Heart Intelligence: Unearthing Purpose for a Symbiotic Future
Heart Intelligence: Unearthing Purpose for a Symbiotic Future
Harnessing the Wisdom of Our Hearts to Tackle Planetary Challenges
Ever since I was a kid I would repeatedly ask myself three questions:
Why am I here?
What’s wrong with the world?
What can I do to help fix it?
This introspection led to an iterative process of self-discovery, prototyping my answers through business ventures, and observing how the world responded to the changes I made within. After nearly two decades, several iterations, and a major personal transformation I’ve begun crafting my responses from a very different place. Rather than rationalizing responses from my logical mind, I have learned how to tune into the wisdom of my body and let the voice of my heart speak.
Purpose is a story
At the end of the day, purpose is a story—a fictional narrative we experience through our thoughts, actions, and emotions. When we learn how to listen to our heart, we can design this story from the most powerful force in the universe: Love.
In this post, I want to share insights from the emerging field of study around heart intelligence, which provide powerful clues to answering the question of our purpose: both individually and collectively. Accessing the wisdom of the heart is a critical skill that we need to cultivate to effectively lead our society through the metacrisis and into the symbiotic age.
But before diving in, I want to ask one resounding question:
Why are you here?
The Virus of The Human Mind
The challenges we face stem from a virus of the human mind that believes we are somehow separate from nature. This belief compels us to construct a world as a castle in the sky, disconnected from who we are and what the world needs. While undoubtedly painful, this turbulent juncture of human history is a necessary step in the process of evolution toward the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.
By accessing the wisdom of our hearts, we can lead more meaningful and fulfilling lives and experience our rightful place as a part of nature.
The Hollowness of The World’s Dream
During my sabbatical, I realized that for many years, I was dreaming a dream that wasn’t mine. Only by experiencing the ‘success’ of the world could I taste its bitterness and understand the extractive nature of the systems we have designed as a modern western civilization.
By the time I was thirty, I had achieved financial independence and experienced the highest highs and lowest lows of the entrepreneurial journey. I built a life that many people dream of: I was married, had two children, and lived in a large country home on three acres with an uninterrupted view of a beautiful river. We had chickens and grazing animals, we grew food, and hosted vibrant multi-day celebrations to prepare soil, plant trees, and harvest produce.
This was the dream brought my ex-wife and me together when we met in Israel back in 2011, and yet I couldn’t escape the suffocating feeling in my chest that something was wrong, that I didn’t belong here, and that this wasn’t my home. I remember countless times driving back from work, looking at the red brick walls of the town where we lived, and asking myself, “How on earth did I end up here?”
This dissonance shook the deepest parts of my being. I had started successful companies that were making positive contributions to the world. I had a beautiful family. I lived in a community with people who shared my values.
Why did I feel so empty?
Listening to My Inner Voice
My rational brain couldn’t the find answers to this question. My logical mind couldn’t compute. I had written a very clear purpose statement that I could stand behind with conviction, and yet I knew something was wrong:
I am here to solve problems I care about with people I love and take care of myself and my family in the process.
It was only during a time of crisis when my world came crumbling down that I unpacked the dissonance between my espoused purpose and my inner experience of living that purpose. It was only through a period of great darkness and uncertainty that I learned how to listen to the voice of my heart, tap into the instinct of my gut, and work with the wisdom of my body.
I realized that I had was stuck in a broken marriage that wasn’t serving me or my family and that I had been neglecting this truth for many, many years.
Never before in all my years of education, professional development, and leadership training had I ever learned to listen to the voice of my heart. I now see my relationship to my heart and its inner voice as the single most important relationship in my life. With this in mind, I’ve completely redesigned my life, my habits and routines to stay connected to this source of intelligence and to cultivate deep embodied flow states in nature to allow this wisdom to emerge.
In listening to this inner voice I was taken through the most painful transformation I’ve ever experienced, and yet I am now beginning to witness the incredible fruits of that labor. I know I will look back at this time of my life with deep gratitude for trusting that inner voice.
The exciting thing is that this inner voice is available to everyone and science is starting to understand and map this field of heart intelligence. The findings are nothing short of astonishing and the techniques are super simple.
A New Kind of Heart Science
An organization called “The HeartMath Institute” has pioneered an entirely new field of research that reveals profound insights for all of humanity. The first is that the heart is far more than a simple pump; it is a dynamic, intelligent organ that influences our emotions, our immune system, and even cognitive functions. The second is that heart and brain are engaged in a continuous, two-way dialogue, where the heart provides 80% of the information flow to the brain.
The heart is understood to have its own central nervous system called the "intrinsic cardiac nervous system." This system consists of approximately 40,000 neurons, known as sensory neurites, which are capable of sensing, feeling, learning, and remembering independently of the central nervous system in the brain.
HeartMath has developed a very easy and effective practice that you can do in just a few minutes to cultivate heart-brain coherence.
The Quick Coherence Technique
The Quick Coherence Technique, developed by HeartMath, is a simple yet powerful method for achieving heart coherence quickly. It involves three main steps:
Heart-Focused Breathing: Focus your attention on the area of your heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. A common suggestion is to inhale for five seconds and exhale for five seconds, or whatever rhythm feels comfortable.
Activate a Positive Feeling: Make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling such as appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. This could be a loved one, a pet, a special place, or an achievement. Re-experiencing these feelings helps to shift your emotional state.
Sustain the Positive Feeling: Continue to focus on and sustain the positive feeling while maintaining heart-focused breathing. This helps to anchor the state of coherence, allowing you to benefit from increased emotional balance, mental clarity, and physiological harmony.
This technique is particularly useful in moments of stress or emotional drain, enabling you to quickly restore a state of balance and coherence and to act from a place of love rather than fear. It’s not like a visualization or meditation. It isn’t thought-driven. It’s feeling-oriented.
The Heartfulness Revolution
In the same way that the mindfulness revolution sparked millions of people to cultivate a daily practice of guiding their awareness toward the contents of consciousness, there is a new heartfulness revolution underway that invites us to cultivate a deep, embodied connection to the world of our hearts.
As part of this exploration, I’ve recently begun an online course with Leyla Salvadé of Standing Light, who has pioneered a method inspired by HeartMath’s research. It’s only been a week, but joining listening to her daily meditations gives me the sense that she is onto something—that the world is being invited to tap into the wisdom of our hearts, and by using visualizations we can process the memories and trauma stored within our hearts, and find new ways to work together and overcome the challenges we face.
At the end of the day, I believe that complex existential threats require an entirely new level of human coordination and ultimately a new mode of being that is rooted in abundance and trust rather than scarcity and fear. This means we need an entirely new way to relate to one another, and this starts first and foremost with ourselves. Our hearts are the organs that allow us to relate from a more compassionate and connected place. This is essential to overcome the apparent obstacles we face as we look past our differences, our pains and learn how to work together.
Finding Our Unique Contribution
Regeneration is a symphony. Our job is to find our instrument and stay in tune.
I believe that our hearts are a bridge between the intelligence of our mind and the wisdom of our body. The problem is, most of us don’t know how to access this holistic intelligence. By cultivating heart coherence as a daily practice—similar to mindfulness—we can begin to harness the power of our most potent electromagnetic organ in the body: the heart.
Each and every one of us has a unique set of gifts that we have been genetically wired to offer towards the challenge and beauty of the world that is unfolding. It is an unfolding process, but by learning how to listen to the heart (in the same way that we learn how to witness the mind in meditation), we can peel away the layers upon layers that have been bestowed upon us by our upbringing in an extractive Western society obsessed with material consumption.
Conclusion
By recognizing the heart as a source of intelligence and cultivating daily practices to honor this wisdom, we can refine our understanding of who we are, what is wrong with the world, and what we can do to help fix it.
If you’ve read this far I’d invite you to take a few minutes to place your hand on your heart, practice the quick coherence technique above and when you feel you’ve entered a state of compassionate awareness open your eyes answer the three questions below:
Why are you here?
What’s wrong with the world?
What can you do to help fix it?
You might just find a heart-centered approach to these questions will completely change the trajectory of your life. It sure did mine.
If you feel called to rediscover purpose through heart-centered awareness, I’d love to hear from you as apart of the Keystone Leadership Program I’m crafting with some amazing leaders. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIN or X.
You know where to find me.