Sunday Contemplation # 50 Our Listening Heart. A Spiritual Practice & A Business Pillar.

Who Let This Guy Into My Company?

Jun 30, 2025

Image taken by my good friend who I shared time around this fire with.

This Week’s Quote
A G’day
This Sunday’s Contemplation
A Guided Meditation
Grateful For
This Week’s Community Chat
Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

It is not a question of thinking much, but of loving much. Do whatever arouses you to love.
16th-century Spanish Carmelite nun, Teresa of Ávila

A G’day

Hello Everyone:

I hope this week has been a good one for you. I wish you peace in the week to come.

This week I took a six hour drive to visit some old friends. Though there is much to appreciate about zoom and other video connections, nothing beats a hug and cup of tea and a proper heart to heart. I realised how much I missed that connection. I felt renewed and grateful.

Today’s picture is of the fire I sat around with one good friend while we shared our hearts and remembered again why we loved each other….not to mention the good glass of red that came with. 🙂

This week I want to share with you some thoughts close to my heart.

I offer the following Sunday Contemplation for your consideration and I wish you the peace and resolve to meet this day.

Cheers,

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Our Listening Heart. A Spiritual Practice & A Business Pillar. Who Let This Guy Into My Company?

When I started this Substack site my hope was to bring together the deep inner wisdom I think each of us has, with the day to day living we each face.

In my life I have been on many inner journeys, attended retreats, learned from wonderful teachers, and been grateful for the insights.

So often these inner journeys were made in quiet isolation, and joining the inner experience with day to day life was a significant challenge. However much I might have longed to be a quiet and peace loving devotee in an ashram, my wife and kids had a different idea of how I might express my devotion…read…get a job, pay the mortgage, take us to football training, connect on every manner of day to day things, and wash the dishes.

I regret none of this, but it did give me a strong desire to join the spiritual and the practical in the way I approach life, and now writing. I write for you like this, because I reckon the majority of folks who read this face the same challenges. We live “ordinary lives”.

So today I am writing very consciously in this way. I am writing two sections. One - the spiritual value of what I call the listening heart. Two - how this very same approach can be made in a work environment.

One - The Listening Heart

Though there are many many paths to discovering our inner wisdom I find the practice of listening with my heart has worked best for me. It works for me because it gives me a pathway that though recognising the importance of thought, calls me to listen with that part of me not dominated by thought, logic and pragmatism.

How does it work? In quiet moments, some more formal meditations, but mostly the quiet that exists in between and underneath everything we do, I very very consciously lead with my heart. By the heart here I mean the part in me that is designed to give love, and to receive love. “Listening” then is a way of saying, paying attention to the inner world of love in everything we encounter.

The good news is the love is in fact in everything.

My experience is that the Awareness, some call God, from which we arise, is by nature, quiet, still, and peace filled. By its very nature we cannot be separate from that Awareness. We are that, we cannot be separate from That or anyone or anything that arises from that Awareness. When we experience the inseparable nature of who we are, love naturally arises. Love is the byproduct of the knowing that we are not separate.

Therefore love is in the very fabric of our lives and our connections.

“Seeing it”, experiencing it, is our challenge in a world, which on the surface, often seems devoid of the fabric of which I speak.

This is our work. To listen past and through the noise to “hear” the whisper of love.

There is not one of you reading this that thinks this work is easy. Me either. But it is the work needed. We can train our hearts to be incredible at this work. Like a drug sniffing dog, it can find the goods in the most obscure and unlikely places.

I will write more on this listening with the heart, but I know you get it. The techniques are way less important than the experience that it is true.

Now to the practical.

Two - A Listening Heart At Work

Here is the good news. Almost every workplace involves people! Here is the bad news. Almost every workplace involves people! 😜

We work for many reasons. Some work because they love it. Most work because they need to, to support families, build a life and find a way. Those most of us, try to find the places of fulfillment within the work environment we land in.

Most workplaces are thought centred, pragmatic and goal oriented. Listening with the heart is not mentioned in most employee onboarding handbooks. One day it will be.

So let me here use spiritual language as to how you can engage your listening heart at work. After this paragraph I will use more pragmatic language to describe how to do it.

Every person at work is an expression of the Divine. Each one is sacred by nature. Each one we are not separate from. Even the one you think is a self-serving dick, is one of those sacred ones. Therefore, our work is to “look” for that and connect with that. How? Set your ego aside, be who you know yourself to be, and treat them like they really are sacred. Their response is up to them. Your intent is yours to honour.

Now the pragmatic language, which does not require you to lose any of your sacred intent. Many will say this approach will make you look weak, and work is too pragmatic and results centred to provide opportunities to use a listening heart. I call BS. You can be as pragmatic and strong as you need to be. But be you. Be the person that people can trust to be straight, respectful and actually concerned about the quality of the connections being made. You want easy, don’t do this. You want to provide the ground from which quality relationships will grow…do this work.

Time is coming when the business world will take seriously the demonstrable fact the most important determinant of success in business is the quality of the relationships built and maintained in the business, and between the business and its clients. This is not woo-woo in any sense at all. Just read Harvard Business Review or McKinsey Group papers on workplace culture and wellness. They are filled with curley language and data which I will summarise for you again here… the most important determinant of success in business is the quality of the relationships built and maintained in the business, and between the business and its clients.

Use Your Listening Heart To Build Trust

Trust will become a central topic of business development, market building, investment and venture capital. It is already a mostly assumed and poorly measured key factor in those areas.

Trust will be build by those most capable of listening with their hearts rather than just their heads. Trust will be best built by those who see clearly the interdependence of all people and things.

Trust is critical. Be someone who is trustworthy, by being someone who sees beneath the noise and works with the most central nature of humans, even when they perhaps don’t know you are doing it.

May you listen to your heart and listen with your heart!

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called The Listening Heart. I will publish that recorded meditation in a couple of days.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

I am grateful for friends. They are the ones I can just be me with, who will listen to me, and allow me to listen to them. The Buddha said we most definitely need a Sangha to build our spiritual life. My translation…we need friends.