You are on the right track in life when you are working with your brain, and feeling with your heart. Your head can’t make decisions easily if it doesn’t listen to your heart. People get confused between their thoughts and their feelings. When you work with your brain you use the logical and practical parts of your brain along with the ability to see a big picture and imagine the future outcome of what you are doing. But if that is all you engage when you work, or consider your future, it will leave you feeling like something is missing in your life, and it is.
Your heart is the main way you receive feelings of whether or not you are on the right track in your life. This is in terms of being in line with your values, and your motivation for doing things. When the heart isn’t listened to, you are susceptible to power disputes between your ego and your inner critic. Your ego wants you to feel important and but is always ‘protecting’ itself through creating a sense of ‘You have to do it right the first time or something terrible will happen.’ And your critic is usually engaging in judgement of your self and others with such thoughts as ‘You will never get this done. You will never even start it. Others won’t accept it. Your work is unacceptable.’
Of course this leads to one hell of an internal fight. Your ego really wants you to look good at any cost, and is pushing you, but your critic doesn’t want you to take any risks. They create a turmoil which at times doesn’t allow you to move in either direction, particularly if its about something that is really close to your heart. The ego and internal critic want to keep you well away from your heart. That is where presence and energy are pure and not corrupted by programming from your past, your culture, your schooling, your peers and your family etc. And that means when you are listening to your heart, the ego and the critic don’t have a job to do any more. And no part of you likes to be made redundant!
When you bring your heart on board, you balance your ego and critic by leaning in and listening to the great wisdom of your heart. This is backed up by your gut feelings. The gut is quite good at entrapment of the energy your thoughts create, that prevent you from being present to your heart. Your gut won’t tell you what to do, but it gives a clear relaxed feeling when you are honoring your heart’s desire. Your gut reminds you to stop thinking and instead start listening to your heart. It does this by becoming tight, jittery, painful or generally uncomfortable.
When you turn your attention to your heart, it can allow your Great Spirit to be heard instead of all the others’ voices in your head. The voices that say you can’t. The voices that say you are not good enough, or that you won’t succeed. The voices that make you afraid to take a step forward with a dream or goal, and then criticise you when you don’t.
It is only when 
we bypass this programming (that we all suffer from to some degree), that we please ourselves and do what we really want to. Our place in our hearts is always one of truth and it won’t be put down by criticism or made to feel silly by our ego.
You can become aware of the inner conflict I have spoken of between your ego and your critic. It will start by you thinking that nothing is going your way and that everything is hard. Become still and notice how your gut area is feeling. If it is tight or uncomfortable it is trying to alert you to the fact that you are not present to your heart.
Put your hands on your heart and notice how your heart area is feeling physically. Then you can interpret this feeling as an emotion e.g. Tightness may feel like fear, your heart pounding loud and fast might feel like you are trying to run away/escape and so on. The heart gives simple messages which usually points to some sort of love or fear. Often the fear is coming from a younger part of yourself. Make your own call on this, then become open to what your heart is trying to tell you. Maybe it doesn’t agree with how you are proceeding, but it won’t interfere. Your heart’s wisdom and Great Spirit will not over-ride your will. Your time on earth, and the great possibilities for your material life, are only possible because you have a free will. So your will is free to over-ride your heart and your gut feelings at any time.
When you open yourself to your heart you will get guidance from your Great Spirit, who some call God or Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed or Angels or Higher Spirit, or Ascended Master, or Universal Energy or SuperConsciousness, or Inner Wisdom. You can call it what you like because it doesn’t matter, because it ISN’T matter – it is Spirit. Words can only ever, at best be signposts towards the truth, but the truth for us, is what we feel deep in our hearts.
How we choose to connect with our Great Spirit which is multi-faceted and multi-faced is every person’s individual choice. Once we create a way of being with our God we can listen instead of push. We can receive instead of forcing things to happen and we can get clear on how our internal Godliness wants us to proceed. You’ll often find you get inspired to take a very simple step. This will not satisfy some of you because your ego wants to know where it will lead and how much money it will make and what sort of standing you will get in the community or at work, and how much it will cost you, ad infinitum.These are the expressions of your ego. And ironically, they are designed to keep you away from your every earthly desire!
That is because, without the tension between ego, critic and spirit we don’t create a prudent energy to manifest our imaginings. The ability to manifest on this 3 dimensional plane arised from a certain amount of tension. Your desires are held between ego, critic and spirit. We deeply long for something, but our critic and ego hold us back. It is the energy that is created by this tension that helps to propel our ideas into the material world. Like a bow and arrow, we can’t go as far without the tension of something holding us back. So there’s no need to hate our ego or our internal critic and wish they didn’t exist. Just recognise them and know they are there as part of a very clever design, for our ultimate progression, our ultimate evolution.
As with all matters of the spirit being made manifest here on earth, there has to be duality. There is no ability to perceive light without dark, no feelings of real joy without some despair in our lives. A child goes through these emotions daily, and without interference they simply come and they go. We couldn’t recognise any of our positive feelings with
out experiencing their opposites. This is what our experience of being here in the material world is made up of – duality. Until we can recognise all of it as a great process which has its own rhythm, rhyme and reasons, we tend to be open to our feelings of contentment and joy, but don’t want to experience those at the other end of the spectrum, that we make unwelcome.
This results in shutting down our willingness to feel those feelings that we judge as ‘painful’ or ‘bad’ or ‘sad’ etc. But in doing so we limit our ability to feel at the other end of the spectrum as well – joy, motivation, greatness, excitement and wonder. When we open to our heart we need to accept whatever it offers us. Instead of running away from our uncomfortable feelings, sit with those feelings and simply experience the truth of them.
From doing this we unblock our emotional energy and we are able to experience our lives more fully. When we feel these rising feelings they quickly transform because ‘e-motion’ never stays static. It is energy in motion. It is only when we repress our feelings that they get stuck and then can cause ongoing depression. Repression or supression is usually the undelying cause of depression and can certainly interfere with our serotonin and other chemical balances in the brain. When you are too afraid to feel your fears, they are also suppressed to eventually manifest as ongoing anxiety.
When you don’t allow yourself to feel your feelings, it’s hard to connect to your true purpose either. This is because the energy we have for this great quest is not found in the ego or the brain, but in our hearts. This is where we are connected most strongly to our Great Eternal Spirit, and it is in our hearts that we feel motivation and wonder about things we are embarking on. We create a general tension in our lives to do with our reason for being here which gets stronger as we mature. We know instinctively that we came here to do something. Just as a tree seed knows it is supposed to become a tree.
When we become open to our deep feelings and our purpose we never know how things will turn out, or where it will lead us. Part of the journey is learning to give up the need to control the outcome. We are often on track when we are challenged to exit our comfort zone. We know we are on track when we feel hugely energised by what we are doing. And whenever we have to develop the virtues of patience, self control, persistance, love, trust, humility and forgiveness, we may think we are going off-course but we are definitely moving forward in our spiritual journey.
Katie Kalin is a kinesiologist and coach with over 30 years experience working with groups and individuals. She runs a private clinic in Cork City and also does online kinesiology consultations. Access one free half hour consultation with her through www.katiekalin.com
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