Listen Listen Listen with Josh Reeves

[00:00:01] This is Josh Reeves and you're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast. Tuesdays in September, I'm beginning our Beyond Limits class. It's in person here at Mile Hi. You can find some online classes as well on our website. It's all about the fundamentals of our teaching and I'm so excited to bring the big ideas of science of mind and spirit to this class as we create community, exploration, and talk about what's most meaningful in life together.

[00:00:27] Father, Paramahansa Yogananda was one of the most important spiritual leaders of the 20th century. He came to the United States from India and helped popularize yoga, meditation, chanting.

[00:00:51] A contemporary of Ernest Holmes, he also taught that the God that revealed itself to Jesus and Buddha and Krishna was the same God. That although religions are different organizations, they are much more apt to be described as different languages trying to express the same thing.

[00:01:17] There's a golden thread that runs through all. He founded the Self-Realization Fellowship and he said of the nature of God, you do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you. It's such an interesting divine contradiction

[00:01:44] that in order to find God, I have to lose myself. I have to loose myself from who I have thought I was. And yet in finding God, who I really am is revealed. The search for the divine is ultimately the path of

[00:02:07] discovering our true self. And the path of self-discovery is ultimately the path of realizing the divine in, through, and all around us. Paramahansa Yogananda was also a talented songwriter. He wrote many magnificent chants. My favorite is entitled, Listen, Listen, Listen, which I think the original title was,

[00:02:34] I Will Never Forget Thee. And Laura has been so kind to agree to play it for us today.

[00:02:41] Listen to my heart song. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. I will never forget thee.

[00:03:19] Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. Can you hear it? Can you hear your heart song?

[00:04:01] It's the song that reveals the totality of your life. It's the song of the depth of your experience, every joy and every toil. It's the song of your struggle and your excitement. Can you hear it?

[00:04:28] At the same time, your heart's song is that which transcends all experience. It is an unconditioned joy within you that can't be touched by anyone or anything or taken away. It is a song of resilience and true grounded spirit. It is a song of pure joy. Can you hear it? Can you hear your heart's song?

[00:04:59] It is the song of your brilliant uniqueness. It is the recognition that no one has ever existed quite like you, that you are a divine expression, infinite in your capacity to express this thing called life in new and creative ways. Can you hear it? Can you hear your heart's song?

[00:05:27] At the same time, it is the song of our vision, oneness revealed. In your heart's songs is the song of all other hearts. It is the song of your ancestors, of their toils and tribulations, of their joy.

[00:05:51] It is the song of shared experience. It is the song of humanity expressing through you. Can you hear it? Listen, listen, listen to my heart's song. Listen, listen, listen to my heart's song. I will always love thee.

[00:06:14] I will never forget thee. I will never forget thee. I will never forget thee. How do you hear your heart's song? For me, the answer is beauty. I reach my heart's song via the gateway of the beautiful. Human connection,

[00:06:42] art, nature. Nature for me is in a state, a perpetual listening. Its voice is listening. Imagine a tree in a park and the countless conversations it has heard of passengers walking

[00:07:05] by its branches and its leaves, never once sharing any of their secrets. Nature is this beautiful listening. And we hear our own heart's song when we give in to our own nature. Our heart is always singing,

[00:07:27] but it is also always listening. How do you hear another's heart's song? Well, when you're in resonance with your own and someone else is in resonance of theirs and there's listening, the shared sanctuary that is listening between the two of you, your songs come together and you dance

[00:07:51] and your heart's song is added to and their heart song is added to and they never quite express in the same way. It's like coming home to yourself again and again and again. In the science of mind, Ernest Holmes teaches this idea that we are not just expressions of the one spirit. We are individualizations

[00:08:20] of it. The whole damn enchilada theory. The all in all. He says there is one mind and we each are expressions of its wholeness. He shares the real self is included in the greater self. It is nothing less than a reproduction of the universal mind on the scale of the individual. This is the real

[00:08:50] person. One mind, one universal mind individualized in each and every one of us. Could we say as well that there's one universal heart? One universal heart individualized in each and every one of us singing the world song, singing our uniqueness and our oneness into being. Listen, listen, listen,

[00:09:20] listen to my heart song. Listen, listen to my heart song. I will always love thee. I will never forget thee. I will always love thee. I will never forget thee. I first heard listen, listen, listen when I was 15 years old. Two lovely individuals who were a part of the Church of Religious Science, Mary and Alan Feldman,

[00:09:50] brought me to Religious Science Teen Camp. They made sure to give me hugging lessons before. Teens gathered together, encouraged to embody their authenticity and to recognize that they're loved just the way they are.

[00:10:13] And in the evening time, the closing ritual was to create a circle and all the lights would go down and there would be a candle at the center. And anyone who felt called to share could speak, not to any individual in the room, but to the candle, every voice representing the entire whole

[00:10:37] of the group. They could speak to God. They could speak to a loved one that was either far away or no longer physically present. They could pray. And it was just heard. And at this particular time, it was the early

[00:10:56] 1990s, and we were moving through the AIDS epidemic, which stole many, many young people from us, especially gay men. And in this circle were young people who had to grapple not only with the loss of friends and

[00:11:17] loved ones, but with a society that was rejecting of gay people. There were gay men who had to suffer the most terrible of illnesses while at the same time experiencing the rejection of their place of worship. In many cases, the rejection of their family and loved ones just

[00:11:44] for being gay. So these young people at this time, they were struggling mightily with what it meant to be in relationship with the love of God, with the love of family, with learning to love oneself. And when the ritual would close, we'd all sing this song together.

[00:12:10] Listen, listen, listen. And the lyrics changed a little bit. And so I've asked Laura to share a slightly different version of the song.

[00:12:36] A silver lining, if there was one, to the AIDS epidemic is that it brought a new era of hospice

[00:13:44] in our country, championed by New Thought leaders like Louise Hay and Ram Dass. I just think of someone being in a safe and sacred space to be relieved from the prison of belief, of rejection of God, to be released from the prison of their own self-rejection, to hear in hospice as they're dying and passing

[00:14:08] away. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. I will always love you. I will never forsake you. I will always love you. I will never forsake you. And we'd sing this song as teens, altogether teenagers, for God's sake. And we'd move it down from the singing to a whisper. Listen, listen, listen.

[00:14:35] And then to a humming. The dying embers of a song forever sung. John O'Donohue taught a lot about

[00:14:58] listening to life. And he taught this idea that listening to life is about surrendering and awakening, awakening, awakening and surrendering. We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time. Each night we

[00:15:24] surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. Waking and sleeping, hanging on and letting go. Breathing in, breathing out, birth and death. None of these things happening separate from one another, but intimately created the rhythm of life, awakening and surrendering.

[00:15:55] He continues, at birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender, they frame each day and each life. Between them the journey where anything can happen. The beauty and the frailty. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. It's always playing. It's always there. We get in touch with it

[00:16:24] by giving in to these rhythms of life. But it's challenging sometimes. Even for the wisest among us, our children. They can struggle with going to bed at night. The introduction of fear is perhaps the idea that something is not quite right. When my daughter was just a few months old, I walked by her room where her

[00:16:51] mom was trying to help her fall asleep and she was singing to her. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song. I will always love you. I will never forsake you. I will always love you. I will never forsake you. Too young to understand the words, but wise enough to fully embody their meaning.

[00:17:21] Our daughter experienced the feeling of those words. She could feel them physiologically through the touch of her mother's skin. Her heart in beat with the heartbeat of her mother. Listen, listen, listen to my heart song.

[00:17:45] As years would go by and whenever our daughter would struggle to sleep, it was an opportunity to engage in this ritual. Sometimes I was only so engaged I really wanted to listen, listen, listen to the Dodger game downstairs. But there was this truth. And isn't that the beauty of a song? It doesn't come from nowhere.

[00:18:11] It comes from everywhere. It comes from everywhere. It's always right there. Listen, listen, listen. How can we start listening to one another in a more sacred, meaningful way? If we could do that, we could unlock the meaning of existence and the joy of our lives.

[00:18:38] Listening isn't so much about turning the volume up. In fact, you've got to turn it down. Listening really isn't even about hearing what one another are saying. It's about beholding who someone is. It's good to hear what they're saying. But I think what people want at the deepest level, at the sacral and spiritual level,

[00:19:05] is to be seen, witnessed, and beheld. It's an honoring of their heart song so that it can come forward. Every class I teach, I try to give some sort of sharing guidelines. But they're really all about engaging one another and deeper listening so that we can not just hear what people are saying. We can hear who they are. What did Maya Angelou said?

[00:19:34] You won't remember anything that anyone did for you in your life as much as you will remember how they made you feel. What did Emerson say? Who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying. Guideline one has something to do with being fully present. Being fully present to the person that's sharing. It's incredibly difficult to do.

[00:20:00] It requires, at least in my life, some preparation beforehand. I have to recognize my own need to share, my own stuff, hear it, and then put it aside so that I can be fully present to who is in front of me. I don't think there's a more vulnerable exercise than listening. Than listening. Because listening requires openness to change. And we don't like that.

[00:20:31] We struggle with that. Sakij Henderson said, To truly listen is to risk being transformed forever. That's the risk of being fully present. That's the risk of surrendering to the rhythm of life here and now in the presence of another human being. Guideline two has to do with this idea of only sharing from your personal experience.

[00:21:00] But it's really about a higher consciousness of listening. It's recognizing that the majority of time when people are sharing who they are and what's going on with them, what they're not looking for is us to say how we just went through something similar. What they're not looking for from us is to fix their problems or give them advice. So we only share with what resonates in our own experience. To truly listen is to see someone,

[00:21:30] which is to truly see that they are more than capable of working their stuff out. It's to give them the light and listening of encouragement. It's to see and affirm their beauty. It's to honor what resonates with you and to share it in your own experience. But it ultimately is to witness them so profoundly, even in a state of their brokenness, that they are perfect, whole, and complete. Beautiful beings capable of articulating their own experience

[00:22:00] without us needing to get all up in their business. And then there's confidentiality. Confidentiality. Which speaks to this idea of the sanctuary we create when we're sharing deeply with one another. Some people say that confidentiality means keeping something secret. I don't believe that. For me, it's about keeping it sacred. It's the recognition that what you shared with me

[00:22:28] in the sanctuary we've created together and what I shared with you should not be spoken outside of this sanctuary because people would not understand it. When I sing, listen, listen, listen to you here, hopefully it's a little adorable. If I sing it to people at Costco, they might call the police. Talking doesn't require sanctuary.

[00:22:59] Revealing yourself does. Revealing yourself requires sacred space. It's a greed upon space. It's the room for your heart song to be played and added to. Greeded and embodied in a more powerful and profound way. I can't really explain how it is, but I like to share in the classes, if you could master these skills of listening,

[00:23:29] you will become a master of this teaching. If in your interactions, even this week, you can be a little bit more present, a little bit more open to sharing from your own personal experience instead of trying to fix others, if you can create sanctuary and confidentiality, you will be a spiritual master. Perhaps we should add a final step

[00:23:58] to find the courage to affirm the being who is sharing, to find the courage to acknowledge them, to admire them, to speak the truth we know about them that we've allowed to be in the hidden heart. I hear you. I love you. I appreciate you. Not just the Starbucks person who gives you your coffee and says, I appreciate you. I deeply appreciate who you are.

[00:24:29] This is what our loved ones will remember most about us. This is where strangers become the best kind of friends because we have the courage to tell people who I see and when they have the courage to step into that truth that we've seen, they can physiologically change and transform. Our heart song is always there to connect to. It's always singing to us. We can sing it to others

[00:24:56] and we can receive it in our own heart. It's August 2nd, 2025. My daughter and I have been in Vail, Colorado. God takes off her clothes and reveals herself. Beautiful place. We're on the way down the mountain and it's a tough day for me. It's the one-year anniversary of my father's passing. Our son has been there with us as well, but our family looks a little differently

[00:25:26] and we're going down the mountain and my mind is caught up in that and I listen, listen, listen to a siren behind me. I'm speeding in a construction zone. I get pulled over and Nancy gets to also listen, listen, listen to a police officer give daddy a lecture and a big ticket. And I'm driving away from the scene of me receiving the ticket and you ever have that experience? I'm driving really slow because I don't want to get pulled over again.

[00:25:55] Life is so tough and hard and fragile sometimes. I can't help it. I've held it together well, but there's a tear that's escaping down my eye and down my cheek. And just then I feel the hand of my little girl on my back. She's rubbing my back and she's singing to me.

[00:26:15] Listen to my, listen, listen. I will always love you. Forsake you.

[00:26:43] I will always love you.

[00:27:43] Thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast. This podcast is made possible by the generous contributions from listeners like you. To make a donation, please visit milehighchurch.org.