Listen to Your Heart

Heart-Speak

“Following all the rules leaves a completed checklist. Following your heart achieves a completed you.”
Ray Davis

Which gets the last word with you—your heart or your head? All of us start out young and impressionable; we often follow a path chosen by our parents. They aren’t bad people. They love us and want us to be ‘successful’ in life. Most parents think they know what is best for their children, and most children think their parents know what is best, too. Unfortunately, we make life altering decisions when we are too young to know ourselves. I can’t tell you how many people I know who went to law school or to medical school because it was expected, or because one of their parents wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer and couldn’t. Now they yearn to step to a different drummer. They feel stuck. So much money has been spent on that post-grad education; too many people have a stake in their keeping to the family plan.

Here’s the deal: it’s just as important to listen to your heart as it is to listen to your head (or your parents). The head has an agenda (and so do the parents); it tells you what ‘you should’ do. There’s nothing wrong with having a good, sensible head. But, it doesn’t leave an opening for the mysterious or the serendipitous occurrences that may lead to a life spent loving every day. The heart is a good guide for leading us where the soul needs to go. Just like Luke Skywalker, we all have a destiny, and sometimes the head gets in the way.

The language of the heart is different. It doesn’t say emphatically, ‘you should do this’ or ‘in order to make enough money, you need to do that.’ Instead, it speaks the language of yearning, of sighing, of delight, and surprise. It says, ‘oh, yes, I love doing this,’ and ‘I feel so good when I’m doing this.’ It speaks of joy and satisfaction; the wisdom of the soul pushing through the ordinary. The heart has its own intelligence. It is wise to cultivate the art of listening to its guidance.

In the spirit,
Jane