Listening to your Heart

Exploring our intelligence within and the path back to ourselves - An extract from Beyond Hot and Crazy

I thought I would share a short extract from my book Beyond Hot and Crazy - A Radical Guide to Living Well with Menopause as its very relevant to what I’ve been sharing the last couple of weeks around emotions and listening to the body.

Much of what I write about now, even in my fiction writing is very connected to emotional awareness and listening to your body, and has its roots in this earlier work.

This piece below explores something central to that journey… the power of the heart.

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The Power of Your Heart

Many people only think of the heart in two ways:

• A pump that pumps the blood around your body to keep you alive.

• A symbol of love.

But your heart is so much more. And yes, it can think!

Research by The Heart Math organisation has shown your heart has its own energy field that is about sixty times stronger than the energy field of the brain. It has its own nervous system and more messages are passed from the heart to the brain than vice versa, but our mind and ego overrides a lot of this information.

Your heart is your core. It’s the first organ that develops as a foetus and is the centre of your feelings, electromagnetic energy and intuition, the communications centre of your soul and yes, love.

Positive feelings can create a harmonious heart rhythm that spreads throughout your body, improving health and wellbeing by balancing your nervous system. This will even transmit to those around you, helping them feel more balanced too.

By learning to listen less to your mind and reducing the power of your ego, you are able to connect with and hear your heart centre and intuitive voice.

Research is showing that by intentionally connecting to your heart centre and feeling love, compassion, care and a positive view of emotions, you can improve your health, relationships and wellbeing. The greatest gift you can give to yourself and the world is to become emotionally healthy, connected to self and able to connect with others.

Heart Intelligence is …

“The art of feeling more joy in your life, through the process of accepting who you are, as you are, without making yourself wrong.”

Christian Pankhurst -Heart IQ™

It’s a practice for learning to:

• Open your heart by being aware of who you are in the world and by receiving from others.

• Listen to your heart by pausing and getting still. You can then connect with and feel your body, emotions, energy and mind. You are able to listen to your intuition and discern what it is you want right now. This can be as simple as a hug, wanting a cup of tea, or to go to the bathroom. It can also help you to be aware of your deepest longing.

• Follow your heart by taking action towards what it is you want and to develop the attitudes, such as trust, courage and willingness, that will support you in fulfilling your dreams.

When these are in place, you are able to communicate from your heart and build authentic, loving relationships.

The focus of heart intelligence is on joy and living an authentic life, true to who you really are. It’s about loving yourself, the amazing, wonderful, perfect YOU and comes from the premise that…

“There is nothing wrong with you.”

I can hear you shout as you read this statement, “Oh yes there is….”

“I am hot and sweaty, struggling with the menopause.”

“I don’t sleep well.”

“My husband left me for his secretary.”

“I’m overweight.”

“I’m in constant pain.”

All these statements and any like them are related to something going on in your life right now, or effecting only a small part of you. They are not who you are at your core. They don’t define who you truly are.

It is easy to associate yourself with what’s going on in your life, especially when it is something negative. It can feel like it is taking over your whole being.

The core of all of us is intrinsically good. Life events can wound us, and some of these events will permanently change us. However, your intrinsic goodness always remains intact and accessible when you receive the right support.

So keep reminding yourself throughout the day as negative statements arise:

“There is nothing wrong with ME.”

We are taught from a young age it is wrong to feel certain emotions. Emotions like anger or sadness are common emotions thought of as negative emotions. When you attach shame, guilt or judgment to an emotion, it can feel negative. It is not the emotion itself that is negative.

Even when you deny or repress what you are truly feeling, the body still feels it. These denied feelings become part of your cellular memory and cause this memory bank to become overloaded. Your cells become like a pressure cooker that is unable to vent. It will eventually explode, sometimes as an explosion of rage, or hatred, or as an illness including depression, cancer and heart disease.

Our emotions are like a rainbow. Without all the colours there is no rainbow and to be whole and healthy, we need all our emotions. By just sitting with them, or expressing them from a place of safety as they arise, the emotion will pass quickly through you and won’t cause violent outbursts, or long-term damage to your body. If you don’t feel one side of the spectrum of an emotion, it is hard to feel the other. Without anger, you have no passion. Without sadness, it’s hard to feel happiness.

Don’t confuse emotions and feelings. Emotions come from within the body, they just pop up in response to a situation, like being scared in a haunted house when something jumps out at you.

Feelings, on the other hand, are the story your mind tells about the emotion or experience. So when you are sitting at home and all is safe, but you suddenly feel scared, that comes from your mind. It’s hard to control emotions other than denying them, but they still have a habit of erupting like a pressure cooker letting off steam. You can easily change how you feel by just switching your attention to something else.

By learning how to expand your emotional range and express your emotions safely, it is possible to find positivity and joy - even in the emotions you are inclined to think of as negative. Your life can become amazing!

Learning ‘heart intelligence’ has transformed my life tremendously. I feel lighter, freer, connected with my body, emotions and energy. From there I am able to listen to my intuition and recognise what it is I really want. It has given me the courage to step out of my comfort zone in so many ways there is not space to mention them here.

But I now travel without fear, I love meeting new people and doing new things. By letting go of my limiting beliefs - not being good enough, clever enough, worthy enough - I have had the courage to set up my own business and to write this book.”

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Looking back, this understanding has shaped my life in so many ways that I never envisaged when I first started the Heart IQ training back in 2011. I’m not the person I was back then. I now explore and relate to my emotions, and healing in a very different, arguably a more healthy way. And most importantly there is now a connection between my body, heart and mind.

It continues to be a practice of pausing, listening, softening, and remembering.

A Gift for You

One of the most basic but I would suggest the most life changing practices Heart IQ calls a Tune in, but I like to call it a pause as you pause what you are doing even for just a few seconds to tune in with your breath, body, emotions and then see if your intuition has any pop ups for you. (For me intuition always comes from deep inside of me and my mind is just a translator.)
”The Pause” is a short meditation I recorded for my clients and readers of Beyond Hot and Crazy. (NOTE: It is for everyone, not just woman going through menopause)

To find out more and to purchase a copy of Beyond Hot and Crazy - A Radical Guide to Living Well with Menopause please go to https://www.pamlob.com/mybook/