I’ve recently had to clean up the mess after a self help “guru” told one of my clients that she should ‘follow her heart’ in pursuing a man that she’d had an on-and-off relationship with for the past five years. Her heart had told her that this guy was what she wanted – even though there was ample evidence that would suggest the exact opposite to a casual observer. But, she took this “guru’s” advice and threw herself body and soul into making him love her! With the blindgly obvious outcome.
However, if she really was following her heart, how could it have turned out so pear-shaped? The phrase “listen to your heart” is a loaded one. First of all, we should not pay any attention to what our head tells us. The vast majority of highly successful business people tell us that you should go with your gut (another word for heart) and research tells us that the normal mind is wandering through a haze of random thought – up to fifty thousand of them each and every day.
But, if the head is in a fog, the heart is obscured behind a veil of much more sinister useless thought – thoughts that have been lurking in the shadows since our formative years – thoughts that the subconscious mind likes to dwell on – and the subconscious mind is most likely to cosy up to those thoughts if they happen to be negative. In other words, when most of us listen to our hearts, we’re hearing something that has been grossly distorted by our own programming and conditioning so that we end up thinking that we’re sure of what will make us happy – which is often a far cry from what is truly best for us.
So, if you want to be sure that you’re listening to your gut instinct or your heart, you’re going to have to get past this veil of deep-seated thought and the only way that you can do that – and it’s blindingly obvious when you think about it – is to clear your mind. We all need to clear our mind completely so that we can distinguish the wood from the trees! But, more than that, a clear mind is an inspired mind and it is through inspiration that we’re most suitably guided towards our perfect life.
