How to follow your heart
Contributor(s): Trudi Griffin, LPC, MS. Trudi Griffin is a licensed psychotherapist in Wisconsin, specializing in addictions and mental health. She provides therapy for people struggling with addictions, mental health issues, and the effects of trauma, both in health care settings and in private practice settings. She received her master’s degree in clinical psychology from Marquette University in 2011.
Number of sources used in this article: 14. You will find a list of them at the bottom of the page.
Number of views of this article: 7589.
Listening to your heart sometimes isn’t easy, especially if you live in a culture where everyone is busy and you have to work hard. But even though life tries to pull you in a thousand different directions, there are ways to carve out a nook for yourself. You can make an effort to live according to your heart’s desire. And that, in turn, will help you enjoy life and be more open to the people around you.
Make a list of what you would like to achieve. A wish list will help your heart choose your direction. Set goals that are achievable (not “become the first person on Mars” style). This list can serve as a great source of inspiration as you search for those meaningful events to which you will aspire. If the list is truly made from the heart, it will reflect some of your deepest desires and interests. [1] X Source of Information
Allocate time and space. To immerse yourself and hear your heart’s voice, you first need to find a time and a place to do so. It is important to sit quietly, without distractions, so that the voice of your heart can be heard. You can beautifully decorate a special place where you will come to be in silence. If you have a spare room in your house, light candles in it and create a cozy environment. [2] X Source of Information
- You can use the concentration technique, which is a great way to get in touch with your body. [4] X Source of Information Here’s how you can practice concentration:
- After clearing your inner space and looking inside yourself, pay attention to your body’s responses. Don’t try to analyze them, just observe them as if from the outside. For example, in response to a question about what is going on inside you, you may feel a heaviness in your chest. Observe it from the outside.
- Clearly record your sensations. It can be one word or a short phrase. For example, you might say “heaviness,” or “chest pressure,” or “tension.” Say different words until you notice that the word fits your feeling.
- Move from the word to the feeling and back again. Check and see how they interact. Notice if the sensations in your body change as you find the right name for them.
- Ask yourself where this feeling comes from. What in your life right now could be causing this heaviness in your chest? Don’t frantically search for answers, let them sort of surface on their own. It may not work the first time. You may need some practice, but this wonderful practice will help you open up to your own heart and to all that is going on inside of you.
- Meditate. Meditation has great benefits for both mental and physical health, such as lowering blood pressure and stress levels. [5] X Source of information Try just sitting for 10 minutes in a quiet place. Concentrate on one thing, like the vibrations of air going in and out of your nostrils, or an object, like a pencil. If your attention moves away from the object, gently focus on it again. [6] X Source of Information
- Lie in a warm bath. Relaxing in water has almost the same effect as relaxation techniques. It is a great opportunity to relax. During this time, you can reflect on your life, or just enjoy the silence and the feel of the warm water. [7] X Source of Information
- Have a cup of coffee with a friend. You may not be able to spend as much time with friends as you would like. Take advantage of this “to yourself” time to invite a close friend to have lunch or a cup of coffee with you.
- For example, if you like to read, schedule time in your diary to read. Ask friends to recommend good books for you. A collection of poems would work especially well.
- If you prefer to watch movies, watch some highly rated movie that will touch your heart strings.
- Another good opportunity is to spend time in nature. It will help you get a deeper taste of life and get in touch with your true self. [8] X Source of Information
- Somatic experiential therapy is somewhat like concentration in that you focus on your body rather than your thoughts and memories.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you identify your obsessive thoughts and beliefs that are keeping you from living in harmony with your heart.
- For example, you might say, “You know, I feel like I’m not living my life the way my heart wants me to right now. I need someone to talk to about it. Can you help me?”
- Ask yourself: “Do I really want this, or am I doing it for someone else and not for myself?”
- Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being generous and kind and doing something for other people. But you have to find the right balance so that when you help others, you stay true to yourself. Otherwise, no matter how good your intentions, you can easily “burn out” and lose touch with your own heart.
- Don’t confuse natural resistance and difficulty with this strong opposition. Sometimes we feel dissatisfaction, and that’s normal, even if you’re on the right track. If you’re not sure if you’re doing the right thing, try talking to someone you trust, like a close friend or a relative.
Clean and organize your personal space. You’ll be surprised at how much your environment affects your mood. For example, colors can have a strong influence on people’s feelings. [13] X Source of Information Make sure your home is clean and tidy. If you don’t like the color of the walls, repaint them. Decorate your room with some artwork that inspires you and gives you aesthetic pleasure. Place photos of people you care about near you. Such simple changes in your home can change the way you feel, too, and make it easier for you to realize your true desires. Clutter and sparse space can cause clutter in your mind, and this will limit your ability to hear your heart’s voice.
Listen only to yourself – 7 valuable psychologist tips
Personality Man.
“Listen to yourself” is probably the most frequent advice I give in counseling sessions. In doing so, I always explain that our subconscious mind knows the answers to all of our questions. Whether we ask them out loud or not at all.
The ability to listen to ourselves is a key quality for a person who wants to live in the flow of love and well-being. Because our subconscious mind is FOR US. It wishes us well. And all we have to do is learn to listen to our intuition, our heart . Our inner self. I’ll tell you how to do that. And also, what bonuses this will bring in your life.
Information for those who listen not to themselves, but to others.
Those who from childhood are used to being led by the opinion of other people are truly unhappy people. There are so many stories about how “I went where my dad told me to go,” “I married the one my parents told me to marry,” and so on. Usually, such people end up in psychologists and psychotherapists with depression and confusion by mid-life (or earlier):
- How to live, where to swim…
- I don’t want anything…
- Don’t know what to want…
- Who I am and where I’m wandering in the dark….
- It’s sad….
But here’s the good news: you can always go back to your roots, where you can hear yourself, your inner voice. Start listening to yourself. Develop it and build on it. And, as a result, live a new, happy life!
How do you learn to listen to yourself?
To learn this, we need to learn 6 skills. These are:
- The ability to listen to our thoughts.
- Learning to listen to yourself and make good decisions
- Learning to listen to yourself and your body
- Hearing yourself – your Higher Self
- Hear your desires
- Listen to your feelings
All of the above are achievable! Below I will describe each item individually. A little effort and you will definitely start to succeed. And at the same time, you will see your life change direction to a much happier one
Know how to listen to your thoughts.
At first glance, nothing seems complicated. We know what’s in our heads. It seems like we do. However, if you start monitoring your thoughts, it becomes clear that your head is in chaos. Thoughts jump from one to the other. And then immediately fly off in an unknown direction.
That’s why it’s always so helpful to RECORD. And then, reread. That’s why psychologists recommend keeping a diary, where you will write down your thoughts, feelings and events.
This clever move allows you to sort out your thoughts. Decompose them into shelves. Because when we describe, WE are FORCED to organize our thought activity into comprehensible, logical word forms. Then, when we reread it, we can see our thoughts clearly. We can already tell which ones are predominant in our head. Which ones are useful to us, and which ones are harmful.
Then, having understood our thoughts, we can somehow work with them. Namely, we can convert our harmful beliefs into useful ones. For example, if the thought “I am ugly” is constantly spinning, then for our benefit we can repeat and write to ourselves many times “I am beautiful. Why? Because even such a simple technique can displace unhelpful beliefs for us and replace them with useful ones. And, as we know, “we are what we think of ourselves.
Listening to yourself and making good decisions
Talking it through!
It works just as well as spelling. We mean talking it out for the other person, when you have to organize your thoughts into understandable expressions.
You may agree that you have noticed how simple speaking out, without being interrupted or evaluated, helps you to understand yourself, to hear yourself.
The main difficulty with this method is that our loved ones often don’t know how to listen at all. In fact, we ourselves often cannot listen. They may begin to give you advice that you did not ask for and that does not suit you. They can shift the emphasis to themselves – “And here I am, and here I have …”. And, as a result, the best option is a psychologist. A competent psychologist will listen to you properly and help you organize the process of listening to yourself.
Listening to yourself at the moment of self-talk, you have a great opportunity to make the right decision, which will be suitable for you. Yes, sometimes it may seem strange and illogical to another person. Well, we need OUR decision!
Learn to listen to yourself and your body.
That’s a great skill! Do you know that our body – very often gives us clues? For example, the well-known expression “feel with your gut. What does it mean? That if something unpleasant awaits us, we feel it with the help of the nervous system, which innervates the intestines. Plus, the gut itself has its own “brain” (this has now been proven). And in such cases, we get spasms – they’ve been called “feeling the gut.” That is, our body informs us about the trouble.
Or, here’s another example that many people understand: feeling relaxed in the presence of certain people. And, on the contrary, the feeling of stiffness, uncomfortable, – as if you cannot find your place in the presence of some others. What do these feelings in the body want to tell us? It’s our subconscious that reads who is our “friend” and who is our “enemy. And thus, through the body, it expresses its opinion. Namely: do we need to be around this person at all? Won’t he hurt us?
Listen to yourself, to your Higher Self.
How do we learn to do this? There are people who listen to themselves and they are great at it. Their secret is meditation, meditative practices and trance states. Milton Erickson (the father of Ericksonian hypnosis) claimed that there’s nothing more useful than a daily trance. Moreover, he himself was able to fall into it at will and taught it to his students and patients.
Why is meditation and trance so useful? Because it removes, for a time, our Censor – our consciousness. Our critic. And it opens a direct door to our unconscious. And, as I said, our subconscious mind has all the answers.
Moreover, many psychologists and esotericists are convinced that the subconscious mind holds the right answers not only to our current questions concerning us. But, also on the universal questions. In our subconscious, the experience of generations, the experience of all mankind is imprinted. And, we can use it. If we know how.
“Listen to yourself, you know all the answers” – meditation
The technique, the simplest one, is this:
First you need to focus on the question. It is better when the question can be answered with a “yes” or “no.” These are the kinds of questions you can practice at first. Later, when you get good at it, you can ask open-ended questions. Specifically: an open question implies an extended answer. These are such questions: how, why, what to do, what is better to do, what is the best first step to take).
Once the question is formulated, you can either hold it in your head or write it down. Then, it’s necessary to take a comfortable position, lie down, and relax. Before this, of course, turn off all the phones. No one should disturb us. It’s optimal to have meditative music. We relax. And, allow ourselves to let go of our thoughts. Let them float. As long as they float, the right answer will come.
There is another option, which many of you also know intuitively or have read. And use it. It consists in putting a question. We tense up, think about it hard, and then let go, and try to shift our attention to something else. And when we shift our attention, and our head is thinking about something else. Then the right answer pops into our head.
How do you learn to hear yourself and your desires?
As an adult, who since childhood weaned to listen to themselves and their desires, it is not easy to get back on the rails, leading back. The Inner Parent is constantly living in the head and uttering his evaluative speeches, confusing him. If you go left, you lose a horse. If you go right, your life will be taken away. If you go straight, you’ll get something else. Which way do you go?
As children, many of us were NOT asked what we wanted. We were bought clothes, which we then had to drag around on our backs with difficulty and sadness. All the while feeling like we were the most miserable people in the world. They would send us to a sanatorium in the summer, and we wanted to stay here with our friends and ride bikes. They would turn off the TV at the most interesting place and make us sleep. So, with our desires now, as adults – is generally a problem.
But, there is good news. It is that you can start small. For example, set a goal five times a day to stop and ask yourself: what do I want? Right here, right now? The task in this case is to stop and listen to yourself and your desires. Even if they are ridiculous, stupid or insignificant. But, – hear yourself!
Then, let it happen. That is, do it for yourself! If we start small, and don’t stop, after a few weeks it will become a habit. It will simply become a skill and become fixed in our heads as a group of neurons. As you develop, you will be able to keep track of more and more of your true desires and needs.
That said, there is a caveat. Of course, the fulfillment of your desires must be environmentally friendly and safe for others and the world. No one has ever cancelled the rules of appropriate social behavior.
Listen to yourself and your feelings
The ability to listen to your feelings is a skill that cannot be overemphasized. Feelings are our everything. It is feelings that are deeper in the psyche than thoughts (hierarchically). Because of our feelings, we act in a certain way and not in a different way. Understanding our feelings, being able to hear them, enables us to control them in some way.
Why? Because as long as the feeling is not identified, it rules us. But as soon as we are able to give it a name, to trace it, we become in the position of observer. And that position works wonders. The feeling can change. Go away or change its vector. It is important to trace the feeling by understanding “what it is about,” “how it came about, and why.” Thus, we can be much less sad, angry, jealous, envious, worried, afraid, and so on… Don’t you agree, a good perspective?
Understanding our feelings, the ability to hear and see them gives us the ability to live them ecologically. And this is extremely important for the health of the psyche. After all, if we don’t know how to keep track of feelings, instead we just suppress them. Trying to keep a “poker face” at the same time, what happens to us? Psychosomatics, friends, is happening to us. That was just now about negative feelings.
But, it’s also important to stop and face the other feelings honestly. Such as love, falling in love, passion, desire, interest, joy, drive. To consciously hear yourself and your feelings in this case gives you an understanding of what you are interested in doing, what you love, what inspires you. And, in this way, it is your awareness that grows. Which greatly affects the quality of life in general.
So, dear reader, listen only to yourself! Trust yourself. Your heart, your subconsciousness is wiser than others. After all, other people have a different life experience. They have had a completely different upbringing. Other traumas in life have been and other peaks have been reached. Other beliefs and visions of the world and values. You have to believe in yourself. And in the fact that you are entitled to it. And you, have that right!
Author: Catherine Kholodova, psychologist. You can sign up to see me ONLINE consultation over Skype, Watsapp, Telegram, Viber
