How to Listen With Your Heart

by

Flo Li

"The first duty of love is to listen." -- Paul Tillich

Love is tricky. Without communication, love is not sustainable. A huge part of communication is the ability, willingness and the act of listening. How you truly listen to your partner determines the depth of your conversation and the meaningfulness of your communication. There are two major ways to listen -- one is with your head, another is with your heart.

Listening with your head requires little concentration, awareness, or compassion. It is a mechanical process that most of us have mastered quite nicely. You simply listen to the words been spoken, pay little attention to tonality or body language, but you do pay a lot of attention to your internal dialogue that formulates what you will say next. The conversation becomes a ping pong game with great technicality but lacks soul.

Listening with your heart requires more focus, sympathy, and love. It is an artistic process that only the gifted few have charismatically obtained. Throughout history, the best leaders are those who truly sympathized with their troops. The most effective executives are the ones who understood their employees at a deeper level. The most intimate love relationships are the union formed between individuals who practiced heart centered listening.

Luckily for us, listening with your heart is a trained process. It simply takes practice to become more compassionate, charismatic, and loving. There are several steps you can follow to fine tune the art of listening with your heart.

1. Be glad. Start the conversation with the willingness to connect and appreciate the opportunity to connect.
2. Set your agenda aside when it is your time to listen. Your objective is to listen and to listen only. Clear your mind of what your agenda is and what you would like to gain from the conversation.
3. Listen to the words, sense the tonality behind the words, and watch the body language without a single ounce of judgment. Remember, there is no right or wrong in what might appear in front of you yet your own interpretation can make anything seem right or wrong.
4. Listen to the underlying message underneath the words by staying open. Your unconscious mind is able to pick up inferential statements which can often get clouded by the judgment of the conscious logical mind.
5. During a pause, do not jump in but take time to open your heart. By opening your heart, you are automatically connected to the other person while sympathy, love, and compassion are also expressed naturally.
6. Ask for clarification. If you do not understand something, ask for more explanation. Do not accuse of the other person for not being clear. It takes two to communication, so please take responsibility for yourself.
7. Most importantly, listen slowly. Listening with your heart requires your mind to slow down or stop in order to truly listen to another. It requires you to be more in your body and less in your head.

Practice listening with your heart as a healthy way of being. It will improve all of your relationships in a miraculous way. Remember, "the first duty of love is to listen."

About the author:

Flo Li http://floli.com/

During a physical death experience she touched the face of the infinite divine and gained spiritual freedom...Flo Li has a masters in Bioengineering and an MBA in entrepreneurship. Born a skeptic with a keen sense of scientific mind, she found herself waking up to the undeniable truth of Divine Love and Ancient Wisdom. A passionate speaker, she shares her crossing over experience and lessons learned through public talks and profound writing.