FOLLOWING YOUR HEART
by Nicholas de Castella
Do you do what is sensible, what people expect of you? Are you good and do what a good person should do? Do you try to please others and do the right thing?
Or do you listen to your heart and follow it? Do you check in and ask “What do I feel here, and what would I love to do?”.
Do you stay safe, in control, avoid making decisions, stick to the familiar or are you open to new experiences? Do you want to live fully, are you willing to risk failure and disappointment for the sake of truth?
If you follow your heart things will tend to flow more smoothly, you will make less mistakes and you cannot help but live the life you are meant to live and make a difference in the world.
The are two aspects to following your heart
Firstly you have to hear what your heart is telling you. The more in touch you are with your heart the clearer and stronger the messages will be. This is akin to your intuition. You may suddenly feel like ringing a friend, get a message to stop eating (because you have had enough) or to take extra care with what you are doing. Have you ever been tightening something - say a bolt - and got a message saying that’s enough - and you ignored it thinking ‘I will just give it a bit more’... and... snap too much.
Practicing Heart Centring is a very valauble tool in connecting with our inner guidance. It is a foundational skill we practice in our seminars (You can download a Heart Centring meditation for free at my website).
Intuition without action is not much value.
The second aspect of following your heart is actually taking action on what you are feeling. This is about trusting your inner guidance. It is one thing to find yourself repeatedly thinking about someone, it is another thing to actually pick up the phone and give them a call.
Most people don’t trust their feelings.
Most people fear the idea of just doing whatever we feel because we do not trust our feelings. Most people imagine that if everyone just did whatever they felt like doing we would have mayhem and chaos.
We do not trust our feelings because we do not know ourselves deeply enough.
After 20 years of assisting people to tune into their deepest feelings I have only ever seen that what they discover is peace, love and happiness.
A fundamental distinction is the difference between following your emotions and following your heart. When I suggest following your heart many people say “I tried that and it got me into a lot of trouble”. These people were most likely acting out their emotions. Bursting out with anger, avoiding sadness or running away in fear. Emotions need to be mastered by allowing their presence till they pass. When they pass we feel what is under them - our heart: peace, love, happiness, connection.
Valuable guidance comes from our hearts.
When we listen to our heart we are motivated to live with truth, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, mercy, devotion, trust, courage, discipline, respect, patience, playfulness, ease, vulnerability and humility.
But you have to be in touch
If you want to follow your heart you must be able to feel your heart and recognise when it is speaking. A good check is to ask if the desire is coming from love or fear. Another clue is the message will keep on coming back. My rule of thumb is that if it comes back three times I act on it.
Following your heart can be uncomfortable
When we live from our heads we do the ‘right thing’ and use our ‘will power’ to ‘push’ ourselves into doing what we think we ‘should do’. Pushing rarely bring success and happiness and more often creates resistance, making things hard work. When we follow our hearts we often have to face discomfort for growth (discipline). For example: We may make a decision from our heart that we know is going to make us feel sad, like ending an abusive relationship. Or we may feel fear at leaving a job that is comfortable, but not our passion.
16 years ago I quit
I was working as an Architect, feeling empty and unfulfilled. Eventually I got to the point of realising that this was no longer my passion. I then started working with the breath as a healer and ever since then I have felt blessed and supported by life in ways that still surprise me. Since quitting Architecture I have travelled around the world three times teaching this work, I am happily married with two lovely boys and we live in a most beautiful rainforest setting on the edge of Melbourne. It was very hard to let go of 8 years of training, but I am so glad that I did.
Courage
Following our heart often takes courage (which is the heart equivalent of will power). in fact the word courage comes from the French word ‘Cour’ which means heart.
Courage is not the lack of fear but the willingness to take action in the face of fear.
You are not meant to feel happy if...
You are not meant to feel happy if you are not following your heart and living your truth. A man in his late 50’s came to me for sessions because he was feeling down and lost and unhappy. In his time he had done some amazing things - building developments and such. When I saw him he was driving a bus. There was little challenge for him and much of his day was spent in frustration because he could see how the company was not running efficiently and was not in a position to do anything about it.
If you did feel happy doing something that is not really your path in life what reason would there be for you t change? Your unhappiness, discontentment and misery are important messages to you telling you to take a good look at yourself and what you are doing with your life. I have a friend who was unhappy in her job. She went to the doctor who offered to prescribe her anti-depressant medication so she could keep on doing a job she did not really want to do any more. Thankfully she was emotionally intelligent enough to choose to resign from her job rather than than go the way of medication. Today she is in a job she loves and is very happy and contented.
Is your addiction keeping you stuck?
Another client was smoking dope to repress her anger about living in an unhappy marriage. Whilst she continued to smoke the dope she could avoid facing up to her life. But what kind of a mother was she to her children, not fully present because of the drugs. When she quit the dope, she left the marriage and married one of her sons school teachers!
Finding your passion
If you are not sure what you should be doing with your life a great book and website is ‘The Passion Test’ by Janet Bray Attwood and Chris Attwood. In short what you need to do is start reconnecting and listening to your heart. Start by writing a list of the things you love to do. Then prioritise the list and make sure that you are spending some time each week doing one of the things on your list. Who knows where it will lead you...