There comes the time when we take deep stock of our lives. If we’re living a life grounded in the present and in the body, we will have taken stock frequently throughout the entire arc of our lives. What does it mean to take deep stock? When do we know it’s time to do so? How do we do it?

A close and trusted friend three decades ago asked me, when considering the patterns of my varied career, “Where are you going with your work, Marsh? How do the strands fit together? Where are you hoping it takes you? What’s the goal?” Startled, I answered, “I must work to support myself and my family, so I try to balance that obligation with my curiosity and desire for different experiences. There isn’t a grand 10-year master plan.” At the time, the answer felt authentic and honest, and it was. Years later, though, I came to understand that another factor had been at play: Instinctively, and sometimes haltingly, my heart was speaking to me about its deepest longing. And equally instinctively and sometimes haltingly, I was listening.

Our hearts constantly speak to us, sometimes in whispers and other times in full-throated voice. Our hearts ask that just one person listen to them: the person in whose chest it calls home. While the heart communes with other hearts, it first and foremost wants to be heard and in relationship with the person it calls home. It wants to pour out its longing to you – it waits for you to listen, to hold it close, to ask the mind to yield to it.

Many tools and approaches exist to take deep stock of life. These three stand out as ways to find insight:

LIFE UNFOLDING AS A HISTORICAL TIMELINE

One of my go-to friends for guidance, a great writer and painter, too, uses these skills to capture the timeline of her life. On a beautifully and simply created horizontal document, she records her life’s significant periods and experiences with words and water-color illustrations. When needed, she adds pages to the timeline, which folds and unfolds like an accordion. As she adds important dates and passages, she reserves time to meditate with her timeline as a guide and messenger. It’s helped her through happy times and sad or challenging ones. It’s a method of revealing. All of us do not draw, paint, or write – and that’s fine. I’ve been known to capture pivotal points of my life on the backs of envelopes or napkins and staple them together. The important thing is to know how your one precious life is unfolding, to understand your story while not getting lost in it.

LIFE READING AS A MEMOIR

A key component of staying grounded to live a conscious life involves knowing your backstory – to clearly examine your family of origin, your relationships, the pivotal times in your life, your emotions, your feelings, how your mind works, when you’ve struggled and when you’ve triumphed, who is important to you, how you moved on, and where you became stuck. We do this as a practice to begin to understand the role of the observer and to prevent us from becoming mired in our story which pulls us from living to our fullest in the present moment. When working with our teacher-training students, in one of our first months together, I ask them to turn to a clean page in their notebooks or journals and begin to capture their backstory in words, phrases, complete sentences, or whole paragraphs. Month-by-month, we take a few minutes to add to the backstory until they feel “done” – at least for a while. Don’t know where to begin? Life coaches, therapists, and other guides can help to ferret out your backstory, understand it, and let it go.

LIFE LIVED AS THE HEART’S DEEPEST LONGING

By far and away, by leaps and bounds, listening to my heart’s deepest longing permits me the clearest path to living a life of purpose, meaning, and wholeness. Said another way, listening to my heart grounds me, warms me, sweeps away feelings of loneliness, isolation, and separation. When my mind yields to my heart, a certain kind of magic ensues.

In a rich, long life of working with and managing many people, and in my own family-and-friend group, I noticed that women as early as their late thirties into their fifties articulated a longing – another purpose, a different job, an alternative way to live, a clear call to live life with more authenticity, calm abiding, passion, and verve. It happened to me in my mid-forties. One day I simply could hear my heart speaking to me with such insistence that by the time I was 57, my redesigned life stood on the foundation of new work (hello, Green Lotus!), focused attention on those dearest to me, a renewed sense of fun, adventure, and enjoyment, and deep diving into learning. Men, it generally seemed, postponed listening as closely to their hearts until very close to retirement age, a result of cultural conditioning and less attention throughout life to emotional states and feeling tones.

As I explored mindfulness meditation, the 8-limbed path of yoga, and how the brain and mind work with each other and finally with the physical body, it became clear that I’d had a close relationship with my heart from a young age. It never abandoned me even I tried to shush it in favor of leading with my mind or turned to other tools - like journaling, timelines, and memoir writing - in an attempt to create my path. In the end, I trusted my heart. In turn, it trusted me.

Listening to your heart’s deepest longing doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing every day. Do not let this deter you or rub you the wrong way. When you listen to your heart and you act, change is inevitable. We humans avoid change more often than we embrace it, which is one of the reasons we ignore what our hearts are telling us. The changes may be tough: leaving a job, ending a marriage, being compassionately honest with a friend, admitting to an addiction or a fear, moving out of a longtime home. Change based on the heart’s observation and examination – and, yes, its feelings – in the long term never disappoints, however. It ultimately creates spaciousness and a sense of security.

Tonight, do this. Grab a piece of clean paper. Sit for five minutes with your hands folded over your heart center – in other words, hold your heart in your hands. Listen. At the end of the five minutes, write down what you heard, even if it seems to be nothing at all. Keep repeating the exercise as frequently as you are able and be prepared for the mind to push back. Be aware of your body’s physical reactions as your heart begins to speak to you and of the mind’s emotional ones, too. Notice how, the next days, those reactions and emotions fluctuated or disappeared. To deepen the heart-listening process, takes walks in nature, get enough rest, integrate Yoga Nidra into your life.

One last suggestion: Teach your children and grandchildren to listen for their heart’s deepest longing from a young age. It will help to keep them safe and secure. And that will help to keep the world safe and secure.

From my heart to yours,

Marcia

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Marcia Appel

In 2006, Marcia, a former journalist and corporate executive, wrote the plan that launched Green Lotus. In 2007, Green Lotus opened, and Marcia and business partner Merry Beth Hovey, who joined in 2009, planted the seeds of service that are the foundation of the Green Lotus philosophy. "As teachers and healers," Marcia says, "we meet students and clients where they are. We learn and grow from each other -- and have fun doing it."

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