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 guy that she’d had an intermittent relationship with for the last four years. Her heart told her that he was what she wanted – even though there was lots of evidence that would suggest the exact opposite to an uninvolved observer. But, she took this “guru’s” advice and threw herself body and soul into making him love her! With the blindgly obvious outcome.

But, if she really was listening to her heart, how could it have turned out so wrong? The phrase “listen to your heart” is a loaded one. Firstly, we should give none of our attention to what our head is telling us. The vast majority of highly successful business people tell us that you must go with your gut (another word for heart) and psychology tells us that the normal mind is stumbling through a fog of useless thought – up to fifty thousand thoughts each day.

But, if the head is in a fog, the heart is shrouded behind a veil of much more sinister useless thought – thoughts that have been skulking 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’re negative. In other words, when most of us listen to our hearts, we’re listening to something that’s been seriously distorted by our own conditioning and programming so that we end up believing that we know what will bring us happiness – which is often a far cry from what is truly best for us.

So, if you want to be certain that you’re listening to your gut instinct or your heart, you’ll 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 importantly, a clear mind is an inspired mind and it is through inspiration that we’re most suitably guided towards the life of our dreams.