Start Listening with Your Heart (What Children Know That We've Forgotten)
Recently, I participated in an advanced breathwork and sound healing training. As part of my Biography Certification program, we are studying the twelve senses based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, and I was assigned the sense of hearing to present.
It was ironic, since I’m deaf, yet it stirred something deep within me and I chose to say yes. As I began exploring the material, I quickly realized I was having difficulty following much of it. I couldn’t hear anything in the training, and my ego threw a tantrum: I’m so lost. What am I even doing here? How can I possibly understand what everyone else is experiencing?
I was reminded of this as my daughter and I watched the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show.
It was sung mostly in Spanish, rooted in a cultural experience many viewers didn't share. Yet if you let yourself experience it rather than demanding to understand every word, the joy was universal. The love was palpable.
Some people met that invitation with joy. Others reacted with rage and fear. The show became a mirror, reflecting each viewer's internal state. Those who surrendered to the experience found beauty. Those who demanded literal understanding projected their own accumulated emotional "garbage" onto what they saw.
My daughter had this to say: "Mom, this is about owning your ancestry, your life, and not being afraid. It’s showing people just trying to make a better life."
Children Know the Truth
Watch two toddlers meet for the first time. They don't speak the same language—they might not speak any language yet. But within minutes, they're playing together, laughing, moving in rhythm. They're communicating on a level that transcends words, listening with their hearts instead of their heads.
Somewhere along the way, we forgot how to do this. We started believing that understanding requires translation, that connection demands literal comprehension. We’ve moved from our bodies into our minds, and in doing so, lost something essential.
When I was feeling frustrated because I couldn’t follow along in my class, I was stuck in a mental spiral. I couldn't feel anything. Not the vibrations, not the love, not the energy.
But when I surrendered—when I stopped demanding that my head make sense of everything and allowed my body to simply experience it—everything shifted. I could feel the vibrations through my skin, through my bones. I was listening from a much deeper level than my ears could ever access. I was listening the way children listen, the way we all knew how before we learned we had to understand every word.
Rudolf Steiner said: "Receive the children in reverence, educate them in love, and send them forth in freedom."
When we breathe slowly with a child, not only do we regulate ourselves, but we teach them that safety can live within their own body. They learn to sense the difference between groundedness and fear.
The Role of the Breath
Did you know 93% of us don't breathe correctly? When we don't breathe properly, our lymphatic systems can't move waste. We're walking around with emotional and physical garbage piling up, and then we wonder why we're so triggered.
Conscious breathing—staying present in our bodies, trusting what we feel rather than what we think—transmutes that stagnant energy.
When I feel overwhelmed by the tremendous collective fear right now, I go back to my breath. I focus on keeping my vibration high, sending out safer, more loving energy. Because the fear, the rage, the need to control and translate everything into our own terms is doing nothing but blocking our hearts.
A Vibrational Shift
The halftime show asked a simple question: Can we meet expressions of joy, however unfamiliar, the way a child would—with openness and heart?
That's the listening we need now. Not the kind that demands translation, but the kind that feels vibration. Not the kind that analyzes from the head, but the kind that experiences from the whole body.
The invitation is to get out of our heads and back into our bodies. To remember what children know: we can connect across every difference if we meet each other from the heart.