“Listen, Listen, Listen to my

HEART-SONG”

When I first found Unity 37 years ago, I went to an event that is similar to what they call today, The Dances of Universal Peace. The Definition of this is: “a spiritual practice employing singing and dancing the sacred phrases of the world’s religions. Their intention is to raise consciousness and promote peace between diverse religions according to one stated goal. They combine chants from many world faiths with dancing, whirling, and a variety of movement with singing”.

One of the dances we did utilized the phrase that I began  this article with:

Listen, listen, listen to my heart-song.

This is a lovely chant. It has stayed with me all of these years and I could sing the correct tune even now though I have never heard it sung since that time 37 years ago.

I think the main reason it has stayed with me is because of the request it has in it to listen to our heart song.  First, the admonition to listen is so important that I could write 50 blogs on listening because true listening is done so rarely. But this little phrase has the key to accurate listening. It tells us to listen to our heart song.

And what is our heart song?

Well, I am happy to say that there was no real definition found when I googled it. Wordnik gave an example of a heart song:

“ a heartsong is your inner message, it’s your inner beauty, like what you are meant to do in life”.

Isn’t this lovely? A heart song may be our inner message or our inner beauty and maybe these two aspects of who we are coincide with what we are meant to do in life.  I had no idea that this quasi definition would coincide so well with the message in my recently published book, ALL CHILDREN ARE GIFTED: Raising Confident and Aware Children. I just discovered this just now.

I started this blog today to write about the importance of simply listening to our children. And, the essence of this message is to listen to their heart song.

I have been a psychotherapist for 36 years. My Master’s Degree is in child psychology. And, I have had one dual career in life; that of a psychotherapist and Unity Minister, and at least 50% of my clients have been children and teens. This group really likes me. The reason they like me is not because of my theories or that I am an expert on therapy with children and teens. The reason they like me is because I listen and after today, I can say that I listen to their heart song.

I was speaking with a parent a few years ago about how she knows that even though her son did not want to run this major race at school, and he nearly begged her to let him do something else physically, but not this, she told me:

“well, if he just gives up on this, he is letting himself down, if I let him avoid this, it will be teaching him, he can avoid all the other things in life, it will be letting him wimp out, so in the future, he can just give up then too and everyone else has to do it and no way is he not going to do it and he will have to try to run even if he says he can’t and is not in shape for it”…………

Oh, if you can feel how this must feel to the child, if you can hear how you hope you don’t treat your child this way, then you are seeing the point of listening, and especially listening to the heart song.

I was very sad about how closed-minded this parent was as far as the effect it had on the child. It is in complete opposition of how I parented or how I do therapy with children. The main challenge with not listening is that we teach our children to not listen to themselves. Second, we are teaching them that they simply don’t have a choice when the parent or teacher “knows better”. Now certainly, there are times, when a child or teen does need do something, and a good parent knows when there are times like this. But in most cases, there are always choices. ALWAYS!

The definition of being a victim is if you don’t have a choice. And if we are adults, we almost always have some choice.

So, I don’t want to word this message to death today.

I simply invite you to listen to your heart song, and you will learn how to listen to the heart song of others.

If you would like a little more encouragement on this, please get a copy of my book. It is available via a link on my website: WWW.Suzannecarter.net