What is the Heart Body?

Beyond the Mind: Awakening the Heart Body's Perception

Mind as Filter

Appearing here, we perceive and process. I see you and as an apprehension of my mind there’s a distance. But what about the Heart Body? What is the Heart Body? As Human Beings, we perceive phenomena though the mind and thus it appears to directly enter the mind as if by projection. Interestingly, this is not actually how we originally experience things, or people. In fact, it’s the opposite, but we use the mind as a filter to understand and capture information. Our brain is such an amazing tool, but we utilize it well beyond its expertise or best use. What I mean is that we exercise it excessively and continually put it to work in situations where it doesn’t belong or where it’s not at its fullest capacity.

The Heart Body: An Alternative Perception

The Heart Body is a tool of perception of experience via another input mechanism. But because we constantly apprehend things through the mind, it can be foreign and unknown. Artists and musicians know of this avenue, but generally speaking, ordinary (and western) consciousness will not be familiar with it. The schooling we undergo has us turn away and divorce ourselves from this method of perception.

The Mind’s Grip on Perception

Moreover, the analytical mind actively shears away the pathways of perception that would allow the Heart Body to come forward and receive the information that is offered by world. The cognitive mind (specifically what happens in the frontal neocortex) is greedy and wants to be the director and interpret the goings on in the world first and foremost. This is how it maintains controls. It is (generally) conditioned to fear a loss of control. The fact that sensory perception is also handled by the neocortex may also play a role in its dominance of how we understand reality. We are processing the sensory input and then our cognitive mind immediately gets to work on making sense of that.

The Pause: A Gateway to the Heart Body

But there is a completely different method to experience the world that does not put the analytical mind as an initial filter. It is a connection via the body that comes with an allowance of the pause. The pause is key has we are pausing our habitual knife wielding mind and opening to input via our body. Immediately the heart is engaged.