Growing up, we heard that we must use our heads. The mind will provide us with the most accurate answer and guide us in our decisions. Yes, the mind is a fantastic tool that can help us, but it is not always best to think only with our mind. Using our minds in productive and creative ways takes us far, but overthinking and investing our minds in unsolvable relational and emotional problems keeps us back. Research says that we have around 60,000 thoughts per day and that a large percentage of these thoughts are the same day after day. Hence, it is easy to get stuck. We have to mind our minds!

We can also think from our hearts. New research has shown us that the heart not only pumps blood and life through our body but is also a source of wisdom and intelligence. It is in our heart’s wisdom that we find creativity, balance, and intuition. Our heart helps us become more connected in our relationships and allows us to feel fulfilled. Living from the heart means finding personal coherence and having a life aligned with our values. We can develop the ability to regulate emotions, be more intuitive and intelligent, and find answers from within.

The heart and the brain communicate, and when we have this avenue of communication open, the heart can affect our intuition, health, perception, and emotions. The heart’s rhythms are one of the best indicators of our health and well-being, or, in other words, of how much we’re being affected by stress and feeling overwhelmed. But this communication between our heart and brain can go beyond this, and the electromagnetic field of our heart can radiate outside of our body, informing people around us of things that would surprise us. Even pets can feel the radiation from your heart. The research suggests that through our hearts, we can connect to each other and that this connection between our hearts and minds will be essential for our collective future.

We can learn to think from our heart and mind. Or to feel-think, a translation of sentipensar, an idea from Latin America and our connection to the Indigenous. In this path thinking starts with the experience of the world and an affective emotional attitude where we feel in a grounded way. We feel without getting lost in feeling and sentimentality, without feeding our wounds and deepening a sense of victimhood. We feel and sense. We use our whole body to feel. And then, we think and connect to our minds from this grounded stance. Sentipensar is then to think with feeling and to feel with thinking.

So, what does courage have to do with all this? Courage is facing our fear, feeling the pain, and engaging with the uncertainty. Courage is what brings us into the battle of living from our hearts. Because we have been hurt in the past, and our hearts close, shrink, and sometimes even dry and harden from this pain. But we must become courageous and fearless to open our hearts again and live from our hearts. We can open our hearts knowing that we can become better keepers and guardians and avoid making the mistakes of the past. Courage is the key that opens our hearts. It is not a coincidence that the origin of the word courageous is the Latin word cor for heart.

Living from the heart means valuing connection, compassion, openness, and being in the moment. It is less concerned with future worries, which will bring balance to what distracts our minds. Living from the heart means living from our higher values and commitments for growth. The heart is then much more than we understand, and it is our job to become personally responsible for increasing our awareness of our heart and its relationship with our mind. When we learn to think from our hearts, we become more aware that we are beings of connection and that we are interdependent. I invite you to reflect on how we can feel-think in a way that improves our health and happiness but also brings into awareness the global environment and what we need as a collective.

Resources

https://www.heartmath.org/research

Cepeda, J. (2017). The problem of being in Latin America- Approaching the Latin American ontological sentipensar. Journal of World Philosophies, 2(1). e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp• doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.2.1.02