Heart Intelligence is a practice; it is a way of living. It is the act of becoming aware and conscious of how you are feeling at any given moment, by learning to track (or listen) to the wisdom of your whole being. This means observing not only what is going on in your mind as thoughts, judgments and beliefs, but also noticing how your body is feeling, what’s happening for you emotionally and what your intuition is saying.
Heart Intelligence (or HIQ) is the sum total and integration of listening to ALL of that wisdom, and then using that full picture to determine what is authentically you (your desires, your feelings) and what is just conditioned thoughts or desires; things that stop us from ‘showing up’ in life and from allowing others in. By becoming aware of the thoughts that try to hijack us, we can choose differently which gives us more choice, more freedom and ultimately more inner peace.
With HIQ you learn that there are no ‘negative or bad’ emotions. All emotions are just energy in motion (e-motion) and are designed to just flow through you. It is only when you resist feeling a particular emotion (like sadness, disappointment, anger etc) that the emotional energy becomes locked in the body and causes physical pain, illness or addictions.
When people live according to their Heart’s truth, they become attractive to life; they embody their own wisdom making them charismatic and inspiring. They literally just walk into a room and it instantly lights up. Their authenticity brings others close, instilling an air of peace and harmony. Having Heart Intelligence is a way of life, not a one-time process. The more you focus on HIQ practices, the more frequently you experience incredible inner peace and joy and the quicker you can get back on track when you inevitably stray off course during a ‘storm’.
What is Embodiment?
A huge part of HIQ is embodiment. This is the act of taking the wisdom you have gleaned from your mind, body, intuition and the emotions and you create a new physical, cellular experience of that understanding, within the body. Once a ‘learning or concept’ has been taken ‘consciously’ into the body, this creates more effective lasting change. HIQ dedicates time to creating practices that help you to integrate the emotional and physical insights you get from coaching sessions in a way that is comfortable, yet stretching; making your own learning a deeply profound experience.
For example, I ‘know’ at many levels that deep breathing is good for our health. It is a concept I have read about from Yogi’s to Doctors, to Shaman… but a concept alone is not enough to make a change. We need to have a new cellular, bodily experience in order to make lasting changes. This is the reason why most ‘talking therapies’ only give temporary relief.
So just today I went for my morning run and I noticed how much easier I found the run than normal. I noticed I was breathing far more deeply and more relaxed. Then I realised that during the Yoga I ’d practicelast last night, we had concentrated on breathing techniques for quite some time. My body had therefore created a new breathing pattern… it had learned at a cellular level, another way of being and then when it needed this resource (during my run), it was there. I will have to practice this breathing technique to keep it topped up of course, but it just shows how when we bring these ‘concepts’ into the body, the unconscious begins to do the work for us, rather than against.
Living with Heart Intelligence – My Personal Story.
You see, what I have (repeatedly) learned is that my body can tell a very different story from that of my mind. Recently, I have been under what most people would consider an enormous amount of stress. To summarise the highlights, the package included rescuing my parents from holiday in Hawaii when my father (who was looking after my mother as she has Parkinson’s) had a serious Stroke; he was paralysed and without speech and had to remain there for a couple of months until he was stable enough to make the flight.
This resulted in the need to move my parents (and sister who suffers with mental health issues) from France where they had lived for 9 years back to UK so I could look after them all. My partner and I chose to give our house over to my family to rent, so they could have some familiarity, figuring we would take a house that would suit our needs more. While navigating both our house move (with a dog and 2 cats) and my parent’s house move (6 cats who all needed pet passports); my partner gave up his high flying job to follow his dream of setting up his own business.
Then to add a little extra ‘je ne sais quoi’ to the mix, my parents who had only moved a fraction of their belongings back to the UK, learned their house in France and all our cherished childhood things had been burned to the ground in a freak fire. The fire brigade could only watch in horror as their hose pipes did not fit the water hydrants. While that was going on, we found out the heart-breaking news that our beloved dog had contracted the most aggressive form of cancer in his back leg. We had to make the terrifying decision to amputate it and to change his diet to unprocessed home cooked food. This action and the tons of love and attention we poured over him happily brought us an extra 6 joyful months together. Amazingly, this catalogue of stressful events occurred over only a 12 month period, while I was studying for some professional coaching exams and still trying to grow my business.
Jeez – it exhausts me just to remember that period 😉 So while my mind had said – ‘yes, you really do have some very good reasons to feel stress’, I was only feeling stressed some of the time. Other times, living with all that going on just felt totally normal.
Not surprising I guess, because before I became a Coach I used to live my life at 95% stress in the Corporate world, so I was an expert ‘stresshead’. Nowadays however, I am an expert in relieving stress, so I’m pretty clued up about what happens when we stifle our emotions… I know all too well that they end up causing disease or ‘numbing’ addictive behaviour if they are ignored.
The way I handled that period was that sometimes I would just allow myself to ‘feel and acknowledge’ my stress, reasoning that it was completely normal. Other times I would use a technique on myself so I could cope better, and other times still, I figured I just felt fine (or normal). Now some of those ‘fine’ times I actually did feel fine, all of my HIQ practices were working well. But here is where it gets interesting and why I say that the body often tells a different story (even if like me, you think you already know what you are thinking).
As I live a fairly clean and healthy life, (good diet and nutrition, lots of exercise, minimal TV, no main-stream media) I have become a very good laboratory to experiment with... This means if I do not deal with my emotions, they show up instantly in my body. Boom! And yes even me – the self exclaimed ‘expert’ can (and does) go off the dial every now and again.
There were moments during that period where for no reason I got a crippling pain and swelling in my knee or my shoulder. It wiped me out, literally floored me completely. This is what blows my mind. The pain was very definitely physical… and yet… once I got out of my story about it being a physical pain and tracked how I was feeling emotionally, I found I was feeling things I had no awareness of until that very moment. I was sad, scared and disappointed – and those feelings (because they had not been acknowledged) had gone straight into my body as physical pain. Within hours of ‘getting real’ with myself, the pain had reduced to less than 15% of how it had been and I’d done nothing other than allow myself to feel what was true. It still amazes me every single time it happens. No less because if I ‘know’ the emotion goes into the body as physical pain, then why would I let that happen…. well, truth is I don’t. It is happening ‘unconsciously’ like 90% of what happens to us – and it is exactly THAT reason why we need to do everything we can to become aware of what is going on inside us. It is why meditation is so good for us. Anything where we become quiet for a few moments… question ourselves about how we feel and actually ‘listen’ to the answer.
I am absolutely dedicated to my own self development and growth so if I (rarely) get a pain or get sick, or (more frequently) have a bout of sugar cravings, I can notice them instantly and yes you guessed it… there is always an emotion, thought or judgment that is lurking away under the radar; something I am unconsciously ignoring. It is amazing because every time I just pause and notice the pain, illness or craving; if I just listen to myself; track all of my body, soul, mind and intuition and bring it all into awareness…. it vanishes. The intense pain in the shoulder, the craving for cake, the sore painful ulcer in my mouth… 9 times out of 10… Gone – Just…. like….. that.
So in short the message is this. When you learn to track what your mind, body, emotions and intuition are saying at any given moment, you will no longer get ‘hijacked’ by your thoughts, pain, cravings or illness. You will be able to make better choices from your own integrated wisdom, so you will feel more Freedom, more Inner Peace and more Joy.
If you find yourself getting repeatedly sick or having physical pain; getting into the same old arguments and patterns with loved ones, craving foods, sex or alcohol and feel like it is finally time to listen to ‘YOUR TRUTH’, then HIQ is for you. The beauty of this coaching is that it is your own innate wisdom and the embodiment of that which will bring you back to life. It is like discovering a long lost best friend who lives inside of you, giving you love, respect, comfort and courage. Funnily enough the word courage in French means Heart. Do you have the courage to listen to you heart? Your inner best friend does….