Yes, we’re crazy about the brain and how the mind works! Equally, we’re in love with the heart and how our emotions influence our lives.
Where traditional education puts its main emphasis on teaching us how to read, write and count, we are rarely educated on how to love, respect and trust. And yet, when our emotions and thoughts are aligned, we create both extraordinary experiences and deliver extraordinary results. Today, the field of neuroscience has made significant steps in terms of describing how the brain works and much is already written about how tapping into our brain’s power can help improve our quality of life; i.e. how we act and react to the events in our lives is intrinsically linked to how we think and our personal and environmental values (“rules”) we live by.
By contrast, we are just now beginning to unravel the ‘mysterious’ power and impact of the human heart and how it is at the core of who we are and therefore how we feel about ourselves and our lives.
The purpose of the human heart is to maintain optimized levels of blood circulation. If we extend this metaphor into an emotional context, this may be reminding us to keep our hearts open in order to circulate feelings of happiness, abundance and success with all those we come into contact with. When we live wholeheartedly, it might be said that we show up as a complete being, present and real.
Current research being undertaken on the interlinked topics of stress, emotions and the intelligence of the heart is helping change existing assumptions about “top performance and human physiology”. Where we have spoken of the brain mirroring a computing system and the heart being the pump, research is discovering that an alignment between the mind, heart and emotions is what creates extraordinary results.
Behind the daily actions we take, our emotions play as much of a role as our thoughts in spite of what conventional thinking would suggest. What we consider a change of mindset, requires us to have a change of heart as well as thinking in a new way.
Engagement and inspiration occur in the expanding and extracting, in tune with our heart-rhythm patterns. Every great athlete knows that as much as you need the expansion, you also need the contraction and the relaxation. When there is balance, we can be said to reach a “state of flow” or be said to be “in the zone”.
More importantly, in our work today, how well we decide, react and operate is determined by being in tune with our emotions. There is a common misconception that some emotions are good and some bad. All emotions give us clues as to where our heart’s energy is flowing in the present moment. Your heart serves only your being aliveness, so whatever feelings emerge, let them be.
The absurdity of trying to categorize and “contain” bad emotions (such as anger in the comedy movie “Anger Management”) is summarized well in the following line from the film – “Temper’s the one thing you can’t get rid of, by losing it.”
Instead through sincere communication, deep listening, speaking your own truth by being courageous in conversation, we can give our emotions a useful context and so feel more alive.
