Heart’s Guidance

Seeking Your Heart’s Guidance

A simple but powerful exercise to help you hear your heart’s guidance. 

Your heart is here to guide you to your best life. Not the easiest, but the best. The fullest expression of you. The richest, most beautiful, rewarding life.

Your heart has answers your mind could never devise. Astonishing in their wisdom, rightness and simplicity.

But how do you hear the voice of your heart? How do you access that guidance?

Here is a process to cultivate connection to the wisdom of heart.

1) Set the scene

Find a place and time where you will not be disturbed. Turn off your phone (really) and close your computer. Have a notebook and pen or pencil. Light a candle or sit somewhere beautiful in nature.

2) Open the flow

This step is preparation, to get your controlling mind out of the way, to open inside. You aren’t yet seeking any guidance. You are clearing the channels to receive guidance.

Grant yourself full permission to write anything at all without judging, doubting, or expecting anything of it. Write for two full pages without pausing to think or edit, starting from the words “In this moment…”.

Write whatever comes, whatever you think, feel, notice around you or in you. Just keep the pen moving the whole time, without pausing, even if you think it is nonsense.

3) Make a request

writing heart's guidanceNow, write a short paragraph to your heart, asking for its guidance and promising to listen.

You may ask about a specific challenge or situation, or you might just ask, “Oh my heart, what do I need to know, be, or do now?” or something general like “How can I live a more joyful life?”

Make a promise to set aside doubt, second-guessing, or your mind trying to figure things out and control the process.

4) Write your heart’s guidance

Drawing on the feeling of freewriting that you did in step 2, simply relax and let the pen flow, writing whatever answers seem to come from your heart.

Keep your promise to yourself not to judge, doubt, second-guess, analyze or edit the answers while you write. That will stop the flow. You can use your wisdom later to discern what feels right or to interpret it.

If your heart tells you anything you feel you cannot do or do not understand, ask follow-up questions. Express your feelings and concerns. Dialogue with your heart about them.

5) Take action

If it feels true and right—even if it also feels scary, hard or silly—follow your heart’s guidance, taking action on what you were told. Keep the faith with your heart by not ignoring its precious wisdom.

What steps will you take? What changes will you make? How will you act in accordance with the guidance you received?

Keeping the Channel Open

magical heart path

by JR Korpa on Unsplash

If you ask for guidance, receive it and then ignore it, you close down your connection to this most valuable inner resource. And your life will feel out of balance.

If, on the other hand, you learn to discern what your own heart voice sounds like, what it feels like when it is speaking to you, you will strengthen your access to this guide within.

Learn how your own heart speaks to you—which may be in images, sensations, impressions or emotions, more than words. Learn to trust and follow the guidance. See what happens as you do.

As you refine your ability to hear your true heart guidance, as you cultivate your deep trust in it, your willingness to follow it into the challenging, scary and wondrous places it is leading you, you will begin to create a life of extraordinary richness and beauty for yourself and for our world.

We want our souls to be fed in the heart’s great pool. Sit with your pen and wait. Sit. Listen. There, it is whispering. There, formless but real. Like wind.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy: Cultivating Intuition and A Return to Heart and also What I Know.

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Cultivating Intuition

Maxima in her studioI have been practicing honing my intuition, listening to it more, following it. Even if it’s something small. “Wear purple today,” it said, and I looked for my purple t-shirt among the stack of clean laundry in the basket, when I might have ignored that voice before as silly or irrelevant.

Sometimes what the voice says seems like nothing more than wishful thinking, or overly simplistic, or not what I want to hear. But, as my friend Cynthia so wisely reminded me, if we ignore the voice of our guidance, it gets quieter or ceases to speak to us at all.

So I’m practicing trusting it, tuning in to that often-fleeting, still, small voice within, that is here in each of us to guide us on our heart path. That voice is my rudder. Without it, I’m lost. Even if it sometimes errs, or I err in knowing recognizing the true voice of intuition versus some ego-inspired voice, I need my intuition, my heart guidance, and need to cultivate my relationship with it.

row boatsIn this culture we’re so fond of listening to our minds, which mostly preach to us of fear, habit and being “practical,” i.e. the safe and known. The mind voice is not going to lead us on the path of heart, a path full of risks, of mystery, of beauty, wonder, vulnerability, and ultimately deep joy and fulfillment.

“Be practical, be reasonable, be logical.” In my experience, while masquerading as good advice, these words serve to keep us small, limited and unhappy, following the status quo, to not believe in our dreams or ourselves or reach for the lives we long to live or the world we know is possible.

I have found that the heart always takes into account our needs and the needs of all beings. The heart is not hurtful or unkind to anyone. This is one of the ways you recognize it. The heart is not impractical, though what it advises at first blush sometimes may seem impossible or certainly scary to you; the heart doesn’t want you to starve, though it may tell you to quit your job because it sees the bigger picture. The heart may tell you to take the day off when you think you have too much to do, but it will also tell you when the time is right to get done all the truly does need to be done. The heart is infinitely wise in ways our limited, fearful minds can never be.

paththroughwoods_-studio-dekorasyonThe mind loves schemes and plans and strategies. The heart has a more innocent and direct approach. It simply knows the path to take in this moment. And it rarely reveals much beyond the immediate moment, our next step. Though we would love to see the long-distance plan and have assurances, the heart doesn’t offer us this information, it doesn’t tell us why it is telling us to do what it’s telling us to do. It doesn’t offer reasons. It asks us simply to follow and trust.

To learn to follow the voice of heart, you first have to learn its signature, what it sounds like, so that you can distinguish it from the voice of mind taking various disguises.

As you practice learning to hear the heart voice, pay attention. Follow it. Start by paying attention to the little promptings, the seemingly insignificant, harmless urgings, “Turn left here, go a different way home,” or while in the supermarket the sudden feeling to buy a certain fruit or vegetable, or the urge to call someone you know that perhaps you haven’t spoken to in months or years. Follow these in the moment, as best you can. Trust the little yes and no, when you don’t know why but you feel to do or not do something that perhaps goes against your habit or thought.

Experiment, keep an open mind, and learn from your experiments. That is the beginning of wisdom.

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