Heart Wisdom

You are using your heart while you are reading this. While your brain decodes these letters, your heart is holding you within a deep emotional feedback rippling all through your physical body. When you know something, your heart knows it, too, or you don’t know it at all. This is ancient knowledge that is now being confirmed by biological facts. Studies show that the heart is a brain too - each pulse sends out pressure waves that carry emotional and physiological signals, influencing the entire body in ways similar to the brain proper. It produces its own logic which is different from the rational mind and instead taps deeply into the embodied knowledge.

This course will bridge recent findings with the oldest wisdom about the heart. It will show you how ancient ideas of the heart as the seat of love within ourselves can be grasped within a contemporary understanding of biology and medicine. We’ll explore the heart not only as an organ but as a site of deep wisdom and connection. The heart, when fully attuned, can be understood as our source of love, intelligence and life. Tending our heart is the one thing needed to be realigned with reality.

For millennia, major wisdom traditions understood the heart as our most important element – both from a biological and a cosmological standpoint. The heart is the seat of love, and without love, we are nothing. Accordingly, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and to some extent Christianity considered the heart to be an organ of spiritual perception. In the Upanishads, the heart is the seat of Atman, the self, which is a microcosmic version of the one divine reality. For the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, “the heart is with God, or rather it is Him.”

In this course, we will explore how different cultures related to the heart as a spiritual guide, and key element in living life. We will study the ideas of classical philosophers and spiritual masters such as Plato, Ibn Arabi, Rumi and Longchenpa and more contemporary authors and teachers focusing on the heart, such as Lilian Silburn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chögyam Trungpa, Anne Klein, Kabir Helminski and Llwellyn Vaughan-Lee. We will also dive into recent approaches to put the heart back center stage of our culture with bell hooks, Erich Fromm and Jack Kornfield.

Infusing scientific findings with philosophy and insights from spiritual practice, participants will learn that the heart is not only a physical organ but an organ of the soul. In it lies the place where spacetime and the plane of the soul meet, where the individual is intimately connected to the whole living universe – and we carry this place in the middle of our chest. The heart is the navel of the One inside of ourselves, at the same time most ultimately known to us, but also densely veiled to our rational understanding. In this course, we will work to unearth its true power. We will study philosophers and scientists such as Iain McGilchrist, Karl Pribram and Rolin McCraty.

Believing that the heart is a mechanical pump only is like thinking that the brain is merely a storage room of sensory information and a relay station for reflexes. Instead, the heart is a perceptual and feeling organ. It even has a nervous system which neuroscientists call “the little brain of the heart” – and this heart brain controls many functions of the grey mass in our heads. Biologically, the heart is the leader.