What Art Thou, Heart?
And why am I so squishy?
What you’ll get from this article: A meandering about living in your head vs living in your body.
No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.
I was recently introduced to the concept of being ‘heart-centered’, rather than ‘head-centered’, whereby the former feels as though their sense of self sits within their body, and the latter lives in their head.
I imagine reality to operate on two planes, based on which type of person you are. The heart-centered are tangibly connected to the world, as their perception of reality is tied to how their senses react to their environment. The air is warm and my body is warm. My clothes are draping down over me and I am protected. A clear, direct line from reality to experience. We all experience this, of course, but heart-centered people live here.
To be head-centered is for existence to primarily sit above that direct line, as an examiner of it through a mental lens. Head-centered is subject to cognitive biases, shaped by previous experiences and extrapolations of that experience. Head-centered filters the external world through the ego.
Neither is bad, neither is correct. Humans often dip back and forth between the two many times per day. But they are vastly different.
The nature of abstraction, which creates multi-layered thinking, symbolism, and complex reasoning, is the domain of the head-centered. They are the reason that humanity progresses through technology, and are at the root of even the ability to use tools. Head-centricity pushes for advancement, but at the tradeoff of tangible connection to the world.
I am head-centered, and I often wonder how it is to be more immersed in the body. I dabble in body awareness, whenever something drastic happens or during a meditation, but it is not my default. I’m constantly annoyed to be living in my head, because it’s a bit of a land of pretend. It’s likely less than 20% of the time that I feel truly settled into the world my five senses interacts with.
The rest of the time is spent in the endless expanse of the mind.
To combat this, I’ve been practicing a concept lately around bodily ownership. Consciously and nominally retraining my brain to recognize my body as me. To not see my arms and hands as tools, but instead as literal extensions of my entity that I use to explore the world. Even now, it’s difficult to put into words exactly what the difference is, but placing my existence in a body part other than my head makes every environment feel more alive.
The hand is more than just a complicated tool that gathers data and feeds it to the brain. The hand is me, and I encompass all the space that it takes up in the world. But a weird thing happens when I become more hand-focused, where the lines start to blur a bit between my body and the environment. The flesh of my finger feels as substantive as the cold water I place it in. The vibrancy is more of a spectrum of color and material than separate entities. Just a big blend of ‘thing that exists’.
Releasing my ego through stepping away from my mind-focused separation starts to dissolve the lines around my being. I start to feel like a thing, just a mass of clay that will return surprisingly quickly to its component parts and be lost to the reformation of carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and the like.
It is both scary and exhilarating and I’m wondering how the hell some people spend the majority of their days in this hyperconnected plane. But man, do I feel alive.