Demystifying the Intelligence of the Heart

When we are true to our heart, we are at our most powerful, why then do we go against it? This internal conflict, boils beneath the surface of every person, whether they are aware of it or not. In this video, I will show you how love dissolves this internal conflict of interest to create a healthy, balanced and secure life. Yet the reality is that for many, love does not feel safe. To love becomes an impossible task because what was meant to feel safe now threatens the most fundamental aspect of our existence: our sense of belonging.

This post is part 5 of the #buildyourbrain series and you can watch the previous parts of the series here. When I talk about the brain-body connection, many equate this to the vagus nerve and how to use it to establish heart rate coherence but that is not how I arrived at this conclusion. Science is simply the language I used to help others reverse engineer this connection back to the heart. So far, I’ve only hinted towards the power of love but never really attempted an explanation, yet it is the single most powerful force driving the inextricable alignment of events that happened in my life with a precision that I will not be able to recreate, even if were to plan it.

I am going to share with you the three most powerful principles to establish the irrefutable connection with your heart. By the end of this video you will see how your heart literally creates reality.

Let’s breakdown the principles step-by-step.

First Principle – Posture

Become aware of your body. The shape your body acquires is the result of your emotional composition that is held in place since childhood and is the quality of presence that people sense when they are around you. We call this physiognomy.

The most important thing to realise is that there is nothing wrong with your physiognomy. When we try to hide our flaws and imperfections, we reinforce the belief that we are unloveable. This inherently creates self-shame that you are somehow wrong, out-of-place or unlovable.

We may be completely oblivious to this but our relationship with self-shame changes our posture in every interaction. We may unconsciously promote or demote ourselves in the eyes of another based on their status, stature and countless number of false beliefs that we hold inside our heads.

You may have experienced this when you meet someone for the first time and immediately feel rejected and then they get to know you and their attitude changes.

We unconsciously change our posture to appear pleasing or avoiding people altogether and this may feel safe. But feeling safe does not mean feeling loved.

As long as your posture is manipulated by how you wanted others to see yourself, you will live at the mercy of shame and rejection and your behaviour will be running on survival psychology. Even if you project a strong, positive and confident self image, this comes at the cost of humility, vulnerability and willingness of people to help you in times of great sorrow.

How then are we to feel safe and still be ourselves?

Sometimes the only option that we refuse is the one that we must take. The moment we relinquish control is when we trust ourselves completely. This is called surrender. By surrendering, we have won the most important battle of our life. The battle that we have fought without end. The battle with ourselves.

This all sounds well and great but how do you do this?

It is no secret that cultures throughout existence have attempted to achieve this state of surrender. I’ve traveled Africa, the Highland of Papua New Guinea and the Amazon – regardless of which tradition I investigated, there is something they all had in common. They all induced a state of trance where the mind steps out of the way allowing the heart to lead.

In this video I want to focus on the practical details of how to connect to the remarkable Power of Love.

The first principle is build on the most basic foundation – Posture.

Become aware of your body. Breathe, relax, soften your body. Instead of attempting to surrender your mind, surrender your body instead. This inevitably withdraws attention from the relentless fury of the exhausted mind.

Some may consider this state of surrender to be weak. This however is far from the truth. Consider this example, when you walk past strangers you perceive to be creepy, your pace instinctively speeds up. Your are now at the mercy of your survival psychology and if something were to happen, you are already on the back foot.

Now let’s consider what happens when you surrender. When you walk past, first of all you do not project your fears onto strangers since your attention is of breath and relaxation. Your pace does not speed up because of some hypothetical outcome manufactured in your head and if something were to happen, your posture is non-threatening and this is often enough to diffuse any threat as there is no residual tension in your posture to push against nor are you manipulated by judgment, opinion or shame – not even of your own.

Surrender is your greatest strength. For men, surrender reduces stress levels which boost testosterone giving men a natural confidence that they do not need to defend. For women, surrender naturally balances hormones and allows women to become comfortable with their emotions rather than fighting against or running away from it – which is simply the fight or flight response.

Life provides relentless opportunities to surrender. In my Train your Nervous System Online course I show you directly how to do this. Breath, relax and you will find that surrender fills you with a strength that reminds you never to give up on love.

Second Principle – Attention Within

Contrary to popular belief, the natural state of the human brain is anything but clear and coherent. Yet remarkably we are able to piece this neuro-electrical storm together to fabricate reality and pass this illusion as truth.

This ability to “glue” electrical activity from fragmented neural networks is called gamma binding. In certain cases, this gluing process fails to occur and we observe asynchronous electroencephalogram (EEG) oscillations among neural networks competing to construct reality. Medically, we call this schizophrenia.

This state of neuro-electrical chaos is escalated when the nervous system is on overdrive and the hyper-vigilance is responsible for fabricating fear-driven delusions. This is apparent in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were the brain is looping past experiences that debilitate your ability to respond in the present. As such, even in the absence of realistic threat, the body replicates the traumatic experience. The physical symptoms include, Hyper-arousal, aggressive outburst, emotional numbness, dissociation, trembling, involuntary spasms and heart palpitations.

This hyper-aroused stated is like drive a car without breaks. You seldom have control and even when you do, you get confused on which direction to take. The brain may loop through past experiences, overthink, overanalyse and this incurs a high cognitive load. This is exhausting and drastically slows down thinking and the lack of control means that we feel out of sync with this moment. Luckily, nature has biologically designed a break mechanism to throttle this cognitive chaos. The break mechanism is your heart.

I have already covered how to use the rhythms of the heart to rapidly repair a trauma response in this video.

What might not be immediately apparent is that despite the brain being quick witted and cleaver it falls drastically short of the intelligence of the heart. The heart is not interested in cognitive loops but rather responds to this moment – directly.

How do you gain access to this intelligence?

You have access to this intelligence in this very moment by simply shifting your mind’s attention to your heart.

The second principle is: Attention within.

It is already scientifically validated that simply focusing on the feelings of gratitude and compassion will elevate your heart rate variability. The higher the better. I would encourage you to take this a step further. Feelings are fleeting and at a certain point, relying on feelings loses it potency. Instead of committing to a feeling, devote yourself to your heart completely, regardless of how you feel.

At first, you may not feel anything or get a sense of discomfort, grief or even anger. Devotion is consistent regardless of what you feel. This devotion strengths the connection between the brain and the heart and suddenly, love appears where fear once was. This is when we realise that love has never failed us. It is we who fail to love and therefore to heal.

We remain devoted to the heart until love completely consumes us, ending the toxic affair we had with the mind.

You may be wondering what is the point of this?

Once the mind surrenders, refusing to flee from love, there is no need to believe in ourselves, to prove ourselves or justify our existence. We do not need someone to completely accept us. It is we who accept ourselves completely.

This is perhaps what Paulo Coelho meant when he said: “Love is the answer we refuse to accept”

Third Principle – Listen

The heightened receptivity of the heart does not play by the rulebook of the brain. In fact the slower central processing by the brain is displaced by the moment to moment response of the heart where the passage of time itself is irrelevant.

This state often reveals itself moments before an accident happens, where people report time slowing down, where they act instinctually and purposefully even before they have had the opportunity to think. Their senses are heightened yet unlike the hyper-aroused state – people report a state of being utterly calm – vision is clear and hearing sharper.

Yet we don’t need an accident to provoke this state. Some may equate this state to flow, yet I’m not talking about the flow state that is often derived through external activity, but rather a perpetual sate of flow evoked internally.

I call this state Precognition and is evoked by the third principle which is simply to: Listen.

I am not talking about some miraculous ability to predict the future, but rather the heart responds to this moment much faster than the brain does and is able to create reality as it happens.

Precognition is the literal meaning of the cliché – Listen to your Heart.

I teach the Precognition Method in my advanced courses available here.

To give a personal account, I have worked hard and meticulously to get to where I am now. But the truth is, a large part of what got me here are things that I never planned or could have ever dreamt off!!! After finishing my PhD in neuroscience, I had my career lined up in front of me. Yet, my heart chose differently. I inherently knew that the moment had arrived for me to abandon life in Sydney completely and travel to somewhere secluded to write my first book. The idea of moving to Thailand appeared in fleeting conversations. This was a stupid plan, an impulsive action that made no sense to my mind. Yet I’d been torn between my heart and my mind before. Time and time my internal conflict got tested and time and time again, I proved my conviction to love. This time, I did not negotiate with my heart. Within three weeks of deciding to write a book, I arrived in Thailand. A series of miraculous encounters lead me to another Author who asked me to take over the cave he was living in. I have documented this journey in this video. Upon returning back to Sydney, I was walking down Bondi Beach minding my own business when a hip-hop artist recognised me from a talk I gave two years prior. Inspired by the Stories in Hidden World: The Inside Story of the Soul, we collaborated in translating the book into a music video called: Equation of Love which was nominated for best Music Video and Best Director at the 2022 International Music Video Awards. I don’t know about you, but listening to my heart has changed the trajectory of my career entirely and none of this would have been possible if stuck to my traditional academic role and played it safe.

Precognition drives the inextricable alignment of events that happen with a precision that you will not be able to recreate, even if you planned it. When you listen to your heart,  you open a channel to a deeper dimension where things of awe happen at a regular basis. You may have heard of the saying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. This is the state you acquire when you slow down and Listen. Like a high frame rate camera, your heightened senses absorb a lot of information yet your brain observes it in slow motion. This is how you pick up on details that others simply miss in the manic and desperate survival state.

We cannot love in a hurry.

I’m not going to give anyone false hope that these precision events just happen. Quite the contrary, I spent the last two decades studying neuroscience to help others reverse engineer this irrefutable connection to the heart. These precision events happens because my lived experience has lead me to only one conclusion: Love favours the brave.

It all comes down to following these three simple principles: First – surrender to your body. Second – withdraw your attention from the mind and devote to the heart. Thirdly – Listen and allow the heart to lead before the mind does.

The Precognition Method is a technique to breath, relax and lead from the heart.

When you love yourself, you love all because hate has no room to exist in a heart consumed by love.

You can follow the Journey of writing Hidden World: The Inside Story of the Soul here and watch the Equation of Love music video here.