Feeling Heard

Notice for a moment how you feel reading the above cartoon compared to how you feel reading the cartoon in the previous post. Imagine if you were the little poodle. Which mom would you want? This mom is really putting her whole heart into the discussion and even though we are outside observers -  we can tell which one feels good to our heart. We can feel the connection.

I just love that feeling. There is such a giant difference between communicating with the heart and the head. Communicating with the heart means you resonate with the other person's experience. You don't try to fix it. You don't try to change it. You don't judge it. The heart joins. There is one place we do this easily. Laughing. When a friend is laughing, we join in or if we don't get the joke, we smile in resonance with their obvious good time. It wouldn't occur to us to try to change their laughter or advise them out of it.

We think that we have to help a sad or angry person out of their unhappy state. But trying to change their experience is just as invasive as trying to change a laughing person's experience. It's the experience that counts! Isn't that interesting? Our experiences bring us wisdom. We need to have them fully. We want others to witness our experience and then speak from the heart that they witnessed us. Just like the mother poodle in the cartoon.