Have you ever walked into a room and picked up on a vibe like something has happened even though everyone else around you denies it? Do you sense an argument took place or that they were talking about you behind your back, but everyone seems to have a smile glued on their face?
If you spend the majority of your childhood experiencing moments like these where you feel like something is up yet everyone else, especially authority figures tell you that you’re wrong, you learn to distrust your intuition, your inner knowing, your heart or gut instinct that tells you otherwise. Instead, you rely more on external factors to validate your experience.
Why would they lie to you, anyway? You must be the problem, not them.
Parents and caregivers always have the best intention, you’re the one who’s wrong. This conclusion may be happenstance, or a brief instant buried deep in the recesses of your mind. As you grow up, you continue to doubt your innate ability to pick up on cues and instead rely on others’ explanations of what is “really” going on. Shame brews about who you are – somehow, no matter how much you accomplish or how great you are, you never feel like you truly fit in. Loneliness follows you no matter how many friends you have or how big your family is.
This is one of my explanations for anxiety. Anxiety is a deep seeded distrust in our ability to go beyond our limitations and find mutually rewarding connections with others. We believe that others judge us harshly and won’t accept us for who we are because long ago we exchanged inner knowledge to blend in with the group/family/culture. The problem or the solution, rather, is that our mind and heart are clever – they don’t like living under false pretenses and they create incongruent feelings inside of us to wake us up. To realize that we need to go back to our core basics to learn how to trust ourselves so that we can make better decisions and find safety in relationships with others.
Therapy is an excellent tool to increase your mind’s awareness of relational patterns, the genesis of your guilt and shame, and tools to change the course of your life as you know it for the better. For us analytical folk, talk therapy is awesome because we use the main tool we have been relying on forever to get better.
What about our heart, though?
Did you know that the heart has neurons? The intrinsic cardiac system sends more messages to the brain than the brain does to the heart? It also acts independently of the brain to remember, feel, sense, and make decisions. When we lose sight of our intuition and bury it under years of striving to be the perfect one, we need other tools beyond therapy to connect us back to our heart. Talking about our feelings and feeling them in therapy sessions are a way to help us reconnect to ourselves, and meditation and mindful practice is another.
Did you know that when people say “I am picking up on your vibe”, they aren’t being hippy woo-woo’s but that it is scientifically proven that our heart emanates a magnetic field several feet away from the body? So, you could have been right about all of those times you felt something was off even though your outer world denied it. Understanding the physiological science of our heart can also explain why it makes a world of a difference when a parent is cool, calm, and connected when confronted with a wailing baby or a tantruming toddler.
It also can explain why some sports teams when in sync win the game. The fascinating thing about it all is, that by implementing tools that focus on your breathing, creating awareness of your heart, and flexing your intuitive muscle, you can dramatically shift your relationship with yourself by reducing anxious thoughts and feelings and improving your relationship with others at home and at work.
To read more about Heart Math, click the link below.