How to Listen to Your Heart, Learn Its Language, and Uncover Your Inner Truth

If you were to ignore everyone else and listen to your heart, what would you do differently? How would your life change?

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the heart is the gateway.

If we can learn to listen to our hearts, we can open the gateway to our souls and receive many of the answers so many are desperately seeking.

Modern life hasn’t emphasized the importance of listening to our inner wisdom. The stress and anxiety of most people’s work lives combined with the rest of their life responsibilities haven’t created a favorable environment to tap into our inner guidance. 

As a result, most people are following the herd instead of following their hearts. They’re doing what everyone else is doing without considering what actually makes them happy and moving toward it.

So today, I will teach you how to listen to what your heart is trying to tell you, uncover your inner truth, and act on that truth with faith and confidence.

You will learn:

• How to understand the hidden language of the heart and recognize it amidst the noise of modern life.
• How to create a safe space for your heart to open and clear up the connection between your heart and mind.
• How to recognize your inner truth when it comes forth.
• How to trust your heart so you can empower it to create a clear path forward for you.
• Daily practices you can use to calm your mind, uncover your inner truth, and trust your heart’s guidance.

My intention is to help you tap into your inner guidance and wisdom, regardless of what others are doing, how they’re living their lives, or what other people’s expectations of you are.

This will empower you to navigate your life more authentically, confidently, and joyfully.

The Hidden Language of the Heart (And How to Understand It)

Our hearts are always trying to speak to us. Whether we are listening or not depends on whether we have developed the skill to listen.

This may be difficult at first, but it gets easier once you understand how your heart speaks to you.

The more you listen to your heart, the more it will speak to you, especially in decisive moments.

But to listen to your heart, you must understand its language. If you do not, you may confuse what your heart is trying to tell you with something else.

Our hearts speak to us in subtle feelings that indicate a desired movement away from or toward something. These feelings are often separate from emotions. They’re not as strong or “in your face” as emotions are. They’re more subtle.

This is another reason why so many people struggle to navigate their lives joyfully. They’re bombarded with noise from outside themselves, completely drowning the soft guiding voice from within that speaks in these subtle feelings.

The Two Primary Guiding Feelings

There are two primary guiding feelings I like to pay attention to:

1. Contractive feelings.
2. Expansive feelings.

Contractive feelings indicate a desired movement away from something. Expansive feelings indicate a desired movement toward something.

Contractive feelings close the heart and cause it to want to protect itself and move away from the source that triggered the feeling. Expansive feelings open the heart, make it feel safe, and cause it to want to move toward the source that triggered the feeling.

Anything can trigger one of these feelings:

• Other people’s words and actions.
• Events that happen in your life.
• Your thoughts and imagination.
• People who enter or leave your life.
• The work you do for a living.
• Your passions, hobbies, and interests.
• Spending time with the people in your life.
• Places you encounter.
• Experiences you have.

On a daily basis, a person may experience dozens of contractive and expansive feelings that indicate what they would ultimately like to move away from or toward.

These feelings can be used, practically, to help you understand what truly makes you feel alive, what makes you happy, and what doesn’t.

Sometimes these feelings aren’t so subtle. More than a few times, I’ve felt my heart contract powerfully for no apparent reason. Before I was consciously aware of it, it was telling me that something needed to change in my life.

During one of these times, my heart felt persistently contracted for a few days, pounding strongly for no apparent reason. The next day, I woke up and had a sudden realization that I needed to break up with the girl I was seeing at the time.

Even though I liked her, the relationship wasn’t right for me. My heart knew this before my conscious mind did, and it let me know through a strong, contractive feeling.

As another example, one of the reasons I am a writer is because writing produces an expansive feeling for me. It’s not as strong as an emotion, but it’s a good feeling that opens my heart and makes me feel at ease. This expansive feeling indicates a desired movement toward writing.

How to Understand Your Heart’s Language

Understanding how your heart speaks to you comes with practice. I’m still learning what the different feelings I feel mean.

Sometimes, things that used to produce expansive feelings can start producing contractive ones, and vice versa. So it’s a learning process.

In addition, your heart may speak to you differently than anyone else’s, so one of the best practices you can do is to start checking in with your heart regularly.

Pay attention to how you feel when something happens in your life. Pay attention to whether those feelings are contractive or expansive. Try experimenting with moving away from the things that trigger contractive feelings and toward the things that trigger expansive ones.

Over time, you will learn the language of your own heart, and if you believe what I believe – that the heart is the gateway to the soul – you will learn what your soul may be trying to guide you toward in life.

However, to listen to your heart, you must create a safe space to open the line of communication between it and your conscious mind.

You can open this line of communication using the three T’s:

1. Tranquility.
2. Truth.
3. Trust.

Tranquility: The Calmness of Mind That Allows The Heart to Open

Tranquility is defined as “the quality or state of being calm.”

In the sense I’m speaking of here, we’re talking about mental calmness. 

An unsettled mind doesn’t create a safe space for the heart to open. Thoughts of stress, worry, anxiety, doubt, jealousy, insecurity, and fear make it more difficult for you to listen to what your heart is trying to tell you.

This type of thinking muddies the communication between the heart and the mind. It’s like driving through a tunnel with the radio on. The tunnel is like these unsettled thoughts. It messes with the signal between your heart and mind, primarily because these thoughts tend to cause the heart to contract.

To hear what your heart is trying to tell you, your heart must have a minimum level of openness. If not, the communication you want to hear is unlikely to make it through the mess of negativity being produced in your mind.

So the first step to opening the heart is tranquility. 

A tranquil mind creates ample space for the heart to open. It clears the line of communication, like your radio signal coming back as you drive out the other end of a tunnel into a bright, beautiful day.

Thoughts of peace, serenity, tranquility, ease, and relaxation help the heart to relax and open up. The body’s nervous system moves out of the fight, flight, or freeze response produced by stressful thinking and moves into safety and security.

From this place of safety and security, you can now hear the Truth being communicated to you from the gateway of your soul – your heart.

Truth: The Awareness That Springs Forth and Lights The Way

As your mind calms and your attention focuses on listening to your heart, what springs forth is Truth.

Truth is defined as “that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.”

Anything that is fact or reality is meant to be relatively concrete, stable, and unchanging. Truth (with a capital T) can change, but usually very slowly. 

All manner of Truth may spring forth from within you when you enter a consistent state of tranquility. However, the truth I’m talking about is your Truth. It’s specific to you, your heart’s desires, and your personal intentions in life.

This Truth can arrive as a thought or sudden realization. It can come through dreams. It can come through new experiences manifested from your new, tranquil state of being. It can come in the form of ideas, imaginations, and visions of the future.

It can come in the form of new desires and realizations about what you want in life or what’s best for you. It may be Truths that have been with you your entire life, but you are only now becoming consciously aware of them.

Whatever it is, it will be yours, and you will probably recognize it as an expansive guiding feeling. It will feel good.

Many times this Truth arrives as “aha” moments and breakthroughs – personal enlightenment about your true self and your life.

This is new awareness coming from within you as the line of communication between your heart and conscious mind becomes more clear. The clearer the line of communication, the more this awareness will pour out from you and become undeniable.

But the journey is not finished. Something must be done with this Truth, and that requires trust.

Trust: The Elixir That Empowers The Heart and Creates a Clear Path Forward

Our hearts can be incredibly strong and withstand even our most difficult challenges. Yet, at the same time, they can be fragile and easily hurt.

So once you have become aware of your Truth, the next step is trust.

Trust is defined as a “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.”

So what are we trusting?

We are trusting the reliability, truth, ability, and strength of our own heart’s wisdom. We are trusting the guidance from within. We are trusting what our hearts are telling us.

Because you have a choice. You can calm your mind, open your heart, uncover your inner truth, and choose not to follow it. 

Or you can choose to follow what it’s telling you.

This requires trust because, often, it will be a path that you cannot see clearly right away. You might have fears, concerns, or doubts about this path or this decision.

It might mean making big, scary changes in your life. It might mean going off the beaten path, not being realistic, and following your calling.

However, that’s also one way you could know you’ve uncovered your Truth. The fear, doubt, or concern isn’t an indicator to move away from this. It’s a sign to move toward it. It’s a sign to trust because trust is the elixir that empowers the heart and creates a clear path forward.

As no relationship with another person can function without trust, trust is also required to have a harmonious relationship with your heart.

Trust is required not only to hear the guidance but to follow it.

Again, a favorable environment to listen to your heart and keep the lines of communication open is necessary. If you allow thoughts of stress, worry, fear, and the like to cloud your mind once more, your heart will begin to close again.

Trust keeps the lines of communication open so you can hear the guidance and act on it.

Your job is not to try to control everything. Your job is to listen and act on the guidance with complete surrender and trust. 

A wrestling match may go on between your subconscious mind and your conscious one. The fear-driven part of your mind may try to talk you out of it. But you must hold steady. You must hold steady in your trust of the guidance that has come from your inner Truth.

As you do, those fear-based thoughts will calm themselves, and as your heart remains calm, you will sail onward with full trust in the benevolent wind that is filling your sails, blowing you in the direction you were always meant to go.

With a tranquil mind, the Truth springs forth.

With trust, your Truth becomes your path. 

Related: How I Found My Life Purpose: My 10-Year Journey of Self-Discovery and Personal Growth

Daily Practices to Calm Your Mind, Uncover Your Inner Truth, and Trust Your Heart’s Guidance

To help you experience more tranquility, uncover your inner truth, and trust your heart’s guidance, here are some daily practices you can implement that have stood the test of time:

1. Meditation
2. Journaling
3. Walking

All types of meditation can help you get into a tranquil state.

However, once you have entered a meditative state, try placing your attention on your heart. Don’t try to make anything happen. Just place your attention on it. This will help to activate this energy center and, over time, increase your connection to your heart and its wisdom.

Related: Find Your Life Purpose Guided Meditation (Tune Into Your Purpose)

Next, here are a few journaling prompts you can use daily:

Morning prompts:

• What would help me feel expansive today? 
• What would make me feel contractive today?
• How could I move more toward what would help me feel expansive and away from what would make me feel contractive today?

Evening prompts:

• What made me feel expansive today? 
• What made me feel contractive today?
• How could I move more toward what made me feel expansive and away from what made me feel contractive?

And finally, try walking multiple times per day outside. If it helps, listen to music that makes you feel good. Walking can put you into a natural state of meditation, which creates a favorable environment for new awareness to spring forth.

Final Words of Wisdom

The true language of the heart is love and all of its derivatives, such as:

• Joy.
• Peace.
• Excitement.
• Inspiration.
• Passion.
• Enthusiasm.
• Gratitude.
• Appreciation.
• Happiness.

The more you follow these feelings, the more you will move toward what you want in life.

Follow your heart. Follow your inspiration. Follow what feels good to you. 

You may not know exactly where you will end up, but you can be sure it will be right where you are meant to be.