Musings inspired by the first episode of this year’s The Minefield podcast series for Ramadan. Listening to this series every year since 2020 has nourished my mind and soul.
The heart.
I didn’t consider it much before. I was fascinated by all sorts of states, sensations, concepts and ways of being. Brains, and wiring, and the gut, and connections, and energy, and the soul.
But I never contemplated the heart, not as the centre, the core, the nucleus of the body and spirit.
The heart is a vessel. The body’s expression of the soul; it speaks for the soul, and when cultivated - tended to - it’s a conduit to the world and to the divine.
The heart - the circular-sensory system, the sensory experience before thought. The voice of the soul.
The beating of the heart is the rhythm of shared life. These pulsing sound waves forge visible and invisible landscapes.
The heart is a muscle, and in good metaphor form, it requires conditioning. In loving and learning, humility and grace, in being torn down and cultivated again with more beauty and strength.
The process of opening one’s heart and the practice of keeping those pathways open is the art of a lifetime.
The divine - the ocean, the deep pool, the river beneath the river - where intuition mingles with the ancient laws, is carried by the soul to its vessel in the body: the heart. The heart carries intention and desire as it beats, sending sounds and vibrations out into the atmosphere. It carries knowing from the deep.
So when it is said, ‘listen to your heart’, it takes a particular kind of practice, the practice of listening, positioning yourself to hear, not for understanding, but for feeling, for knowing, which is often lost in the cacophony of noise.
To keep an open heart is to be wired to the world; it is the practice of listening and speaking from the soul.
