Yes, Your Heart is Smart
Listen along, or listen instead:
Before mastering any relationship or path in life, master the relationship with your heart.
Make friends with your heart’s wisdom, laws, and limitations.
When we talk of the “heart”, it’s not the physical organ (left of the centre of chest), but just to the right of the centre, in the spiritual, energetic heart (the heart chakra). It is the manifestation of “the self”.
That right there deserves a bit of a pause.
Wherever you are listening or reading, bring your hands up and place them on your chest, just right of the centre. You may have even closed your eyes just now, and if you’re looking for something even more specific to visualize; see it as a meridian, a small spinning disc. It’s green.
There it is. There’s the portal to your heart’s wisdom.
So how do we start cultivating it in our daily lives and why should we?
The mind keeps you safe
If you’re anything like me, I live 99% of my life bearing the weight of my brain. I overthink and strategize small details, situations, and problems to be solved. Every person or conversation I ruminate over, takes me out of presence and uses up precious prana. My brain burns up tons of energy and in return it gets rewarded with a paycheque and validation that thinking pays the bills.
If you know me, you know I am a mom of two with a few different jobs and hustles, and so being in practical thinking mode may seem perfectly normal. But this state that I am describing is an “unconscious” one.
And the job of the heart is to bring more “consciousness” to our unconscious lives.
The brain is not a single gal running a house and home relying solely on her own intellect. In fact, she has a loving partner;
The heart.
Our brains need an awakening
This begins with the Reticular Activating System, or RAS. This is a system above your spinal cord and its job is to connect the subconscious with the conscious part of our brain.
Consciousness cannot happen in the cortex, the brain, without an awakening, and they say the best kind of “awakening” is the one that comes from the movement of the heart.
Heart-Brain Coherence
The communication between the heart and the RAS is what we know as “Heart Brain Coherence”, and although I am still a student, not yet a master, this has been a game-changer.
The brain is the “I”. The heart is the “existing”, so together they make the “I am” state and when they are aligned it creates that flow. We need flow to know if we’re on the right career path, parenting in accordance to our values, hanging with the right people, eating the best foods for our bodies.
For most of us, that connection to the heart, those heart check-ins are not part of our daily practice. And so it takes practice to cultivate that heart-brain coherence.
The first step in developing heart-brain coherence is to make friends with the heart. Understand it’s wisdom.
The Heart’s Wisdom
The heart carries wisdom that your brain, and your ego can’t comprehend. Your ego lives in the past and thrives off patterns, so a movement from the heart, or a question answered by the heart may scare or threaten the ego, and that’s why we ignore the heart or don’t consult it in the first place.
When the heart moves, it just moves. It says “yes” to whatever reflects love and oneness and says “no” to fear and separateness. It considers your fear or separateness and also the fear and separateness reflected from others.
Your heart has access to source consciousness and universal consciousness. Yup, I said that.
If you’re a religious or spiritual person you know that the heart is a connection to the divine, God, or a higher self. If you are completely atheist or an earthly individual, then I’ll bring it back to the body science again: we are operating in an unconscious mode, an “asleep” state. Activating the heart activates the RAS, which opens up our consciousness; and from consciousness we can see what is really here, what is “here” beyond our 9-5, the bills, UberEats, the latest box-office blockbuster, and deadlines.
It can be a radical notion for folks to grasp that the brain, the ego is an “unconscious state” and the heart activation is an “conscious one”.
The Heart’s Laws
There is no ego with the heart, so therefore it has no ability to want anything for itself, to hold grudges against anyone. It has no agenda, no personal motive. It doesn’t love others for its own sake. It doesn’t ask you or anyone to give up something or change something to be loved.
The heart is unconditional.
You can’t bargain with it, or offer rewards or punishment to get something from it.
The heart asks nothing. The heart needs nothing. It’s like the sun that’s going to keep on shining, whether you wake up or sleep in.
Our Heart’s Limitations
There are no grey areas with the heart. It’s non-conceptual. It’s either a yes or a no. When you feel a deep urge to do something or not do something, that is your heart’s wisdom, though. It won’t explain itself like the mind. You won’t have a conversation back and forth of why yes or why no. The heart will only provide you with the feeling.
As much as I have examined a potential metaphor, the heart is not Zoltar from Big. It is not your personal wish-granting machine, nor fortune teller. But yes, you can ask your heart questions, of course.
It’s your heart. Ask away.
In fact, the heart knows no “body”, no “one”.
The Ego’s Version of Love
Most romantic relationships are built on “specialness”, which is the ego’s version of love.
I love you because you are: attractive, creative, cool, interesting, adventurous, funny….So being with you makes me feel special.
But as soon as you stop being those things, or you stop making me feel special, I’m going to stop loving you, or cheat on you, or leave you. And I’m going to find someone new (or someone from the past) to make me feel special again.
This is not the kind of love that comes from the heart. That “ego love” is the protagonist of the love songs on the radio, made up by man, and it’s a deadly myth.
That is not her. That is not her job. Those are not her laws, those are not her rules.
The Heart Cannot Break
So in essence, the heart cannot break. The suffering and pain we feel from loss is simply or brain’s, our ego’s response to lack, to abandonment, to self-worth, to safety, to survival, to deservability, to repeated stories from our past.
The universe only cares about our expansion. It doesn’t support our smallness. Us retreating and balling up does not serve the purpose of higher consciousness, and so the heart gets nothing from closing up. Our heart is designed by nature to stay open, and in constant communication with our desires because staying open grants nature’s law too – to procreate.
It’s true that pain gets stored in the body. It is also true that what we experience as “heartbreak” is often in our minds.
Ask that hurt in the middle of the night – where are you?
Your mind says: “here.”
but your heart says: “I’m alive.”
Not for the Faint of Heart
I believe that most people who say they “acted from the heart”, were in fact acting from the ego. Present company included. I’m not a gambling woman, but I would put a lot of money on that one.
It can be dangerous when people are making key decisions, and key decisions that affect other people based on an internal guidance system they don’t have. Which is why it’s so important to cultivate our own.
This goes back to one of my core values in learning and development and one of the biggest lessons I have learned and continue to pass on; worry about your own damn self. Forget what other people are doing and focus your time and energy on cultivating the inner relationship you have with yourself and explore your inner world for wisdom.
- Yes, sometimes you ask your heart a question and you get nothing. It’s silent. It’s like the magic 8 ball that says “Ask again later”.
- Sometimes you get a pull from your heart towards something and you didn’t even ask it.
- Sometimes you don’t know if the whisper of guidance comes from the brain or from the heart.
- It takes practice to cultivate the wisdom of the heart, but you can trust the wisdom of the heart.
How can we cultivate heart wisdom?
- Connect to your heart. Place your hand on your chest. I have to point out that this isn’t an exercise that you use your mind for. You can’t just “think” about this, you have to “feel” about this. Is it there on the left in the physical manifestation, the heart organ? Is it slightly in the middle? To the right? Close your eyes. What colour is it?
- Doodle your heart: Get a piece of paper and a fine-tipped marker. Closing your eyes, and again, using feeling rather than brain activity, put pen to paper and move your hand along the paper and draw the shape or rhythm of your heart. Maybe it’s heart shaped like the classic symbol, maybe it’s the shape of the bloody organ in our chest, maybe it’s a series of geometric shapes. What is YOUR heart? Find out!
- Think of a dream of a goal that you have where there would be no limits from society. Your biggest wish for yourself. Ask yourself: Is this for me? Pay attention to what your heart says; a move to a yes, or a move to a no.
- Continue placing your hand on your “heart”. Repeat the following mantra: I trust you. I trust you. I trust you...
It takes practice to trust the wisdom of the heart.
Trust the wisdom of the heart.