Listen to your heart. No, really.

I’ve had several friends bemoan their fates when they’ve followed their hearts. “I should have known to listen to my head!” they would say, and vow never again to let their hearts decide their fates.

Most people, when they think of their hearts, think of them as the seat of their emotional selves. Feelings seem to come from the heart. Happiness, sadness, anger, love, anxiety, all burst from our chest. We listen to our minds say, “This man or woman is no good for me” while our hearts seem to say, “Yeah, but boy do they look mighty fine!”

The heart is more complex than that. It is actually an extremely sensitive sensory organ. Intuition comes from it. The heart is the connection to your soul. It actually senses what is going to happen in the near future. (See the documentary I Am for an interesting experiment that illustrates this.)

The problem is that the mind creates stories that trigger emotions. The heart, rather than sensing the minutest input, is drowned in the emotions triggered by the mind. It’d be like hooking a powered microphone into a stereo that is expecting input from an unpowered microphone. The minutest feeling triggered by the mind completely overpowers any intuitive input it normally receives.

This is why we frequently think the heart leads us down the wrong path. In fact, it is the mind that screams through the heart, “THAT PERSON LOOKS LIKE WHAT I EXPECT MY MATE TO BE!!!!” We become drooling idiots, not because the heart senses the rightness of the situation, but because the mind overpowers the heart.

How can you tell when the heart is relaying its intuitive senses? Because it is gently factual. The light turns red. A tree falls. The car ahead of me stops. The person I love is smiling. They are crying. These are simple statements of “this is life.” The emotion that frequently comes with these observations is one of gentleness. Appreciation. Soft laughter. Soft nostalgia. “Things are what they are, aren’t they?” it says gently.

And so the most important messages the heart can offer are the ones at cross-current with the mind. The mind says, “SHE’S HAWT!!!” and the heart gently says, “Oh, you’re so funny… she’s not the one for you,” or whatever. And the heart is drowned out.

One of my experiences with this was driving to Costco in Capistrano Beach, near where my parents live. I was driving south down Del Obispo Road, the main drive through San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point. As I was driving towards an intersection, I got the sudden impulse to turn left. That impulse was the barest twinge – a pulse that felt like a water drop hitting the surface of a pool in my chest and leaving no trace – and I dismissed it, because my mind couldn’t believe that I was getting good information from that little blip.

So I continued to drive, and discovered that I couldn’t get there from here. So, reluctantly, I turned around, turned down the road my heart had asked me to go down, and there was Costco, on the right-hand side.

When we talk about “head over heart,” we like to think that the rational stories we tell ourselves are made by the mind, while the irrational, emotional stories are made by the heart. But all stories are made by the mind. The heart makes no stories. It only describes facts. I am happy. I am sad. The heart doesn’t place any judgment on the emotions it expresses. It doesn’t say “I am happy because my lover is with me.” It’s the mind that generates the story of why I’m happy.

So when someone tells me they should have never listened to their heart, my response is always, “try listening more carefully.”