Listening from The Heart is about presence. It is about being allowed. We don’t have to approve to be present. We don’t have to agree to be present. All we have to ‘do’ is experience. Be allowed to experience fully what is, and nothing more. Though there is really no doing in that at all.

Pause right here and right now and allow yourself to be present. Your body is sensing, your mind is cognizing and behind it all you are present. From this place, if you heard a disrespectful remark of a co-worker, if the person you love did that annoying thing, you would still love. For that matter, if one part of you felt or thought something that another part of you disapproved of, you would still be able to be still and love. You would be present even though your ego’s automation reacted on its own. And it does. It does more than what we know. And yet behind it, we are present. We just don’t always remember we are present.

Awakening to the wisdom of the heart is about remembering who you are. It is about continuously remembering we are present. It is also about facing the fundamental ways in which we experience the world and questioning those beliefs. This is why the path of awakening is called the path of the warrior by some traditions. We question the very premise of who we are and by doing so leave nothing for the ego to hold on to. Until finally the ego realizes it was made up of the things it held on to and by letting go one final time we find there is nobody left standing to hold on to anything.

And yet here we all are. All yearning for something; longing for something. And what is this place if not a place of peace? A place where the heart speaks to the heart and the heart sees the heart. Ironically, we are all chasing after a place of rest - a place where thoughts and emotions don’t haunt us - a place that allows, a place of acceptance. What we find ourselves doing in effect is not-accepting where we are in order to find a place of acceptance.

The language of The Heart is the language of acceptance. Not an acceptance that is resigned to a life of unhappiness but a wise acceptance that knows that when something has happened, it has happened. It knows that there is no changing the past. Once an emotion is experienced in the conscious mind it has already happened, stopping its flow simply leads to congestion. It knows that once an event has happened it has happened but that what is important is who we are.

We are all seeking the wisdom of The Heart. This is the wisdom that tells us that it is not in our resistance to unpleasant emotions and situation that we find liberation it is in our acknowledging of them and allowing them that we find freedom. By shedding light on these places the tension and resistance dissipate and with it dissipates our anxiety and inability to be our selves in our purity. And by allowing ourselves to be, we find we are able to allow the same of others. And viola – peace.

But how do we get there?

• In the Footsteps of Masters, by Yonatan Hoffman

• Kahlil Gibran on Love
• The Kybalion, a Hermetic treatise on the nature of existence.
• Elements of the Qabala by Elifas Levi
• The Corpus Hermeticum
• On the Major Arcana of the Tarot