Knowing your own heart and mind is important for survival on this precarious planet. But what people mean when they describe their experience using these terms varies. How heart relates to living wisely also remains a wide open question. At some phases of development the heart can seem very unwise. I am going to respectfully use a mode of analysis called 3+1 to get inside people’s preferences in the way they talk about the human heart. I’ll explain what 3+1 analysis is, saying why I believe it helps to connect with others with more understanding. During times of disruptive change especially, the flexibility of this 3+1 mentally structuring approach to situations could improve the quality of decisions for action or restraint that people have to make in order to continue to live wisely together, at heart level.
Three points of view and an integrating fourth.
In my experience as a family systems doctor and then as an emotional health educator aiming to prevent problems, people variably use the term ‘heart’ to mean:
- the physical seat of the emotions,
- the inner core of human values that shapes life,
- the energy someone puts into making an achievement happen.
There seems to be a broad agreement among people of many cultural backgrounds that the mind is a place or process for rational balancing of choices. However, even rationalised conclusions then need to ‘drop into the heart’ if they are to be sustainably carried through into shared life. For some, that can be a difficult process.
There is a fourth point of view that integrates these three perspectives on the heart’s relation to mind, which might help to resolve misunderstanding and reconnect heart-mind. This is the +1 of a 3+1 analysis that we shall look at more closely. The reason for doing so is that the balance with which people integrate these three core perspectives on their life experience is what is meant by knowing your own heart. Inquiring about that balance helps to know other people’s hearts too.
The three perspectives are not illuminating separable parts of a person, like body, soul and spirit used to be thought of centuries ago. They are viewpoints from which a person’s whole life can be understood in that quality of ‘the light of understanding’. For example, when thinking about the physical seat of the emotions people commonly bring to mind the physically pumping heart that moves the blood circulation, so responsive in its pacing to emotion that people place their hands on their chests to indicate their emotional awareness. But the work of Rollin McCraty in HeartMath.org looks also at how the electromagnetic field around the pump and the chest variably interacts with the earth’s EM field, allowing coherence between people and wider events. This is also a wider, nonlocal feature of our physical embodied seat in emotive nature.
Having the ability to shift between perspectives from these three core viewpoints enriches life – physical embodiment, personal values, energy for responsiveness. Flexibility aids the mind when rationalising how to live responsively in the now with a stable base like a tripod at heart level. From this place of integrity, the future can be envisioned and imagined with its potential further impact on emotions, values and energy during times of change. Knowing your heart becomes a stabilising 3+1 set of roots for growth and adaptability.
Rediscovering wholeness as the generative source of life
How else other than a mechanical tripod can we picture this fourth integrating process of living movement?
In the English language the heart is applied also to a fruit or vegetable, to mean its generative core, its source of coordinated growth. This meaning is the living integrating fourth view in which to appreciate our human experience at heart, but our human root into life is more difficult to identify than when holding a cauliflower and rotating it. We human beings have a generative source of growth rooting us in a wider biophysics of ecology with values and energy. This 3+1 root has the integrity of +1 if we allow ourselves time to let its balance emerge.
Human beings can lead fruitful lives, and vegetative ones, in which emotions, values and energy are sometimes summarised as a passion for some mindful purpose. The heart of a fruit is also where seeds form to replicate the capacity to generate life elsewhere at some other time, whenever the conditions are right. That same principle can be applied to human beings also. When seen in context, like an ecology or field of interest, someone passionately growing a feature of life from their heart-level commitment to it tends to attract more widespread interest from others over time. This may lead to its benefits being replicated more widely. Seeding life is an impact of a vibrant heart guarded and selectively guided by its reflective mind.
The scientific community is waking up from a 200 year slumber in which their dreams have all been about breaking up experienced life into ever smaller bits and pieces and particles, then gaining power over them by naming and describing their replicable characteristics in different experimental contexts, before trying to work out how they fit back together again with forces to make a whole machine work. While this has been a good dream for technology, the same method applied to understanding living organisms disintegrates them, so life sadly ceases and eludes the grasp.
This is because the inner human heart is not made of aggregated bits and pieces. Physical emotions, personal values and committed energy are features of an inner wholeness in movement unfolding at heart level in a wider ecology. That same heart enfolds the resulting qualities of relationship movements back into that same ecology’s renewed potentials. Heart repatterns wider change. The heart extends life or soul beyond the individual in movement.
Hearing the wakeup call
For scientists, the wakeup call about wholeness came from the yawning mismatch stretching and separating those who focus on macro movement of the universe from those who focus on micro level quantum movement. At the micro level, the only way to interpret some weird experimental findings is to say that the context in which ‘particles’ move is itself in some sort of relational movement beyond the container of space and time. Astrophysicists are psychologically attached to having a spacetime container in which lumps of matter rattle around, no matter how stretchy relativity makes it. Wholeness peeps into this container asking why she has been excluded.
Wholeness by any other name is relational movement beyond the boundaries of any spacetime container. Call it Tao emptiness from which all fullness pours forth, or the waters of Genesis 1:2-3 from which light unfolds, or Wisdom as the Spirit of the Whole, or the grace of Universal Love in which all healing is reconciled, or a quantum field in holomovement in which we all participate… Language will fail to unite people who do not have a prior heart level sensitivity to the shared movement of the whole, to Life and light and relational warmth and welcome.
The heart is the source of wisdom, guarded by the rationalising mind
One consequence of this wakeup call is that many people are now questioning whether emphasising rationalising mind over integrating and replicating heart is the best path to wisdom. When people are forced to make responsible decisions in life, rather than merely floating through its eddies for the ride, many people are rediscovering the importance of intuitive and emotive listening at heart level, waiting patiently for a sense of coherence and peace to guide their chosen and timely responses. Wisdom is more than the accumulation of experience. It involves the capacity to engage with complex situations in the present moment with a relational intuition that can assess how different individuals’ values may influence the physical progression, and how to meet those heart level values with a moderating but energetic response.
Mental observation and analysis can feed that balancing system at heart, but it takes time to see things from different perspectives. The mind thus can guard the heart’s unbalanced imaginations against over-reactivity, until a more rounded understanding of situations has been achieved. This is a heart-mind feedback process. It replaces the old ‘mind over heart’ aggressive attitudes that control life without sensitivity.
Wisdom is a heart level balancing act recruiting its mind. That’s true mindfulness. Not merely a calming process, but a growth into wise engagement at heart level with life.
The 3+1 approach to balancing heart level wisdom
I said I would close by explaining the 3+1 way to describe any concept. It is useful to understand why people connect or do not if they are inflexible in their perspectives on life. So this final section risks collapsing lived experience into some three concepts that people may erroneously try to separate from each other, rather than blending them into the one movement that is life.
- Physical emotions are our embodied form patterning behaviour, which affects how situations develop in linear time.
- Personal values are cyclical changes filtering out processes considered irrelevant to managing a situation within relevant time frames.
- Committed energy is the relatedness quality connecting valued patterns of behaviour into wider local and eternal contexts to reshape life.
- +1 is the freedom of choice we have to seek wise integrity in our timing of responsive action or restraint.
Timing our relational responsiveness is potentially life-enhancing in relevant local and whole or eternal contexts of life. It is the heart-mind focus we need to live wisely in the rapidly changing global situation.
