The Journey From Head to Heart
I know this journey well. I spent my entire adult life in academia until quite recently. Through a master’s degree, two PhDs, 15 years of teaching and research, I was taught very well how to live in my head and completely ignore my heart (or rather criticize any signals from my heart and then ignore all of it).
It wasn’t until I realized that if I didn’t start getting to know my heart, my family would suffer, I couldn’t be the father and partner I wanted to be, and I’d be a depressed and anxious mess in a career that had long lost its luster. I had prioritized my head over my heart for way too long, and as dangerous as it felt (and still feels sometimes), I started making that longest journey.
I am certainly not alone in living a life alienated from the heart. One of the defining features of modernity* is its prioritization of the head: analyzing, planning, intellectualizing, and criticizing. Ian McGilchrist writes about this in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. When we talk about “the head” or the parts of us that analyze, plan, and intellectualize, we’re talking about the left-hemisphere of the brain. And it’s these qualities that are most required by modern social and economic institutions. If you can predict, plan, and control in school, corporations, markets, and bureaucracies, you have much better odds of gaining material resources and social prestige.
But the parts in us that are so good at analyzing, monitoring, planning, and rationalizing are the same ones that block access to our heart (or what McGilchrist would refer to as the right-hemisphere of the brain). Why is this? Because, as the early modern French philosopher and scientist, Blaise Pascal, wrote, “The heart has reasons of which reason knows not.” In other words, our heart works in a completely different way than our head, and if our head insists on being in control, we will lose access to all of the knowledge and power in our heart.
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When I work with clients, my aim is not to replace the head with the heart. We need the head (or what I prefer calling an analytical or intellectual part) not only to be effective in the world but also to understand ourselves. My aim instead is to set the head in proper context with our heart.
In each session, I ask clients to close their eyes, breathe deeply, and relax into their bodies so they can eventually be WITH their inner parts that are defensive, scared, sad, alone, and carrying pain. Analytical and intellectual parts can block this process by doing what they do best: analyzing, criticizing, and monitoring. For some of us, these parts are so strong and big in our systems that we’re effectively blocked from helping the parts that need us the most.
Analytical/intellectual parts are at their best when they relax and step aside during our coaching sessions and then come back in afterwards to reflect and piece things together. They’re only helpful after we’ve opened our hearts, felt deeply, and expressed fully. It’s only at this point that they can draw a map of the territory we’ve traversed, place our experience in the context of our life story, and give us a frame around an otherwise nebulous experiential memory.
The intellect can also plan ahead: what in my life needs to change? How can I set a new path? How do I live in alignment with these new revelations, understandings, and feelings? These are all issues for which the intellect can help. And then once it computes its output, it can relax back again and follow the lead of the heart.
I’d love to hear where you are on your journey from head to heart. It’s not just the longest journey of your life but it’s the most important one.
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*Modernity refers to the historical era that began sometime in the 16 or 17th century and is characterized by industrialization, globalization, capitalism, individualism, secularization, bureaucratization, and science. I don’t think it’s useful to talk of “post-modernity” as a new historical era because we’re very much living with all of the major forces of modernity.