Getting Heart-Led vs Getting Stuff
By Simon Dawe, published on May 23, 2014
The Institute of HeartMath has been doing some extraordinary research, discovering that the heart has a brain of its own, with neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells. They have found it can act independently of the brain and also send signals to the brain that can influence perception, emotional experience and ‘higher mental processes’. Science has been proving to us what we already know to be true in our inner wisdom, in our hearts.
I was reading a wonderful story today about how powerful coaching can be, when it encourages someone to lead from the heart. Heart centredness… I was going to say, it is at the heart of the matter. 😀 That phrase says it all! We speak of the heart in glowing terms. We don’t say, “It goes to the mind of the matter” and yet so many of our choices can be made according what we ‘think’, above and beyond what we know in our hearts to be true.
When I got married as a young man, it was for all the right reasons. Emily ticked every box on my list of the perfect woman. Firstly she had to be my friend. If we couldn’t talk, how could anything else work? We talked about everything. Then she was stunning, included in a top ten most beautiful women in Australia in her day. And she was smart, sharp as a tack. We had fun together. I knew she would be a wonderful mother. Not a bad list!
But I wasn’t listening to my heart. It was drowned out by the excitement, my determination that I should have this, that I deserved it; that I would make it work. Noise in the mind rattled on… I hadn’t learned to distinguish heart from mind and have them work together. I remember standing alone in one of the rooms of the church after the ceremony feeling down and not knowing why. I bucked myself up like I always did, because I had nothing else at my disposal at the time.
Years later when we divorced unhappily, I began a long journey of healing, forgiveness and recovery. It wasn’t much fun.
A line in a movie trailer I saw recently jumped out at me, “We can only hope getting what we want, is worth all the evil we do to get it.” Scores of films focus on that divide to a lesser extreme – between doing what is right and getting what we want. “Wall Street” & “The Devil Wears Prada” come to mind. It’s one of the basic plot elements, a core underlying tension in the human experience and so perfect for creating dramatic tension in story telling.
In real life it starts in the playground and it doesn’t let up; the temptation to sacrifice what we know to be right for us… in a trade off of one sort or another. To some small degree we are invited to sell our souls for favour, to fit in and a small trade like that, can so easily balloon out to larger trade offs for money, fame and glory. It happens all the time and what’s so sad about it, apart from the mayhem and destruction that goes with it, is the emptiness of the result. There really is no external approval, no amount of money or control or anything, to counteract the deep inner disapproval of one’s own soul.
Around the world there is a growing awareness of the depths to which corporations and governments will go, to have what they want, what they think they deserve. The evil seems to know no bounds, but then I guess that’s what evil is and does – know no bounds. There really is no gorging to satiate the appetite of the greedy and the lost. It’s ugly and disturbing, destructive and ultimately very sad. But there is a remedy… “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” Isaiah 55.1 What a wonderful invitation!
