How to Develop an Understanding Heart

Spiritualizing our understanding can help us find miracles and meaning among the mess.

True peace of soul is the fruit of spiritual understanding applied to all the ends and outs, ups and downs, delights and disappointments, successes and failures of life. It can come in a flash of intuitive knowing or through an experience …

Spiritual understanding comes with seeking it and with realizing that human understanding alone doesn’t always produce good results. We use our spiritual understanding when we make lemonade out of the lemons in life.

King Solomon of the Bible, considered in his day to be one of the wisest and most prosperous of all human beings, asked God for only one thing … He asked for an understanding heart so that he would be empowered “to judge your people, that I may discern between good and evil” (1 Kings 3:9 NKJV).

Knowing More Than You Can See

Spiritualized understanding is a precious jewel that taps into the infinite spring-fed well of compassion. It takes us gently beneath the facts of life—the circumstances, emotions, and perceptions—to a truer seeing.

Spiritual understanding is the doorway to using our experience to enrich rather than embitter our lives.

Through the surface of whatever our eyes can see and our minds interpret, spiritual understanding drops a plumb line to universal truth. This dissolves the crusted edges of the facts into the nourishing nectar of acceptance, forgiveness, humility, and compassion.

Our inner vision is infused with the divine perspective through our willingness to see the situation or person differently. Out of this comes a quintessential understanding of right action …

The Benefits of Understanding

There are universal spiritual laws that live and operate whether we are aware of them or not. If our thinking and responding to life are in alignment with these laws, life works. We find that even in the midst of the greatest difficulty, there is an ineffable sense of clarity that leads to beneficial action.

Spiritual understanding gives us the vision to see through the mists of our experience to the highest, most life enhancing truth. It helps us find the miracle and meaning in the mess. In this awareness, we can make informed decisions about our responses to people and life’s circumstances rather than reacting.

In our willingness, spiritualized understanding redeems our losses, failures, heartbreaks, and fears. It helps transform pain to gain because we see it differently. As the beloved Unity minister Eric Butterworth said in Discover the Power Within You, we are “not in the world to set it right but to see it rightly.”

Spiritual understanding is the doorway to using our experience to enrich rather than embitter our lives.

Opening to Understanding

How do we spiritualize our understanding? Start by praying to see beyond troubling appearances, situation, and circumstances. Ask to understand the person or situation from a spiritual perspective. Be willing to see it differently. Pray to see the person or situation differently.

Call on the powers of love (forgiveness, compassion) and release to inform your thinking … Let go of any person or situation troubling you into the alchemy of divine energy—just think about something else … Stay steady in your release until you feel some sense of peace and notice that your perspective has shifted …

As Solomon prayed for an understanding heart, so can we. Step-by-step, its manifestation will create healthy, harmonious relationships along with seeing the circumstances of our lives in the most helpful, life-enhancing, peace-producing way.

Practice Understanding

For the next 21 days, pray for an understanding heart. Notice any changes in your thinking or experiences.
Consider someone in your life who is difficult to love. Look beyond what makes the person difficult to love, and find a reason for their behavior that awakens your compassionate understanding.
What would an understanding heart empower you to see more clearly, judge more kindly, right now?

Excerpted from Adventures in Resilience. Read more about your 12 divine powers.