Listening From Your Mind vs Your Heart
Analysis vs Intuition
For a long time when the word intuition hit my ears, it immediately shot doubt through my heart. To me, it sounded like luck. I’d hear it described as an advertisement, showcasing a variety of intuitive miracles. I’ve learned that it has nothing to do with luck. I’d like to describe it here in a more grounded way.
Analysis vs Intuition
Analysis
Our mind, specifically intellect, is responsible for analysis. It is cut and dry. With your intellect, you can even split an atom. Through this analysis, you can perform a certain deductive construction of things.
Thinking, and trying to find an answer puts you in analysis mode. Sometimes this analysis goes awry and our thoughts become torturous and make our entire system hypersensitive.
Intuition
As you will find neatly described in a google search, intuition is “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”
You could say that you can only intuitively access your intuition. That means however well it is described to you in words, even if there is an intellectual understanding of it, it must be perceived outside of your thoughts. The problem is that we cloud our intuition with attempts to prove, justify, or grab our intuition and intellectually analyze it. This simply pulls us back into analysis.
Most of the time, there will not be one correct intuitive choice. Your intuition could simply tell you what the most effective phrase to google is.
Listening With Your Mind vs Your Heart
Listening With Your Mind
This is close to what pops into our minds when we think of listening. Listening with your mind in some sense amounts to understanding what the other person is saying. Active and passive listening are good descriptors for this.
These are general definitions I got from here
Passive listening — “Passive listening is one-way communication where the receiver doesn’t provide feedback or ask questions and may or may not understand the sender’s message.”
Active listening — “Active listening includes responses that demonstrate that you understand what the other person is trying to tell you about his or her experience.”
The American Psychological Association defines them as
Passive listening — “in psychotherapy and counseling, attentive listening by the therapist or counselor without intruding upon or interrupting the client in any way”
Active listening — “a psychotherapeutic technique in which the therapist listens to a client closely, asking questions as needed, to fully understand the content of the message and the depth of the client’s emotion. The therapist typically restates what has been said to ensure accurate understanding.”
Most of us end up listening with conclusions. Your desire to respond and share your thoughts or opinions is not listening. Once you decide “aha! so this is what they mean” you begin to conclude what they are saying. Or begin to pre-plan your response for when they finish talking, this is not listening.
I’ve got a bad habit of not hearing people out and interrupting them before they finish their idea. Yet, they were going to say the same thing that I was.
When you can listen with a clear mind, people’s words will become very revealing. It becomes clear what their beliefs and views on a variety of topics are. Listening with your mind means patiently seeing their focus, choice of topic, and other qualities of their speech.
The barrier is that your mind naturally generates thoughts and ideas about what you are listening to based on your beliefs and values. Leaving us biased and often causing us to read distorted meaning into other people’s words through analysis.
Listening With Your Heart
Most of the time if you are listening with your mind, even a clear mind, then you are not listening with your heart. You may see clearly what is happening and you may even be able to reason through it, but this is not where your heart comes into play.
At the risk of dipping into “woo woo talk”, listening with your heart is perceivable to you as an energetic or emotional sensation. Since most of us have our emotions and thoughts whipping all over the place, our intuition is also biased.
Most of us cannot recognize our intuition because it guides us in line with our identity and beliefs. For example, if we identify with confidence, we will find confident words, actions, etc., and feel confident and comfortable. If we identify with stress, we will feel drawn toward actions that will cause us more stress.
Your intuition is aligned with your identity. While pure intuition, free from any attachments or identifications would be very fortuitous, it is not useful to focus on when we are trying to find our intuition. Your intuition in many ways is your feeling of certainty. This certainty leads you to take action based on a variety of mental, interpretive projections.
To listen from our heart is to use our minds to identify these biases so that they may be dissolved or released. Allowing us to clearly understand our external environment. For example, listening to someone with a “conscious” intuition would tell you their intentions. Not because of a deduction, but because it would be communicated in their feeling.
There Is A Harmony To Be Found
It is not better or worse to listen with your mind instead of your heart. They are interconnected.
You can notice this now, your thoughts and emotions are linked. If you’ve got more space in your mind you will listen from there. if you’ve got more space in your heart you will listen from there. Being able to drop mental-emotional connections, even if only for a few moments, will lead to heightened perceptive and intuitive ability.
Conclusion
Since there is no conflict between listening with your mind or heart, it can be kind of tricky to grasp. In a broader sense, you are either receptive or not receptive.
The heart cannot supersede the mind, but it can become the main center. In that instance you would act from your heart before your mind, using your mind as a tool to see the details of a situation or craft your desired outcome.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed.
Ask me questions in the comments so I can answer them in an article!
