How do we connect with our spiritual heart? The primary reason most of us don’t know how to connect with our spiritual heart is that we are not designed to connect without the access code. That may seem strange – it always has to me – to have this powerful source of personal attunement within us, and yet not be designed to use it all the time.
Our primary method of interpreting what happens in our lives and selecting our response is not with our hearts. It is with our brains. Our primary perceptual mechanism is in our head. It is through our brains that we gather life’s data and interpret it cognitively and emotionally.
What happens when something comes to our awareness? Let’s use my experience of an ice cream truck pulling up at a beach as an example I have
experienced over the years. The first thing I hear is a happy tune that plays from the truck as it pulls up at the curb. That data, the music, comes into my ear and is distributed across my brain (the cortex) by a part of the brain called the thalamus. My cortex (the thinking part of my brain) will come up with the recognition of the sound. It will recognize the tune – and that this sound means “ice cream truck.”
However, even before my cortex gets to the details, the emotional memory processor in my brain – the amygdala – will have already taken the data of that sound and checked it against my emotional memory database. It will connect with a positive emotional memory of ice cream and laughing children. As a result, I will already be feeling good by the time my cortex puts the ice cream truck response into my awareness. Although emotional memory seems to be distributed throughout the body, the processor is in the brain, and it is super fast.
If I experienced a different stimulus, such as spotting a shark fin out in the water – even before I cognitively identified it as a shark fin – my amygdala would have taken the raw data coming in from my
eyes, compared it to my emotional memories, and created a fear reaction within me. Even before I could think “Shark fin!” I would have been sitting up straighter and feeling fear.
These two mechanisms from the brain, the cognitive and the emotional, provide me with most of my view of the world around me and what it means to me. These basic functions are always on the job when I am awake.
My heart’s role in those moments at the beach was limited to that of the physical heart. It probably would have speeded up a little from a sense of positive excitement upon hearing the ice cream truck. It also would have sped up upon getting the fear signal from the amygdala about the shark fin. The spiritual heart would have remained neutral because it had not been called upon. My brain handles my interpretation of my life experiences, and creates how I react to them.
Scientific research has shown that we have the capability to choose to connect with our hearts in such a way that our hearts change our brains, and bring about a different perception of our life experiences. All people have had that experience, although it is
seldom intentional or recognized. Very few people know how to intentionally create that shift of perception. The discovery of how to do this is the greatest spiritual discovery of our time.
This connection to our hearts is accomplished primarily through our feelings. We have the ability to select feelings that activate a connection with our hearts. When that connection is made, we are able to experience a different perception of the events unfolding in that moment. That new perception is the result of our spiritual hearts expressing through the mechanism of our physical hearts.
The impact of this change of perception can be powerful and profound. It changes how we feel and the choices we see before us. We will explore in detail the feelings that are the heart’s access code and how to activate them even in times of duress.