"Follow your heart"

[rousseau]

"A cliché or cliche (/ˈkliːʃeɪ/ or /klɪˈʃeɪ/) is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel."

Follow your heart is one of those clichés that's been repeated so often that it's become trite, but when you look at terms like this from another perspective there's got to be a reason that they're repeated so often: they have truth value.

I've been thinking about this specific one for a while now because it seems to under-pin one of the main sources of tension in the human experience: being faced with a tough decision and not knowing which direction to take yourself.

And when you look at the human lexicon you don't see the phrase 'follow your mind' repeated over and over, you see 'follow your heart'. Of course, a person can't literally follow their heart, so what does 'heart' point to? I'd suggest intuition, the gut feeling that someone feels when faced with a problem.

When I look back over my life it feels like if I would have listened more closely to what my intuition was telling me I would have saved myself countless mistakes.

What do you think?

 

[abaddon]

Sometimes it’s helpful to follow your felt-sense.

The saying “follow your heart” may go back to times when that was considered the seat of the soul, but now I think it can be sensibly used in reference to the body and maybe especially the torso specifically.

The head can’t make all the decisions. There’s much of your psychic life that’s not all “processed” in the brain, but suffused through the body. Sometimes getting an answer to a question involves quietening the jibber-jabber in the head and listening instead to input that seems to come from outside the cogitating “in the head” tidbit of the mind. When my belly says "hungry" there's a certainty that doesn't accompany thinking "considering x, y and z maybe I should eat". Maybe, similarly, questions about life-issues would receive the best answer by feeling into the body. Or at least get some valuable input this way. Thinking can dissociate one from this more visceral, more grounded-in-the-physical certainty.

When I look back over my life it feels like if I would have listened more closely to what my intuition was telling me I would have saved myself countless mistakes.

That’s my experience as well. I’ve let a lot of ideas get in the way of seeing (or rather, bodily knowing) more clearly. I feel I’m more fully my “authentic self” coming through and having a say as the I bit of my self or mind dialogues with my body more.

“Intuition” is too vague for me to understand though. Maybe it overlaps some or a lot with what I’m saying, I don’t know. I tend to conceive this matter more in terms of interoceptive stimuli.

 

[abaddon]

It’d be interesting if persons more knowledgeable of physiology commented. I remember reading some about both the heart and “the guts” having extensive nerve networks, more extensive or sophisticated than anywhere in the body except the brain itself. Allegedly “virtual brains” of their own.

If so it’s interesting that we have phrases that reference them like “follow your heart” and “gut instinct”.

 

[untermensche]

The nervous system is found throughout the body.

There is an extensive system that innervates the intestines called the enteric nervous system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

The heart is made of specialized muscle cells that behave somewhat like nerve cells. And the heart has extensive neural innervation as well.

But a person can use their imagination and can center their mind on various parts of the body.

Where are emotions felt?

Some might say; the entire body.

But I can focus my mind on the sensations in my upper chest instead of my kneecaps as I think of my beloved.

And call this focus "following my heart".

 

[rousseau]

Sometimes it’s helpful to follow your felt-sense.

The saying “follow your heart” may go back to times when that was considered the seat of the soul, but now I think it can be sensibly used in reference to the body and maybe especially the torso specifically.

The head can’t make all the decisions. There’s much of your psychic life that’s not all “processed” in the brain, but suffused through the body. Sometimes getting an answer to a question involves quietening the jibber-jabber in the head and listening instead to input that seems to come from outside the cogitating “in the head” tidbit of the mind. When my belly says "hungry" there's a certainty that doesn't accompany thinking "considering x, y and z maybe I should eat". Maybe, similarly, questions about life-issues would receive the best answer by feeling into the body. Or at least get some valuable input this way. Thinking can dissociate one from this more visceral, more grounded-in-the-physical certainty.

When I look back over my life it feels like if I would have listened more closely to what my intuition was telling me I would have saved myself countless mistakes.

That’s my experience as well. I’ve let a lot of ideas get in the way of seeing (or rather, bodily knowing) more clearly. I feel I’m more fully my “authentic self” coming through and having a say as the I bit of my self or mind dialogues with my body more.

“Intuition” is too vague for me to understand though. Maybe it overlaps some or a lot with what I’m saying, I don’t know. I tend to conceive this matter more in terms of interoceptive stimuli.

That's an interesting idea. I'd think the 'body' feeling you're suggesting would be a generalized nervousness and anxiety over something. Kind of a fight or flight response to an external threat. Like an intelligent reaction of the sub-conscious, before the concept is realized.

 

[abaddon]

My notions about “bodily knowing” are taken partly from a psycho-therapeutic technique called Focusing. Getting the body’s input when decision-making or finding a “direction to take yourself” or resolving an unsettled feeling inside can be experimented with if you like. Some basic instructions are here.

In your reply to me, you’re thinking what the feeling would be, and that might somewhat illustrate the dilemma you present in the OP of making mistakes for not listening to your "intuition". While a felt-sense can feel something like a tension inside and a felt-shift like the sudden relaxing of it, and maybe that can be explained in whatever needless abstruse way, still nothing substitutes for the inner awareness itself. This is a very direct way to contact a “gut feeling” and thereby learn one method of "following one's heart", so why bother merely thinking about it when it can be experimented with instead? The felt-sense will be whatever it just is, and the felt-shift that happens when you successfully articulate what the "sense" is feels something like a little tiny "ah ha!" experience. Which is what your talk of "intuition" reminded me of.

Focusing can, among other things, be used to become clear on what one feels or wants, to obtain new insights about one's situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation. Focusing is set apart from other methods of inner awareness by three qualities: something called the "felt sense", a quality of engaged accepting attention, and a researched-based technique that facilitates change.

 

[abaddon]

I just remembered a description of a commonplace example of spontaneous focusing.

Say a person has misplaced his keys, so he looks in all the places he thinks he’d have put them but they seem to be nowhere now. So he stops his fussing around, and stands or sits silently for a minute or two or three. He breathes and lets his attention go inside and notes there is a feeling, maybe in the chest, maybe in the belly. As he holds that sensation in awareness, he tries “on the dresser?” and there's no change inside, the felt-sense just remains the same tiny tension inside his chest or belly. Then he tries “on the couch?” and there’s this release that says “Ah yes! that’s it!” and he finds the keys under a cushion on the couch. His body remembered something his ‘mind’ didn’t.

Not a mind-blowing example, but I think resolving anything - uncertainty about decisions, unclear feelings or wants, unresolved emotions - in a way that's true to the whole of oneself will include what the body (or “unconscious”) knows about you that you’re not consciously aware of.