Shamanic Listening Begins With The Heart

Turns out, the heart and mind hear things differently.

Feb 11, 2024

In my early twenties, killing time between morning and evening classes at the Institute of Audio Research in Greenwich Village, I’d walk the three miles up 5th Avenue to Central Park. My future was uncertain. My afternoons were free. I preferred to wander and wonder.

At the Institute, I was learning the technical skills required to record music. Mastering the latest gizmos, I practiced turning knobs and pushing sliders while concentrating on what the meters, graphs, and sound waves were telling me and making sure everything was registering within range. Listening to music may be the premise of this field, but learning how to record is actually quite different. It requires another type of listening and an exact, focused, practical kind of attention.

Meanwhile, sitting on a park bench between classes, I took in New York City’s cacophony from all directions. Many would find the sensory overload stressful and altogether too much. And yet, in its midst, I managed to find calm, take a breath, and settle into thought. I’d focus on the trees, the birds, the squirrels looking for handouts—even the city machinery sounds, which carried a rhythm of their own. Noticing all this required a different kind of attention than music recording, as well as another kind of listening.

What are these kinds of listening? What should we know about their differences?

The mind and the heart listen differently.

Each is focused on its own areas of concern. Each receives, interprets, and responds in its own unique way.

Here’s what that looks like and why it’s important as we explore how to make the spiritual practical.

Watch the additional commentary on this topic here

or listen on the Podcast here

Mind Listening

This is our default. It’s what we do every day and becomes automatic.

Starting with the jolting alarm, the new day messages us with buzzes, beeps, and incoming notifications. Then come the voices we “hear” in emails and texts. Then comes live interaction with colleagues, acquaintances, family, and friends. Then the podcasts, videos, and our bubble of news.

We hear. We interpret. We put incoming information in its proper place and/or send off a response. Boom. That’s the mind’s jam.

The mind listens so it can provide:

Judgment
Allocation
Response

It keeps things rolling. It employs a particular work ethic: “a place for everything, and everything has its place.”

It’s also mathematical—solving problems and getting things done. And while there’s always room for rational debate, there’s not much space for artistic expression.

Heart Listening

Artistic reception is where heart listening comes in. The heart is concerned with:

Feeling
Nourishment
Connection

Think of the heart as a big antenna at the top of our Mountain of Feeling. It’s scanning for and receiving all kinds of signals, but doesn’t dial in to just one signal based on “the facts.” Rather than prioritize logic, it seeks out the frequency that feels best.

The head listens with thinking. The heart listens with feeling.

While we need both in order to apply spiritual insights to everyday life, most of us are much more attuned to the head and the mind. The society we swim in reinforces, rewards, and demands this.

But, to make the spiritual practical, we need to hone in on the artist’s way and the heart’s brand of listening.

Yeah but…

I know, I know. Tuning in to heart listening and making it more prominent sounds great: “Follow your bliss” and all that.

But sure is the long way around (at best) when it comes to paying bills and getting shit done.

Yes, we need to eat and keep the lights on. And, this is true too:

If we don’t learn to listen with our heart and incorporate its messages into everyday life, we’ll remain on a hamster wheel. We’ll continue listening to the mind’s solutions to problems it can never, will never solve. Things like: love, meaning, purpose, connection, and home.

For many of us, the mind hears this advice and:

Judges it: “That’s a bunch of woo.”
Allocates it: “I’ll figure it out later.”
Responds with its version of a better solution: “Hmpf. I have a new, more logical plan. It’s superior to and bypasses this heart stuff.”

Highlighting this heart-mind tension speaks to the exact reason many folks run into problems. They’ve got a good, logical, rewarding life—one that checks all of the boxes. And yet, for some reason, they don’t feel fulfilled.

They’re experiencing heart-sourced longing. This feeling emanates from the void of lack around these big issues. With my clients in the recovery field, this is often the gravitational pull at the core of addiction.

And while it can be a tough sell to get someone to sit next to me—literally and figuratively—on a park bench and listen to the heart, this is precisely where recovery begins. This is exactly the medicine required.

From there, the spiritual becomes practical. The steps of recovery fall into place.

Head to heart starts here.

Ready to sit next to me? Eager to listen with your heart? Start here:

One: Unplug.

Turn off your electrical devices. Yes all of them—no exceptions. Even better, put them away and out of sight and earshot (making sure no notifications will reach you).

Two: Get out of your mind.

Choose to intentionally not do what the mind wants. Don’t judge. Don’t allocate. Don’t respond from a mind-based, logic-led place to categorize, label, or repair what’s coming in.
Rather than do anything, make space for and allow reception—begin listening to your heart.

Three: Hook into Nature.

Once we unplug and set the intention to get out of our minds, we make space for a bigger possibility. This bigger possibility’s first layer of communication is Nature. By Nature, I mean the natural world—which is alive, beyond our control, all around us.

To hook into Nature and access heart listening, a few suggestions:

Go for a walk.
Notice what’s alive around you.
Visit a body of water and sit next to it.
Stand on a porch or in a doorway during the rain.
Listen to the wind blowing through trees.
Take a ferry ride and stand outside along the railing.
Make a fire in the fireplace and gaze at the flames.

As you practice with this, what would it mean to:

Receive.
Surrender.
Empty yourself of expectations and hoped for outcomes.

Truly listening with your heart requires relinquishing the reins of control. The reward?

Relief

When the mind drops the burden of having to know all the answers and can instead receive answers, a weight lifts.

Inspiration

When the mind surrenders control of steering the ship, inspiration can enter.1

A New Way Forward

When the mind releases its grip on getting the “right results,” solutions appear in the form of new, previously unknown ways forward.

See simplicity in the complicated.

I’m offering simple explanations and practices that bring a profound shift in perspective. Making the leap from listening with the mind to listening with the heart may even come across as childish because…

…it is.

If you think back to your connection with Nature as a child, you were probably a lot better back then at hearing what was being communicated and shared. But even now, as an adult, try bringing to mind:

Camping
Fishing
Hunting
Gardening
Climbing a mountain
Watching the migration of purple martins!

Peeling away the layers of a conditioned mind and re-membering ourselves and our natural ability in this realm is deeply healing. But first, we must acknowledge what was lost.

Recognizing the differences between how the heart listens and how the mind listens is a powerful first step. From there, we bring spirit back into everyday life. From there, we make the spiritual practical.

Once we tune in to our hearts, then what?

What comes back? Who’s doing the talking? What do we do with this new information? Well…

What comes back are answers. They may be clear and direct or take the form of symbolism and metaphor.2 How we interpret, understand, and apply these answers is our responsibility. Walking this path requires putting in work. (And finding a skillful, honest guide that your heart resonates with will be tremendously helpful.)

Spirits are doing the talking. One of the foundational tenets of shamanism is that spirits are real. They exist in non-ordinary reality, and we all have helpful and compassionate spirits that are available and waiting for our requests for help. This article is focused on the beginnings. From there, we move on to more advanced and deeper listening techniques.

For example, you can learn how to undertake a shamanic journey, by which you will go to specific places in the spirit realms and connect with your personal helping spirits. You can also use my Shamanic wRites exercises as a way to connect with and write to these spirits. Either way, you’ll receive answers and guidance from the spirits directly. In shamanism, you do not need an intermediary between you and the divine.

As for what to do with the information? Quite simply, just apply the information you’ve received to your life. Does it work?

If so, why?
If not, why not?

Do you need to go back and get clarification? And if you’ve successfully integrated these messages into your life, you may be ready to go back and receive your next steps.

Effectiveness is the measure of truth.3 If it works for you, accept that. Receive that. Build upon it.

How I began in my mind and landed in my heart

Looking back, I see that attending the Institute of Audio Research and learning to record music was a decision that I made from listening to the mind.

The voices around me warned:

“You need a backup plan. Nobody makes money as a musician. What are you gonna do when it doesn’t work out?”

The mind’s logical response was:

“Well, if I can’t get what I really want…maybe being close to it will be good enough. Let’s just record music instead of making it.”

And that’s as close as the mind gets to understanding the heart. It weighs the logical pros and cons and comes up with an answer that makes sense. It says:

“Dagnabbit, that should be good enough! Stop all this ‘I want to be a guitar player’ nonsense and get on with it!”

And yet…

One of the reasons I loved wandering and wondering through my afternoons between classes was that Manhattan was the island of my birth. Despite the tar and concrete, there was earth underneath. The spirit of the island was right under my feet.

I wanted to feel connection to the place where my soul incarnated. I felt that there was something important to hear, receive, and know in this place. I sensed that this kind of listening held answers about the meaning, purpose, and life I was seeking.

Unfortunately, I lacked a guide or mentor to help me make sense of the heart’s messages. It was all too easy for the mind to take charge, insisting: “You need a logical backup plan…”

As the Fates would have it, my mind’s plan lasted for about a year. Thereafter, “good enough” became so obviously inadequate and existentially painful that it was not. Not good enough. Not the solution.

The heart came up with its own vision, advising me to load my guitar into a $200 car dubbed “The Prayer” (because you prayed you’d make it to wherever you were going after climbing through the windows, since the doors were held shut by running seatbelts through the handles…not to mention the rusted-out floors, bald tires, bad brakes, etc.).

Together with two other heart listeners, I embarked on a cross-country journey to LA to turn heart dreams into reality.

That’s a story unto itself but for our purposes here illustrates the clear delineation between how life unfolds when listening to the mind…compared to listening to the heart. The outcomes are drastically different—both from an internal health perspective, and so far as the external, objective reality resulting from our choices.

Listening with the mind is not “bad”—in fact, it’s absolutely necessary when it comes to checking off life’s to-dos. But the heart cannot be—and will not accept being—another box to tick off that list.

One way or another—whether consciously or subconsciously—the call and longing of the heart will find its way into life sooner or later. I challenge and invite us to provide space for and acknowledge its gifts—including the medicine only it can deliver in our modern, mind-driven lives.

Going deeper

Have questions or thoughts? Looking for a skillful guide or wondering how to go deeper with heart listening?

Join me for a conversation in the comments or email me directly at: Randy@AlchemistRecovery.com.