Living and Leading from the Heart
Preface:
The Heart feels isolated.
Its powerlines disconnected.
By the rational's concepts.
Maps. He has for everything.
All the Heart wants is to feel.
To experience. Express. Everything.
Joy. Sorrow. Content. Fear. Excitement. Pain.
So it knows its alive. Connected. Protected.
Trusting your Heart
Our society has become incredible intellectual and scientific. Left-brain thinking dominates our lives. Everything needs to be explained, analyzed, and tested before anyone can trust it. Gone are the days when we 'trusted our gut' to make decisions.
Even Psychology Today now makes trusting our gut into a science saying: "we need to follow a process to make sure that our intuition doesn't fool us":
Psychology Today: 'When Should you Trust your Gut? What Science Says.
Intuition and spontaneous insight seem to be skills of the past. AI, predictive data aggregation, and modeling are the future. There's less and less room for the unpredictability, un-controllable creativity of the Heart, and its limitless expression, free of concepts and norms.
What many corporations and governments want is predictive human behavior, steered by technology towards pre-determined actions that further their monetary and political agendas. All of this happens in a very subtle manner, and most people won't be able to notice the slow changes until it might be too late. Read Shoshana Zuboff's book 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' to understand how our creativity and freedom of thought might be stifled by this in the future.
Awakening the Heart
How can we awaken our Heart more and keep the powerlines to our Heart and its insights strongly connected?
It's effortless to stay connected, because it's natural, hardwired. But hardwired doesn't mean it doesn't need to be nurtured. It takes awareness and daily practice to harness the powers of your Heart.
There are many different methods you can use to enliven your Heart, over the years, I've tried many approaches. What all of them have in common is to learn how to bring your energy from the head into the Heart. Most of us have their physical or somatic energy up in the head for most of the day. That is quite normal in a left-brain society were rational, logic, and analytical thinking dominate. It gives us a feeling of control. It assures us that we stay focused on our plans and goals we have for our life.
Connecting to a deeper part in your body - which the Heart represents - is a journey into the unknown, where we don't really know what awaits us. It's better to hide somewhere on the map of our life than expose ourselves to the raw, unfiltered experience of being in the territory of the Heart. It's uncontrollable and uncomfortable to confront what we might find in the depth of our Heart. That's where unfulfilled desires, longing for love, and unresolved fears hide.
Do we have a choice?
...to be continued