By archelys3@gmail.com 5 Surprising Facts About Your Heart
I talk a lot about heart, here at Monk At Work. In fact, it’s one of the things I talk about the most.
But the heart I’m talking about is not just the heart of compassionate action, as in, “I want to hit my sales goal, but when I check in with my heart, I feel that I’m holding onto my goal a bit tightly, and I need to back off a bit.”
Having that kind of self-awareness is great — essential, even, to working holistically — but it’s also just the beginning of your heart, as I’m defining it.
So, here are the top five points that, as a Monk at Work, you should know about your heart:
Heart = centrality.
You may already think of your heart as your center, the calm place within. But it’s more than just the resting point of your mind — the heart is between the inner and outer worlds of your being.
Your outer world: your mind, your emotions, your physical body, and the world of your senses;
Your inner world: your soul, your connection to the Divine, and all that goes beyond what the world can make sense of, or define.
In sufism, the heart is known as “that which turns” between these two worlds. That is, until you reach a pretty high level of heart-awareness, you’re either paying attention to one or the other… and which one you’re paying attention to makes a huge difference in your experience of life, of course.
Heart = truth-meter.
Ever have that sensation of just knowing in your heart that something is true, even if you don’t know why it’s true, or if it’s something you’ve never heard before? You don’t have the experience to back up your feeling, but something in you is 100%, absolutely sure that this thing is the real McCoy?
The would be the truth-knowing element of your heart at work. Your heart knows truth from falsehood, without having to be taught a thing.
Al-Jilani, one of the most famous Sufi teachers of all time, said,
If your heart tells you no, it is unlawful, and if your heart tells you yes, it is lawful. If it stays silent and says neither yes nor no, then it is something dubious.
Heart = perspective.
It’s the place within you that knows a bit more than your head, or looks at the world a bit differently than reason and logic do.
How? Because of that “between the worlds” piece we just talked about. You “know” things through your heart that your mind can’t know yet, because your heart receives whispers and messages from that internal connection, even when your focus is on more worldly activities.
My Sufi teacher writes in his book, “The Path to Allah, Most High“:
Know that if Allah wishes to give life to a heart by giving it knowledge of Him, then this heart becomes the place of the [revelation] of divine inspirations.
And, lest someone think the heart is too airy-fairy to be brought into “real-world” business…
Heart = union.
Union of all that you are; both worlds, all aspects, all things considered. Contrary to popular misbelief, “trusting your heart” isn’t about abandoning common sense and throwing yourself off the cliff of blind faith; that only happens when someone doesn’t want to look at their feelings.
When you are solidly acknowledging the knowing in your heart, you have the sense of complete understanding and synthesis between the rational and the intuitive. “Acting from your heart” is about trusting the inner knowing you have, and seeing that it makes perfect sense, alongside the knowledge of your mind.
If there’s a contradiction between what you know in your heart and what you know in your mind, then you haven’t listened deeply enough to one of them. In the union of your heart, there’s enough room for both intuition and reason, and it’s often times when you bring the two of them together that differences gets ironed out, and they start understanding one another.
And that’s the synthesis you’re looking for. Without it, you’re acting out of balance. With it, though, you feel solid, connected, tuned-in, and fully aware of all you can be aware of.
Which leads us to number five…
Heart = certainty.
This is the one that most people in business could use a whole lot more of.
It’s perfectly normal to come across times where you have more questions than answers. Perhaps you have a decision to make, and it’s not an obvious one; maybe both choices could work, but you’re wanting the one that lets you be at peace with your choice.
The sufis say, “The light in the heart is the light of certainty.” That is, when you feel an answer in your heart, it has a qualitatively different sense to it than an answer in the mind alone.
So, if it’s certainty you want, don’t look to your mind to fulfill it. The mind is like a set of scales, weighing evidence, reason, logic, and what it can perceive from the world around it, to give an answer.
The heart, though, knows what it knows from an entirely different level of reality, and so it can know things your mind cannot. It can teach the mind from what it knows, though (that’s the bringing of the two together I mentioned above).
These, of course, are only five of the facets of what the heart is. What does “heart” mean to you? And can you see how much bigger “heart” is, than just the softer side of our humanity?
Read:
- The One & Only Antidote For Failure – archely
- Determine to fulfil your destiny and you will never be destroyed by defeat – archely
- 10 Life Changing Thoughts To Help You Never Run Out Of Gas – archely