i heart connection © erincarver.com

The heart is a mysterious organ. To some it’s simply a very efficient pump; to others it is the seat of the soul. But there isn’t a human being on earth who doesn’t know what it means to feel something in your heart, to have a heart that’s bursting with joy or a heart that’s broken.

When I want to access my intuition (inner teaching), I drop my awareness into my heart. I don’t really understand why it works, but it does - my mind stills, I stop telling myself stories and cut to the truth.

I’ve long been fascinated by the research conducted by the Institute of HeartMath and its latest study is about the heart connection between mother and child. It showed that when a mother placed her attention on her baby, she became more sensitive to the subtle electromagnetic signals generated from the infant’s heart, as detected in her brainwaves.

It’s not commonly known that the heart develops and begins beating in the foetus, before the brain is formed. Or that the human heart possesses a complex energetic system that processes electromagnetic information that can be detected up to 3ft outside the body.

IHM’s research shows that the heart produces 40 to 60 times more electrical amplitude than the brain. The heart acts like a director, and much of the rest of the human body follows its lead. 

“The heart puts out a powerful, rhythmic signal that the brain responds to,” IHM Director of Research Dr Rollin McCraty has explained. “In a way, we could say that the heart and brain ‘talk’ to one another, and together they set the rhythms for the entire nervous system and body.” 

The concept that the heart directs the brain is a profound one, and perhaps provides a glimpse as to why I feel connected to my inner wisdom when I’m in my heart. And it makes it even more important to listen to the heart’s rhythm and keep it healthy.

But I don’t think the heart will be giving up its secrets any time soon.

Another vintage post from the Pearl Within archive about unseen beauty and the world that exists beyond our senses.

Time for some heart wisdom from Jack Kornfield…

If you missed it, here’s my first attempt at a manifesto for life…

I derive great pleasure from the English language. I especially enjoy discovering new words - or rediscovering words that had slipped out of my vocabulary.

My word of the day is sapient. It’s another way of saying wise, having good taste, or good judgment. It comes from sapience - meaning wisdom. Related to this is the Latin word sapere, meaning “to taste, to be wise, to know”.

The present participle of sapere forms part of Homo sapiens, the Latin name for the human species. According to Wikipedia, the 18th-century physician and zoologist Carl Linnaeus, who came up with the name, had originally given humans the species name of diurnus, meaning man of the day.

But he later decided that the dominating feature of humans was wisdom, hence the application of the name sapiens. This was intended to emphasise Man’s uniqueness and separation from the rest of the animal kingdom.

I wonder if Linnaeus, had he been around today, would still consider the human race to be wise? If wisdom is the right use of knowledge, have we used it wisely? Looking at the state of the world today, it would be hard to describe mankind as sapient.

As nature is out of balance, so are we. And surely the return to wisdom starts with us, deep in our own inner space.

Most of my clients instinctively know what I mean when I talk about inner wisdom - what I call The Pearl Within. But then most of them consistently fail to listen to that inner wisdom. Why is this, given that it always guides them to the right course of action?

Because their minds are buzzing with random thoughts, other people’s voices (often their parents’), limiting self-beliefs and all manner of other inner space detritus.

The voice of your inner wisdom does not shout. In fact, it often whispers. So if you have a cacophony of noise in your head, you will not hear it. I repeat, YOU WILL NOT HEAR IT.

So what’s the best way of turning down the noise and tuning into the whispers? There are many ways, but the simplest one I know is to drop your awareness out of your head and into your heart.

Do it now - close your eyes, take a deep breath, and focus your attention on your chest. Imagine your awareness is dropping down, out of your mind and into your heart. Say quietly to yourself: “I am heart.”

Allow thoughts to come and go, without holding on to any of them. When you feel still and centred, ask to speak to your inner wisdom. Ask it anything, but remember it is softly spoken.

You might not get the answer straight away, or in the form of a thought. The message could come in a variety of ways - something you read or watch, something that a friend says, an image on a poster, anything.

So it’s important that you are open and receptive or you might miss the message altogether. You’ll know it when it arrives, though - because you’ll have a gut feeling.

If Homo has any chance of living up to its sapiens, then we could all do with getting in touch with our wisdom. You know it makes felt-sense…

This morning, the Telegraph website published a lovely gallery of photos of naturally occurring heart shapes (link below), which demonstrates that there really are hearts everywhere if you look for them. It got me thinking about the heart icon, how our brains scan for it and pattern-match it all the time, and what were the origins of a symbol that has come to mean everything from eternal love to Valentine’s Day.

According to the website heartsymbol.com, in prehistoric times the icon was not even a heart - it was an ivy leaf, which represented eternal love, withstanding death. This makes perfect sense, as the ivy is an evergreen - and also the heart chakra is associated with the colour green rather than red.

We have the medieval tradition of courtly love to thank for the replacement of heart-shaped ivy with the red heart. After that, the circulation of the heart symbol through art, playing cards and above all, through religious worship, has made the heart probably the most popular non-geometric symbol in the world.

Now it means everything from “I like you very much” to “I love you deeply and passionately” and everything in between. It has been commercialised, monetised and animated but still it remains a universal icon of love, passion, compassion, devotion and much more.

To me, the heart symbolises presence. Much of the work I do as a human potential coach is about encouraging people to live from the heart, not the head. Most people can do it immediately with a little guidance, but the real test is being able to stay focused on your heart in the wider world, when you’re surrounded by people who are in their heads all the time.

I need to be reminded to drop my awareness into my heart and be present, so I admit to using little heart stickers in key places as visual cues. There’s one on my laptop, one on my mobile phone, one on my bathroom mirror.

It’s a discreet, personal trigger for me to check whether or not I’m caught up in my thoughts.

It’s a shame, though that we have lost contact with the ivy leaf. I much prefer its connection to nature, to growth, to everlasting love.

Last night I visited a friend who has two children - one almost three, the other eight months old. They’re an absolute delight to be around and I realised it’s almost impossible to be in your head while you’re with little ones. Stay in your heart and you experience the joy of childhood all over again.

It’s all about play, of course - especially for the toddler - but it’s also about stories. Even though the littlest one can’t speak, you can see her bite and play with toys as if she’s constructing a narrative.

As a species we have a profound relationship with storytelling. Human beings love stories - in fact, in some fundamental sense, we need stories.

Narrative is a basic organising principle of memory, and from early childhood we tell ourselves stories about our actions and experiences. Accuracy is not the main objective - coherence is. If necessary, our minds will invent things that never happened, people who don’t exist, in order to hold the narrative together.

This tendency to confabulate - to fill in the gaps of memory with plausible inventions that preserve narrative continuity - is most pronounced in people suffering significant memory loss, or in tests with participants who have had the connection cut between left and right hemispheres.

Recent experiments have revealed a function of the left hemisphere dubbed “The Interpreter”, which jumps in to make sense of memories when it has no direct access to those memories or the context in which they were made.

Narrative coherence helps us navigate the world - to know where we’re coming from and where we’re headed. It tells us where to place our trust and why. What stories give us, in the end, is reassurance. And as childish as it may seem, that sense of security - that coherent sense of self - is essential to our survival.

So it makes sense to me that if storytelling is so important to our brains, then we need to make sure we construct a narrative that allows us to flourish. Even if you enjoy reading them, no one wants to live in a horror story. It’s never to late to make sure your story has a happy ending.

(Includes excerpts from Your Storytelling Brain by Jason Gots, www.bigthink.com/ideas/41943)

Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today’s a gift - that’s why they call it the present. You may have heard that one before and it might seem a bit of a cliche but it’s worth looking into what that really means in practice.

It’s all about freeing ourselves from the past, not worrying about the future and living in the moment. How does that work, though? How do you live in the moment? For me, it’s about accepting reality - being at peace with whatever is happening right now this instant, and not trying to deny it. You may not like what’s happening right now, and by all means you can take action to respond to the reality you find yourself in, but respond from a place of stillness, calm and presence.

Presence is the gift of the present. Presence is that feeling of being totally centred, aligned, relaxed and in flow with whatever is arising. Presence is a state of being, not doing. Presence is about being in the heart, not the head.

You can always tell when someone is not present because they’ll be yawning, scratching themselves, looking out the window or over your shoulder while talking to you. They won’t be present with you because they’ll be busy telling themselves a story about you, about themselves, formulating their next sentence or argument before you’ve finished speaking.

But being truly present with another person is a wonderful thing. They will know they are in the presence of authenticity.

There are many ways of bringing yourself into the present moment - mindfulness practice being perhaps the best known. The bottom line is, you can’t be present if you’re stuck in your head - in that clogged-up world of thoughts and stories. Try dropping your awareness down into your heart, imagine breathing in and out of your chest, and really start noticing the air as it enters and leaves your nostrils. Then become aware of different parts of your body - your hands, legs, feet. If thoughts arise, allow them to come and go without buying into them.

and grumpy while you look serene. And if you really are present, your presence will touch others and maybe they will have a better day as a result.

It’s much easier to be present when you’re in nature, or in a still and beautiful landscape. But why not try it next time you’re on a packed train? While you’re being in the now and accepting reality, you can smile to yourself as all around you people start getting annoyed.

In 1988, Don’t Worry, Be Happy - Bobby McFerrin’s anthem to happiness - became the first a capella song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. And while many may remember it as a slightly annoying ditty with a bit of whistling, the fact is that McFerrin’s lyrics are brimming with psychological insight. And it’s worth pointing out that the title was inspired by a quote from Indian mystic Meher Baba.

In every life we have some trouble/when you worry you make it double

Buddhists have been telling us for many years that worrying is like praying for what you don’t want. Science is now backing this up, with recent research linking worrying to heart disease.

Here, I give you my phone number/When you worry call me/I make you happy

Multiple studies have confirmed the positive correlation between social support and well-being, even the virtual kind.

Cause when you worry/Your face will frown/And that will bring everybody down

One of the most fascinating discoveries of recent neuroscience has been mirror neurons, which fire when we observe behaviour in others - ie the expressed emotions of others triggering a reflection of these emotions in us. So don’t frown, it’s contagious.

Put a smile on your face

And get everyone’s mirror neurons firing. Sometimes it’s called faking it till you make it, but I prefer acting as if. If you don’t feel happy, smile anyway and your brain will start to believe you are. There is plenty of evidence that consciously changing our thoughts and behaviours to emulate the emotions we’d like to feel helps us embody these feelings.

Don’t worry, it will soon pass/Whatever it is

In 1983, a seminal paper was published by an American psychologist which indicated that we grossly overestimate the negative impact of events that befall us, from cancer to divorce to paralysis, and return to our previous levels of happiness shortly after these negative events take place.

So I’m with George Harrison here - All Things Must Pass; but when tragedy does strike, show compassion to yourself as well as others, allow emotions to arise and flow, and don’t store them away to be dealt with at some future date. However painful the emotions are when the challenging event happens, you shall reach your happiness set point again, whatever you believe at the time.

My top tip for dealing with worry is simple. When an anxious thought enters your mind, stop and take a deep breath. Ask yourself, “Is this thought true? Do I absolutely know it to be true?” Nine times out of 10, the worrying thought will scuttle away, unable to to justify its existence.

Then drop your awareness into your chest, and imagine breathing in and out of your heart. Say quietly to yourself, “I am heart.” Then you’ll know what your heart wants for you, which almost certainly is to stop worrying and be happy.

This post owes a debt of gratitude to the brilliant website Brain Pickings www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/09/23/bobby-mcferrin-dont-worry-be-happy-neuroscience-psychology/