Does your heart control your emotions

Our heart is an involuntary organ of our body which receives electrical signals from the brain which controls the pace of our heart. Our brain releases certain hormones when we confront something that makes our emotions flow. These hormones bring some changes in our body with an addition of changing the pace of heart. Sometimes, when we keep facing a lot of stress for a long time there are instances, when the heart fails to beat or we face an heart attack. So, That’s how our heart is technically connected to emotions.

What would your heart say?" When someone asks me this question, I often adapted a gestalt technique using two chairs. When the client was sitting in one chair, I asked them to speak from their heart and talk to their mind sitting over there in the other chair. Then I'd have them switch chairs and speak from their head, talking to their heart, telling their heart the mind's views and concerns. It was like two different people talking. The heart spoke from genuine feeling and authenticity, in the present. The mind spoke from opinions, fears, shoulds and shouldn'ts. I had them switch chairs several times, until they had an epiphany. Very often the client would realize their heart's voice was their true self, a voice that offered both more intuition and common sense intelligence.

What's really fascinating is that the heart contains a little brain in its own right. Yes, the human heart, in addition to its other functions, actually possesses a heart-brain composed of about 40,000 neurons that can sense, feel, learn and remember. The heart brain sends messages to the head brain about how the body feels and more. When I first heard about this scientific research, it intuitively made sense. I had felt for a long time that the heart has its own mysterious way of knowing.?

And until the 1990s, scientists assumed and most of us were taught that it was only the brain that sent information and issued commands to the heart, but now we know that it works both ways. In fact, the heart's complex intrinsic nervous system, the heart brain, is an intricate network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells, like those found in the brain proper. Research has shown that the heart communicates to the brain in several major ways and acts independently of the cranial brain.

One important way the heart can speak to and influence the brain is when the heart is coherent - generating a stable, sine-wavelike pattern in its rhythms. When the heart rhythm is coherent, the body, including the brain, begins to experience all sorts of benefits, among them greater mental clarity and intuitive ability, including better decision-making. The heart has been connected to emotions for thousands of years probably because of the correlation of emotions and heart rate/blood pressure.?

For example: When you are angry your brain release hormones and chemicals which speeds up heart rate and raises blood pressure often resulting in an abnormal chest feelings. Also the fact of the heart being a vital organ probably increased speculation that the heart deals with emotions. But indeed the brain is responsible for emotions.

And if someone says, kindly give me Rs. 500, we may not accept the request, but if the same person says with tears, then we are likely to give Rs. 500. Why? Because we think that emotions are true, we think emotions are special, we think that emotions must be respected, but there is nothing special in emotions. Emotion is thought and thought comes from outside. You have acquired it. Similarly, emotions are acquired. Do not think that feelings are pure. These regular, normal, conditioned thoughts that you have, always, when they become very intense, when they start having an impact over the body also, then you call it as feeling.

That feeling is nothing but the conditioned mind. In fact, feelings are very close to the mechanical nature of mind. Are you getting it? So, do not confuse feelings with the heart. Whenever you say heart, always understand that it is the pure mind that I am talking of, the intelligent mind, the uncorrupted mind, the free mind. What is heart? The free mind is called the heart. Heart is not the place from where all the sentiments and emotions arise. No, that is not heart. Sentiments and emotions arise from the corrupted mind itself.?

There is nothing special about emotions. You look at a girl and you start feeling a particular sentiment that’s because you are physically conditioned. And even the sentiments and the emotions depend upon the physical characteristics of the girl. Is that not so? So, what is so sacred about the feeling, that emotion? That is not heart.?

You are mistakenly giving it the name of the heart. "My heart says, ‘I love you’." Now it is not the heart, it is your conditioning which is saying that "I love you", and this conditioning does not even understand love. It is only claiming love, it does not understand love. You are irritated with something, when that irritation becomes very powerful, then your hands start shivering, you say, I am angry now. Till the time you say that I am irritated, you are confined to the mind. Cheers!