How to Listen to Yourself (A Guided Meditation for Deep Listening)
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How to Listen to Yourself: A Guided Meditation for Deep Somatic Listening
Most of us have learned, in one way or another, to stop listening to ourselves. We learn to question our feelings, minimize our struggles, put our needs aside, and keep going even when something inside of us is telling us that things aren't okay.
And we can become so accustomed to doing this that we don't even realize how disconnected we've become from our own experience.
We might find ourselves staying in situations that don't feel right, struggling to understand why certain things upset us so much, or feeling frustrated with ourselves for having needs and emotions that we think we shouldn't have.
Sometimes we know we're unhappy or overwhelmed, but we don't really understand why.
And sometimes we've become so focused on what everyone else needs or expects from us that we've lost touch with what we actually want.
But learning how to listen to yourself can change so much about our relationship with ourselves! After all, how can we truly care for ourselves, understand our reactions, or make choices that reflect who we really are if we don't know what we're feeling and what we need?
Why Is It So Hard to Listen to Ourselves?
Disconnecting from our feelings wasn't something we consciously chose. It was something we learned through our experiences, especially in relationships where our feelings weren't understood, our needs weren't welcomed, or expressing ourselves led to conflict, rejection, or criticism.
We learned to adapt. Maybe we became very good at understanding what other people were feeling while losing touch with our own experience. Maybe we learned to dismiss our hurt, question our anger, or convince ourselves that things weren't really that bad.
And these patterns can become so familiar that we don't even notice when we're doing them.
But the feelings and needs we've learned to ignore don't simply disappear. They continue to influence how we experience ourselves and the world around us, even when we’re not consciously connecting to them.
We can spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to manage our reactions or change our behavior without understanding what's happening underneath. And when we're disconnected from those deeper feelings and needs, we may not even recognize how much understanding, compassion, and support we actually need.
Somatic Listening: Learning to Hear What's Happening Beneath the Surface
One of the most powerful ways we can learn to listen to ourselves is through connecting with what's happening in our bodies.
There's often much more happening inside of us than we consciously recognize or explain. We might know that something feels wrong, for example, without being able to identify exactly what it is. Or we might have a strong emotional reaction that doesn't seem to make sense when we think about the situation logically.
Our bodies can help us connect with these deeper aspects of our experience through something called the felt sense.
The felt sense is a concept developed by psychologist Eugene Gendlin. It refers to our bodily sense of an experience or situation as a whole, including aspects of that experience that we may not yet consciously understand or have words for.
It's a fascinating part of how we experience ourselves, because our bodies can register subtle emotional responses, tensions, and impressions that we haven't yet made sense of intellectually.
And when we learn to listen to this felt experience, we can begin to discover feelings, needs, and inner conflicts that we may have been completely unaware of.
Sometimes this brings surprising clarity. We may suddenly understand why something has been so difficult for us, recognize a need we've been overlooking, or discover that what we thought we were feeling was only part of a much more complex experience.
Why Deep Listening Is So Important for Healing
One of the things I find most remarkable about deep somatic listening is how relieving it can be to finally acknowledge something we've been feeling for a long time, even when what we're acknowledging is painful.
Sometimes we discover that something affected us much more deeply than we'd allowed ourselves to recognize, or that we've been struggling with feelings and needs that we've continually minimized or rationalized away. And when we finally connect with those experiences through our bodies, there's often a deep sense of recognition. It's as though some part of us has known this all along, and we're finally listening.
There's a real difference between understanding something about ourselves intellectually and actually feeling the truth of it from within. That deeper recognition can help us make sense of our reactions, understand ourselves in new ways, and begin to process experiences that have continued to affect us beneath the surface.
But there's another part of this that I think is just as important: learning to listen to ourselves changes the relationship we have with ourselves.
Think about how difficult it is to feel truly loved in a relationship where we don't feel heard or understood. I think the same is true in our relationship with ourselves. When we continually dismiss our own feelings, minimize our struggles, or ignore what we need, we're denying ourselves the very understanding and care that would help us heal.
And when we begin to listen deeply, we're showing ourselves that our feelings matter, that our needs are worth knowing, and that the parts of us that are hurting deserve our attention and care.
This is how deep somatic listening helps us create an inner landscape that supports healing. We begin to develop a relationship with ourselves in which our authentic experience is welcomed and understood, and where we can finally attend to the feelings and needs we've been overlooking for so long.
How to Listen to Yourself: A Guided Somatic Meditation
Learning to listen to ourselves is something we can develop, and it begins with making room for our experience, including the parts of ourselves we've learned to ignore or dismiss.
In this Guided Meditation for Deep Listening, I'll guide you in connecting with your body and your felt sense, so you can begin to recognize what's happening beneath the surface and listen to your own experience with greater curiosity, compassion, and understanding.
Because the more deeply we learn to listen to ourselves, the more we're able to recognize what we truly feel and need, and begin offering ourselves the care and attention that makes healing possible.
Listen to this Guided Meditation for Deep Listening now!
Episode timing:
00:00 - Why Learning To Listen To Yourself Is Essential To Healing
04:27 - Guided Meditation for Deep Listening
28:18 - Conclusion and Reflections
How was that Guided Meditation for Deep Listening for you?
What shifted within? And how do you feel now?
Please let me know in the comments!
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And please join me every Friday on this beautiful journey out of your head, and into your more embodied and authentic self. 🩷🩷🩷
Thanks so much for joining me today!
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Enjoy more like this: Somatic Emotional Processing, Embodied Self-Love Series, Get to the roots
About me
Hey, I’m Karena!
I’m a somatic healing coach who helps people deepen their healing through somatic emotional processing, so they can finally heal unresolved wounds and move beyond the old patterns that have been keeping them stuck.
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