Heart Smarts

Like the one-tenth of our brain that we currently use, I think now that most if not all of us have access to about one-tenth of our possible feelings. Sonia Johnson – The Ship That Sailed Into the Living Room

Maintaining personal boundaries, knowing what we want, and being self-protective and able to stand up for our values helps to create the experience of being well cared for and self-confident. We will call these strong-hearted verses timid or weak-hearted.

Sharing personal experiences that give others a glimpse into our private worlds, extending ourselves beyond our comfort zones, letting the light of a new day shine on old, habitual feelings and stagnant thoughts and exposing ourselves to new interactions and experiences, all serve to bring new movement and flexibility into our lives. We will name this openhearted verses closed- hearted.

Being willing to take into consideration the feelings, sensibilities and uniqueness of others and connect with them through the common ground of mutual feelings, extending good will and positive regard and empathizing with the fact that everyone is doing the best they can with what they have to draw from, allows a sense of overall well-being to permeate our lives. This can be called warm-hearted or softhearted verses cold-hearted or hard-hearted.

Approaching our life situations with a kind and gentle touch, opening to the quirky humor that sometimes bubbles up, brewed from the mix that is created when what we hope and expect meets with what life actually brings us and letting go of our tight-fisted attempts to control the game helps to air out and dispel the heavy, overwhelmed and burdened thoughts and feelings that accumulate from shouldering too much for too long. We will call these light-hearted verses heavy-hearted.

Strong-hearted, openhearted, warm-hearted and light-hearted are worthy and useful companions on the journey towards living well through right use and ownership of our personal power.

The shift that must be made to access these skills is in our awareness of the role that heart smarts plays in the task of living well. Heart skills are usually relegated to second-string status, positioned as the secretary of the intellect. In this position, our feeling nature simply takes dictation from the boss and carries out the mundane tasks of producing conventional feelings that support the decisions of the intellect-in-charge.

Used this way, our heart's intelligence is repressed and therefore manufactures resentment, suppresses grief, sadness and anger and stays mute when in disagreement with the intellect. As a result, we stay stuck in the experience of too much boredom and numbness from holding back our natural feelings of exuberance, creativity, curiosity and passion. Seen this way, there is a storehouse of energy ready and waiting to be called into service.

Let's resolve to liberate our heart's intelligences and promote them to executive status. Imagine creating a dream team of strength, openness, warmth, kindness, caring and delight that can partner with our intuition to co-create a life infused with a sense of well being and mastery.

We can enlist our heart skills to open and close, extend and receive, lighten, soften, let go and let down, stand up and stand out as exquisite responses to the rhythm, timing and tempo of our unique life challenges and intrigues.

(Excerpt from: BEYOND INTELLECT: Journey Into The Wisdom of Your Intuitive Mind)