The Third Freedom: Heart

nEssence of Emotionn n

Poets, mystics, philosophers, and scientists have long pondered the mysteries of the heart. Religious thought claims the heart as the center of spiritual love. Christianity associates divine love with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Hindus revere Shiva’s sacred heart, Buddhists extol the heart as the site of compassion, and Sufis see the heart as the seat of God. The ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was home not only to emotions but also to thought, personality, moral awareness, and the soul. Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the heart, not the brain, was the seat of mental processes.n n We now know that the heart does indeed have a mind of its own. Simple experiments on frogs in high school laboratories demonstrate that the heart, composed of involuntary cardiac muscle, is autogenic or self-excitatory—signals for initiating contraction need not come from the brain but can also originate in the heart muscle itself.n n Your heart beats continuously for your entire lifetime, fulfilling its primary function of circulating oxygen and nutrient rich blood throughout your body. It also affects you in other ways: neurologically, by transmitting nerve impulses; biophysically, with pressure waves; biochemically, with hormones and neurotransmitters; and energetically, with electromagnetic fields. With every heartbeat, energy and information are transmitted to all your cells and back again. This excited exchange is the energy charge we call emotion (“energy in motion”) from the Latin verb meaning “to move.” Although your heart is about the size of your fist, metaphorically it can expand to embrace the entire planet and all humanity as well as that one person who you know as your soul mate, in a sublime energy field of love and compassion. In order to expand your heart in this way, you must unlock it and reclaim your Heart Freedom.