Follow your heart? That’s advice people often give. But many people don’t know what is right for them in a deep way. Often, layers of hurt, bad decisions, and social norms prevent us from understanding who we are at a heart level. How do we follow our hearts? Take a few minutes to explore this with me.
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Follow your heart. It’s familiar advice. It sounds positive, affirming, and seems to convey a respect for a person’s individuality and authenticity. What does it mean to follow your heart? Is it good advice?
I believe that each of us has at our core a spark, an inner light, a center that is profound and is the source of who we are. It’s who we are at heart. Paying attention to our heart and how our deepest core, our deepest identity leads us in life is surely important. But here’s the problem: lots of people don’t know who they are more deeply. That deep identity is something of a mystery. When you’re told to follow your heart, what do you do when you’re not so sure where your heart may be leading you.
There are lots of reasons why we don’t know who we are most deeply. In general, we’ve never been taught how to recognize that part of ourselves. Most of us have been taught to live up to social expectations and to fit in, to color inside the lines, and to do what’s expected of us. To follow your heart: well, becoming successful by society’s standard may not be where your heart would naturally lead. So, we’re taught to ignore that longing for something other than society’s expectations for success. Or to set it aside until retirement.
There are other things that prevent us from knowing our own hearts. Because of problems we faced in life, some of them serious like abuse or neglect, and some of them ordinary, or more common, like not being understood by those significant to us, we may have adapted to unhealthy patterns. Those unhealthy patterns feel normal to us. They are all we know about our inner experience. When things that are unhealthy feel normal to us, we’ll probably keep choosing them and wonder what’s going wrong. We may even think that we’re following our heart when we’re really following something that’s unhealthy and deformative for us.
In addition, society gives us lots of messages that keep us from our own hearts. Women are taught that their role is to care for others, their spouses or children, with the implication that a woman’s heart is always to care and nurture. People who are part of racial minority groups are taught to stay in their place, because that’s what will be best for them. There’s no room there to trust their heart. People from sexual minority groups are to just blend in and pass as ‘normal.” Following your heart is threatening to others. While I’m being simplistic here, my point is that there are many social and family messages that come our way that convey that we shouldn’t trust our hearts let alone follow it.
So, if you really want to follow your heart, what are you going to do? For most of us, before we can follow our hearts, we need to learn to take care of our hearts, to nurture our hearts, and then to listen to our hearts.
To care for your heart, it’s important to step away from other influences in life and just be. Time alone for spiritual practice is critical to care for the heart. But when I say spiritual practice, I’m speaking in broad terms. Of course, there is meditation and mindfulness. But some people have difficulty with contemplative practices like meditation. Walking or hiking alone, drumming, or chanting can all be used as spiritual practices.
When we engage in spiritual practice regularly, the noise of the world including all those messages that distort our view of ourselves fall away. In time, we find that we are alone with who we are most deeply. It’s in those times that we get to know our hearts.
So, yes, we begin by caring for our hearts with regular spiritual practice. Then we can listen to what is stirring within us most deeply.
It sometimes helps to talk about what we learn with a trusted friend or a spiritual director. That’s part of how we learn to discern what we learn about what’s stirring within us.
Follow your heart? Yeah, that’s a good idea. But first, take care of your heart and learn to listen to your heart. Without that, you may not recognize where your heart is leading you.