the mighty heart: the timeless seat for love and emotion
“The inside of your body is an exact map of our solar system and the universe. Your heart is the sun and the center of your body system. Your organs are the planets, and just as the planets depend on the sun to remain in balance and harmony, so do all the organs in your body depend on your heart to remain in balance and harmony.”
— Rhonda Byrne, The Power
For centuries, cultures across the world have associated the heart with love and the full range of human emotions and feelings. There are good reasons why this heart-emotion connection has been so deeply embedded in our collective psyche and language.
When you feel a powerful surge of love, excitement, or other intense emotion, you can literally feel it in your heart. As your heart rate increases, you become hypersensitized to the pounding of your heartbeat in your chest. This visceral feeling of flutters, palpitations or your heart racing is your body's way of allowing you to vividly experience the force of your emotional state.
Even in ancient times, the great philosophers and thinkers understood the heart's primacy in the realm of emotions, especially love. The ancient Greeks had contrasting views, but both identified the heart as the control center for feelings and passions. Plato believed the chest area, containing the heart and lungs, governed our strongest positive emotions like love as well as negative ones like fear, anger, rage, and pain. His student Aristotle went even further, granting the heart supremacy over all human processes – mental, spiritual, and physiological.
This notion that the heart, not the brain, directs our feelings, desires, and will makes profound sense when you consider the fact that the heart is an amazingly sophisticated intelligence system. The heart contains its own independent nervous system known as the "heart brain." With over 40,000 neurons, the "little brain" in the heart can sense, feel, learn, and remember. It continually sends signals to the big brain influencing our perceptions, emotions, and mental processes.
The physical heart is also a powerful biological oscillator radiating energies and electromagnetic frequencies that saturate every cell in our bodies. When feeling loving emotions, these frequencies become more coherent and radiate outward in an energetic heart field that others can pick up, even from several feet away.
From a holistic perspective, the heart's robust neural network, energetic field, and biochemical production qualify it as a leading intelligence system in the body. Our age-old identification of the heart as the wellspring of love and emotion arises from our innate recognition of the heart's incredible multi-layered complexity and sophisticated processes. Ancient wisdom revering the heart was simply ahead of its time.
