I’ve spent most of my life searching outside for the answers to everyone of my questions. Many of these questions and desires centered around health, but also success, happiness, and world change. No matter how hard I searched for the answers, my goals were never fully attained. Then I fortunately stumbled upon the teachings of Sydney Banks by way of Michael Neill and I began to see the world in a completely different way. I began to better understand the truth about how my mind works and even the smallest bits of this understanding were creating infinite changes in my personal and professional lives.
Somewhere along this journey, I experienced a spontaneous moment when I became truly curious. If the intellect or ego doesn’t have my best interest at heart, what did? Could it be my heart?
I was inspired to design an incredibly simple experiment.
For at least 100 days, I would make decisions in my life based on what my heart wants rather than my ego or intellect. There of course are going to be times where I don’t notice it’s my intellect guiding me, so I was willing to make allowances for a bit of imperfection in this experiment.
The heart guided decisions would be determined when ever I was aware of the fact that a decision was being made.
This lead to a very valuable question from the people around me:
How do you know the difference between the heart and the intellect?
Most of us already know the answer to this question, because we have felt it before. We’ve all had the experiences where we followed the path not yet walked in front of us, with no good intellectual, logical, or rational reason, EXCEPT that it felt like the RIGHT thing to do.
The difference between the heart and the intellect is really quite simple. It might be hard to notice at first, but with time it become as obvious as noticing the only black sheep in a flock of white ones.
The feeling is different. I don’t mean feelings like joy or sadness. The physical feeling within your body of the heart versus intellect is more broad and less defined, but as you learn about the feeling it can become your sign that tells you which direction you are headed. Are you headed home to the heart or away from home by way of the ego or intellect.
Here are some more details that might be helpful:
With the intellect, the feeling is often tight and constricting. You might even have a localized area in your body that feels it the most. Mine was and continues to be my belly. The muscles around my abdomen will tighten like a corset squeezing the very breath out of me.
Which turns out to be a really amazing sign post for me. It just so obvious now when my intellect has grabbed a hold of the steering wheel of my life, because my belly tells me.
For others it may be the muscles in their jaw or their tongue, the neck and shoulders, or even the muscles in your hands. There was a period of my life where I would wake up every morning unable to use my hands for the first 10-15 minutes because I had been squeezing and gripping them all night long.
The intellect feels heavy. It feels like you are carrying about 100 pounds in a backpack up a steep mountain climb. Which means it’s hard. I mean really hard to do what the intellect tells you to do.
So why do we do it?
Because we’ve heard so many times that the hard things are the ones worth doing. If it isn’t hard, it won’t change you. If it isn’t hard you won’t grow. Life is supposed to feel hard.
What if that isn’t true?
With the heart, the feeling is light and expansive. You’ve dropped the heavy backpack and the intrigue and curiousity of what lies ahead is infectious.
At other times it’s so matter of fact. As if enormous, bright yellow sign posts have been lining the right side of the road that you’ve just missed simply because you’ve been looking left. Then suddenly, it’s so obvious what you should do next.
Following the heart has been immensely enlightening for me. By putting this on my internal radar, I see how much the intellect has been and continues to try to direct my life. The intellect wants to be included in just about everything. Whether I’m deciding when to go to the bathroom, what to eat, or how to “plan” my entire life.
So I’m interested in how my life feels and looks when the intellect doesn’t get to plan anything (or at least a heck of a lot less than it previously had).
Want to see more of what I’m learning?
You can check out some of my videos on YouTube or TikTok to follow along on this journey.
If you are interested in learning more and want to try your own guided heart experiment – join the movement and sign up below!
