Un-silencing Your Heart
Growing up, we often learn to turn away from the instinctive wisdom of our heart center.
The message at home, school, and with peers, is often to put aside the inner knowing of your heart's wisdom, to ignore it and instead, to go along with the main consensus to get along with others. We learn to squash, hide or shut down heart knowing and feelings, in order to please, to be accepted, to get along or be safe.
And slowly, over time, shutting down how you feel becomes the default pathway. The voice of your heart is silenced. You no longer feel, hear or valued its priceless wisdom. Modern culture doesn't teach us to how to access the the knowledge and wisdom that we hold in our hearts. We're taught to ignore and move away from our heart feelings and voice in order to get on with it, to be agreeable and fit in.
One of the most powerful tools we have to guide us, to connect to ourselves and the world around is our heart, and it's vital to be connected to this priceless inner gps system.
The human heart is mysterious, intelligent, powerful, deeply feeling and often misrepresented.
In these modern times, especially within western culture, the heart has been largely left on the shelf and forgotten.
And yet, there remains ancient wisdom and stories to guide us, information about the heart as a seat of the soul, a place of knowing and the compass and guide of our being. In many diverse spiritual traditions, the heart is given a place of honor, referred to as the "cave of the heart", the "well of the heart" and in early desert Christianity "the cell of the heartt", in energy medicine, the "portal of the heart". Taoist wisdom and Chinese medicine identifies the heart as the "Emperor" that governs all other function in the human body. These diverse perceptions have been substantiated by numerous scientific studies, showing the heart to be an organ of perception and communication, rich with nerve cells and a brain in its own right through which we view the world, an organ deeply rooted in our emotional and mental health.
Twelfth century Christian mystic, Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “The soul sits at the center of the heart, as though in a house.”
“The majority of modern peoples, if asked to find the place within their body where the unique self resides, would say they live about an inch above their eyebrow….. But most indigenous and historical peoples would locate the self someplace very different. They would gesture in the region of the heart. For most of our history of habitation on earth, that is where the seat of intelligence, the seat of the soul, was located. That this has changed is more an expression of how and what we are taught in western cultures than of some exact truth.” - Stephen Harrod Buhner
Slowly, we are returning to the awareness of the heart's importance. The heart's central place in our being is slowly being restored. The Heart Math Institute has developed a simple practice called Heart Coherence to restore us to connection with our hearts, which been taught world-wide for many years.
Our heart's nervous system is attuned to other fields and is contantly receiving information in energetic form. Our world is full of the invisible and the felt, the language of the soul.
The Greeks had a word for the hearts ability to perceive meaning from the world - Aisthesis. The word literally means “to breathe in”. It is receiving the world, a taking in of soulful communication that connects us. When we experience this, we experience that we are not alone in the world. Aisthesis denotes the moment in which a flow of life force, imbued with communications, moves from one living organism to another.
“the organ of aisthesis is the heart; passages from all the sense organs run to it, there the soul is set on fire” - James Hillman
Want to get started strengthening your connection to your heart wisdom? I offer several pathways to re-connection. Book a free consult today for more information.
