The guides have been poking me to shift things slightly, with more gentle feminine forms of allowing, inviting, and encouraging and less of the sacred masculine of action. I’m practicing pausing and listening more before each task or email, and to listen to each moment of my life like I do with my clients. When I’m in session with a client I’m listening on so many different levels: emotionally, mentally, energetically, spiritually, and physically. I’m practicing the type of listening deeply that I want to do every day of my life.
What is deep listening?
Listening deeply is more than just the auditory sense of listening. It is more than just being present with your mind. Listening deeply involves a full body experience where you are present on every level of the Centered Wellness Framework and each of the 5 wellness bodies. Deep listening is something that we can do with other people, but more importantly, it is a practice for yourself first and foremost.
When you listen deeply, you are listening to your body and the messages provided. These can show up in lots of different ways. It could be the pain in your side, the heaviness in your chest or the lightness throughout your body. When you notice there is a sinking in your stomach, listening deeply is about seeing what message that sensation has for you. This could be emotional, energetic, and can be connected to thoughts and beliefs that we have.
These thoughts can be our own or could be passed down from ancestral beliefs, or past lives. Listening deeply is listening to what is needed in this moment in any of the wellness bodies. Typically we tend to pay more attention to the physical one first. We get sick, there’s an illness, and usually there isn’t a medical explanation for it. Sometimes this listening deeply is also about what the body needs: movement, more vegetables, less inflammatory foods. We can listen to the body on all levels, and that listening offers opportunities for healing, health and wellness.
Listening deeply also happens through the spirit world, and it includes listening to what our guides, angels, and compassionate helpers have to offer us. This listening deeply is not something that is supported in our society unless it is through traditional religion. Even then, most of us were taught to sit in prayer to god. Prayer is wonderful and beautiful; and i was taught that prayer is talking to god, and meditation is listening to god. The space to hear what life or the guides have to tell us. We are sovereign beings that can choose what we want AND there is a divine support team waiting to be asked for help. Listening deeply to the universe, goddess, guides, spirit, trees, animals, and all of the guides in the world is one of the ways we can cultivate wellness and health.
And to tie those together, often the messages from the guides are fielded through the body. It’s like a radio tower or antenna that receives messages from the guides. We have messages we can receive through the body that are from all of the different wellness bodies, or sometimes we receive them out in the world. A post on Facebook. A text. A feather you see on your walk. These are all ways to listen deeply
So how do you listen deeply? How do you cultivate this availability to show up and listen in a way that you haven’t listened before? In my experience, listening deeply is cultivated through space and time. When we find space between the thoughts such as in mindfulness and meditation, or yoga, then we have space for our bodies or our guides to listen to us.
When you create time for yourself, there is space available to hear the messages that are being shared with us. Time to listen to your body or time to rest, time to listen to what you need. The space is created in the time. When you make time, you are clearing away something off your calendar or your to-do list and there is this beautiful creation of space that occurs.
You can begin to do this by just pausing one more moment in bed and asking what you need to know. Or before you send the email, just ask your body if this is what you need to do right now. Cultivating stillness is one of the best ways. My suggestion is to start a practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is like the absence of rocks being thrown in a pond- when you stop throwing pebbles in a pond, the ripples stop and the surface becomes clear. Mindfulness is like keeping the pebbles from being thrown so the mind can be clear. Start with 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation. Or sitting with the trees to ask what you need to know. There are so many ways to create space and time. Look at what you already do, and pair it with that. Maybe it is one minute before you get on your phone in the morning. Or one minute before bed at night. Make it simple and available to yourself- you can’t start an hour of listening deeply if you’ve never listened deeply before!
Now for some of you, that might be terrible and scary at first. You are not used to space or time for yourself and there may be all sorts of thoughts or emotions about what it means to have space and time for yourself. It might seem selfish or that you have to DO something. And that’s ok. That’s part of listening deeply. See if you can bring compassionate curiosity to the experience. Ask yourself what sensations in the body, emotions and thoughts arise. BE with the part of you that that has resistance or sadness come up. That IS listening deeply.
Listening deeply is a profound way to begin to get unstuck, heal your body, and be full of health and energy. It’s a foundational practice and I hope you make the time and space to practice for yourself today.
