This article was originally published on www.elephantjournal.com. Read the complete article here.
My heart and I have been working on our communication skills lately.
I have been asking her to please let me in on the secrets of her world—what makes her well with emotion and what makes her recede into herself, near-silently beating and refusing to be acknowledged?
She has been asking me to please open my ears, insisting that the answers beat through me with each throbbing whisper—I am just not listening carefully enough.
The other day, we had a breakthrough.
I was on my mat, somewhere in my glide from downward dog to plank, when I found my knees on the ground and an overwhelming heaviness in my chest. My breathing deepened and my eyes watered, and then released.
It did not last for more than 20 seconds, but in that moment—we spoke.
It was fleeting, it was wordless, and it literally knocked me off of my feet.
For the first time in a very long time, my heart and I gave in to one another. At the very moment I happened to be listening, she happened to have something to say. In the past, we have had similar opportunities, but one or both of us got cold feet, and the moment passed in familiar silence—but not this time.
Still, we have a long way to go.
I am currently trying to engage in a conversation with her about whether the two of us want the same thing out of this life we are leading together, out of this body we coexist in, out of any and everything we experience as one.
As it stands, the conversation is not going extremely well. It essentially consists of me bullying her for answers, and in turn bullying myself for not being able to figure them out on my own, and her steadfastly beating along, waiting and waiting and waiting until I figure out what it really means to listen.
And therein lies the problem.
I have not yet learned how to speak her language, making it nearly impossible to interpret the answers she is giving me.
Our hearts don’t speak in words, or in cohesive, structured trains of thought. They speak in beats, in rising and falling syncopations, in tempo, in echoes.
If we want to hear our hearts, we have to feel them. We have to be physically aware and in tune with what they are saying through their movements, their rhythms, their pulses.
This article was originally published on www.elephantjournal.com. Read the original here.
*Image of "heart“ via Shutterstock
