THE HEART SENSE JOURNEY

In this deeply reflective and sensitive book, Louise asks a key question for our time: ‘How can we move beyond ways of knowing and being that are creating a world of increasing separation and conflict, and learn to live into the possibility of a radically interconnected world that flourishes for all beings?’ Ever since childhood, she has ‘felt her heart calling her beyond the limits of modern rational thinking’ to which she also devoted her PhD. Her story is also one of an existential health crisis leading her on a transformative journey to become a wounded healer and guide for others. As the title suggests, the book itself invites the reader on the heart sense journey, first by tuning in to one’s heart – an exercise with which the reader begins and returns, and which we have been practising at meetings of our management team.

The heart is introduced as an intuitive and imaginal organ of knowledge and perception, and wisdom. Heart knowing is ‘real, authentic, grounded in lived experience, strong and whole’ – it is also immersive, inclusive, and relational, an inner compass orientation inviting radical trust. The four parts comprise preparation, uncovering the lost heart hidden in our past, rediscovering different hearts and opening to their wisdom, and finally developing your practice, re-turning the world to heart. Louise explains and expounds the five hearts: heart as a sacred vessel, physical heart, emotional/feeling heart, symbolic heart, and spiralling heart. She lists seven foundational principles on which she elaborates: that the true potential of the heart has been forgotten; the heart holds space for the formation of authentic relationship; the heart empowers co-creation; the heart knows that life is a creative unfolding born from the great mystery; the heart is the gateway; the heart perceives differently; the heart is the way home to a deeper experience of being human. (p. 80)

Part of Louise’s training was studying holistic science at Schumacher College, and becoming more explicitly aware of the divided nature of our Western reality, and the corresponding fragmentation of knowledge dominated by the left hemisphere – referring here to the work of Iain McGilchrist and Julian Jaynes. This leads into a fascinating cultural history of the heart in mystical traditions – the eye of the heart/contemplation – then its reductionist, mechanistic and secular transformation into a mechanical pump, a metaphor inconsistent with heart transplant memory recall. The work of Robert Romanyshyn also reviewed in these pages has shown how we have become progressively disembodied and detached from lived experience as well as from the natural cycles of life. Key to Louise’s approach is how we choose to see and show up in any relational space. She draws further insights from the Romantics, especially Goethe, who, like Leibniz, approached the world from the inside through empathy, contemplation, and poetic imagination. The rest of this section explores experientially and in more detail the five hearts referred to above, with an excellent summary and invitation to reflection at the end (pp. 297, 310).

This is followed by some illuminating case studies highlighting the way in which the heart perceives reality in its wholeness, seeks to understand and embrace all, honours differences and uniqueness, is non-competitive and creative: in short (p. 322) ‘the heart is the place through which we are gifted the possibility to create deep connection and real, authentic relationships even in the midst of differences, difficulties and challenges through the heart’s inherent qualities including deep attention, deep listening, unconditional welcoming towards difference, reverence, and so forth’ – hence the importance of how we show up with ourselves and for each other in the relational space. Louise also identifies (p. 335) indicators of holistic heart thinking and separation thinking, which dominates so much of our discourse today, creating polarisation and division in a binary world of good and evil, where evil is projected on the other and therefore disowned.

Louise gives some practical guidance for daily living in which the key is perhaps regularly returning to your heart through the breath throughout the day. She concludes that we need a change of mind for the sake of our hearts, so that we can open up towards the kind of world that the heart makes possible, reflecting the title of one of Charles Eisenstein’s books relating to the beautiful world which we know in our hearts is possible. This inspiration also corresponds to our deepest longing for connection and love. As I said at the outset, this is truly a book for our time, a call to rebalance our culture and overcome the self-perpetuating pathologies that we see all around us.