The key that opens the doors of well-being, or of the long-awaited happiness, is within us: the heart. In addition to being the organ that pumps blood to all parts of our body, the heart also houses our self.
This idea is the starting point of Pax Dettoni, an expert in emotional education and author of books such as intelligence of the heart (ed. Destino), which invites us in this article to listen to our hearts as a way of self-knowledge and as an opportunity to make better decisions by developing our emotional intelligence.
What is the voice of the heart?
By Pax Dettoni, anthropologist expert in emotional education
Let’s look: Where do we put our hand when we say “I”? Shall we put it on the feet? Or in the head? Or in the stomach? Indeed, we put it on the chest, above our heart. Therefore, we can imagine that that most intimate thing that lives in usour most authentic version, resides there.
We might think that reaching our hearts is a simple task, since we live with it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and we are supposed to be ourselves. However, It is not easy for us to connect with our own essencelisten to our heart.
This difficulty occurs mainly because there are several voices that can pass for the voice of the heart and, if one does not train, one can confuse them and not be able to recognize the authentic one.
For example, it is a classic to confuse the voice of the heart with the voice of emotions. How many times have we heard “do what the heart tells you” to refer to “do what the emotion wants to do”? whatHow many times have we followed the impulse of an emotion and then we realized that, in reality, we did not want What has brought us that impulse?
We tend to confuse emotion with heart, and this dyslexia does not help us at all to learn to identify our true and authentic voice.
The heart is not the emotions, the heart hides behind them and We can only know ourselves when we are capable of disidentifying ourselves from what we feel.
The carriage metaphor
To better understand what parts make us up, or what voices can be passed off as the voice of the heart, there is a metaphor that I really like, that of the carriage, which the author Annie Marquier drawn from oriental tales.
Let’s imagine a carriage, one of those from a fairy tale: It is drawn by a pair of thoroughbred horses and driven by a coachman who wears a navy blue suit and bowler hat. Behind, a pretty carriage with two doors and curtains on the windows. Inside travels the passenger or passenger who wants to reach their final destination. There are four clear elements in this image: the horses, the carriage, the coachman, and the passenger.
The carriage represents the totality of the human being and each of the elements corresponds to thoughts, emotions, true self (spiritual self that inhabits the heart) and body. Who is who?
- Horses represent our emotions, because they are the ones that move the carriage – in the same way that emotions motivate us to act. In fact, emotion comes from the Latin emovere, which means “to move”. Just as horses can run away and lead the carriage to its downfall, the same can happen to us if we let our emotions run wild.
- Our inner coachman corresponds to our thoughts: it is the reins that must keep the horses on the track and at a good pace. We are likely to find that in our carriage the coachman holds the reins very loosely and the horses do as they please. Or on the contrary, we may discover that our driver has very short reins and the horses cannot move naturally. Although it may also be that the coachman hold the reins just enough to allow the carriage to move smoothly.
The coachman’s horses make the carriage move forward and reach its destination. But that destiny cannot be the one that the horses decide, since they do not have the capacity to decide; nor the coachman, since his job is to serve the passenger, not make decisions on his behalf.
- So, the float, which represents our body, serves to transport the passenger, who is the one who must indicate the destination to the coachman so that he can drive the horses that will move the entire carriage. Who is this passenger then?
- The passenger represents the self: that authentic, true part that we identify as ourselves, that part that cannot be seen, smelled, or tasted, but is there and is felt. Our spiritual part, that self that we refer to when we touch each other on the chest. That I that yes, lives in the heart. That is, the self that we have to know and learn to listen to achieve our destiny.
We can explore how tidy our carriage is by asking ourselves: Who’s boss? Do the horses and their desires rule or the decisions of our coachman; or the desires to keep the float pretty; Or does that passenger that we carry inside send?
The carriage that will arrive in good condition at its destination is the one in which each one does their job. without usurping functions of others. In our inner carriage, the passenger must “command”, that is, the heart, that is, the true self that we have to learn to listen to.
Taking back the reins
Develop the capacity that teaches us to disidentify ourselves from our emotions, our thoughts, our bodily instincts and identifying with our true selves is what I have called the intelligence of the heart. That intelligence that we began to use when we decided to learn to love. What do we find in the heart but love?
To use our intelligence of the heart it is necessary, as a first step, develop our emotional intelligence; we must learn to recognize our emotions and manage them, otherwise our carriage will be governed by the horses.
Let’s try it: if we close our eyes and think of that person we can’t stand, what do we feel? Something similar to a burning knot arises in our stomach, and yes, anger, resentment or, in the worst case, hatred has already been awakened. Is that person in front? No. It is enough to think of her for the emotion to be activated.
The same happens when we want to deactivate emotions. For example, if something happened this morning that made me angry, the worst thing I can do is keep thinking about it all day, because surely I won’t think about it positively, but I will find even more reasons to get angry. Instead of letting it go, I feed it. But if, instead, when I’m sorry, I take a breath and then turn my attention to other mattersI don’t think about it anymore: I don’t feed it, I deactivate it.
Only through “good thinking” can we keep the horses at a good pace and following the orders they receive through the reins.
We must also learn to owning our thoughts, as well as our bodily desires and instincts. That is, the intelligence of the heart will help us to own ourselves, so that love guides our lives and leads us to our true destiny.
When let’s learn to listen to that voice that it is only ours, we will not find in it fear, distrust or despair, but acceptance, understanding, trust, gratitude, generosity: love. Although it requires constant practice to be found.