The best questions found me last week.

“How do I feel my heart? What do you mean when you say that? What am I trying to listen for?”

I replied, “Your heart has a voice that speaks beyond the controlling thoughts of conditioning, the inherited beliefs, the ‘shoulds’. The language of heart communicates without shame”.

“But it’s hard sometimes to know if I’m making contact with my heart or with my head. How can I know?”

“Taking a deep breath can help. It sounds trite, yet our heart is located between the lungs, so breath takes us into direct contact with its wisdom + power. Rituals, practices or basic thoughts focused on the body helps. Guiding attention away from the head (or the mind brain) and down into the grounding of the body is a good first step.”

Let it be clear that the path into heart does not imply a turning away from the mind. We don’t do this work to reside solely in the heart from here on out. We are trying to extricate ourselves from only feeding the mind or only feeling the heart. We are deepening understanding of how both the head and the heart have their role.

Maybe the question ought to be: “How do I find a balanced flow of communication between the head and the heart?”. As with all wise endeavours, get quiet and listen. The heart will speak in a myriad of ways, through breath, through a child’s laugh, through standing amongst the trees, through a flutter travelled into the belly. The heart will pull you out of your comfort zone, scream you away from the disingenuous and ground you into integrity.

The brain seeks to understand and the heart knows. No qualifiers, no justification, no hesitation. It needs curiosity, quiet and many other hearts to help light the way.