‘Follow your heart’ many people say. But what does this mean? In the heart one might find a vast stillness, a luminous fire, a ferocity, an immense tenderness, a spaciousness, a deep feeling of relationship or intraconnection, a deep knowing. You may find intuition, clarity or luminous awareness, grief or surrender. You may find many wild animals, numinous landscapes and an inner temple.

Sometimes people assume ‘follow your heart’ means follow your feelings, but sometimes our feelings can lead us astray, when they are just feelings from the past circling round without being fully touched or acknowleged by tenderness and consciousness. So you might need to discern which are the feelings from the past which need to be touched with tenderness, and which are the grief and joy that goes down into the ember fires at the core of your being. What’s the feeling behind the feeling, and what are the embodied states and myth being that accompany them?

Its not always helpful to be lead by the first emotions that you experience and its rarely helpful to repress them either, (although we may have good reasons for doing so) Its not always enough to just be aware of your emotions; sometimes its helpful to go deeper into them, to discover the emotions behind the emotions, all the body sensations, body postures, sound, relationship patterns and myth beings that live around and within them.

To be lead only by our emotions is to live in a hall of mirrors in which the whole of outside reality just becomes part of our unacknowledged projections, rather than a world that is experienced as something we are mutually co-creating and co-dreaming with a million other life forms.

What is to be found deeper within our emotions? Behind fear there may be a cautiousness, an alert aliveness, a ferocious intent or a vast power. Behind sadness there may be a feeling of a being able to stand up against a oppressor OR a great grief which cuts down to the core of our being like music and is in some way inseparable from our joy. Behind desire there may stoicism or rapture, innocent gratitude, fierce aggression or the orgasmic body. Behind anger there may a vast drive to penetrate everything, a gentle stength and protectiveness, a powerful intent, a force for justice or an aikido like power to guide an opponent where they wish to go or to communicate with them more deeply.

We need the heart, and we need the throat and the head too…not just the thinking mind but the connected heartmind, the eagle vision mind. We needn’t be caught in emotions from the past, we can live and dream from a place of embodied co-creation, where our deepest feelings can be tenderly held, processed and allowed to flow through. Rationality and clear thinking are important too, but we needn’t be caught in the purely rational mind either; we can trust the aliveness and knowing of of the soma, the heart and the embodied superconscious.

We need the heart, and we may need its connection to the solar plexus too, our connection to our deeper power and deep instinct, to know what to do. And we may need the spiral fire that rises from the sacrum, from the belly, the testicles or the womb to rise into the heart and suffuse it with something like liquid light and an embodied sacral knowing.

The heart is deeply intuitive and knows and is connected with the solar plexus’s instinct and the belly’s orgasmic being. It is connected with the mind’s vision and the throat’s expression. It is connected with the ‘void’ of not knowing, the unknowing of love between the heart and throat. We can sense, feel, see, hear, smell and taste through our heart; all these senses are intimately neurologically connected with the heart. The heart is the enlaced radial hub of a tens of thousands of neurons and inner energy channels and center of our embodiment, senses and connected ‘Self’

If you journey deeply enough inside your heart you might find the temple of the heart which contains the stories and dreaming your ancestors and your non-human spirit ancestors. In this place, there is no doubt about who you, what you feel, or what you came here for. In this place you know who you are.

In the temple of the heart you are blessed by your ancient ancestors from the time before the period of disconnection from nature. They have lit a fire for you, to guide you through the dark of the current age. Their light shines through your later, possibly more wounded, ancestors and heals them. You are blessed by the Goddesses, Gods, heroes, kings, queens, tribal elders and ancestors of your spirit lineage