Following your heart

 

Hello Magical Souls, ✨🤍

One thing I learnt to do in life, since I was little, is to follow my heart and trust that it knows the way I have to go and why. Following your heart does not mean what most people think it means. It is actually not so simple and very, very brave to follow one’s heart. In this post I speak about the heart as the seat of the Soul, and why ultimately we should all let our heart guide us towards our Divine self.

Following your heart does not mean what most people think it means

A lot of Christian authors and life coaches caution about following your heart generally for 2 reasons:

• it will mess up your life
• it’s unbiblical.

Is it just feelings?

For a lot of people “the heart” is actually fleeting emotions, feelings, and impulses. For ex. you come home after a long day at school and you can either watch Netflix or study some more, and your heart says: “Netflix!”. Or you are preparing diner and you have some salad in the fridge but cupcakes in the pantry and your heart says: “Eat all the cupcakes! All of them!”. Or you discover that your boyfriend is cheating on you and your heart says: “Slash his tires! That’ll teach him!”.

But you understand that this is not “the heart”. Your heart is not telling you to be reckless, to divorce on a whim, to quit your job on a whim, to uproot your life on a whim for a boyfriend, or to commit crimes. Your heart is not telling you to prioritize yourself or your needs above all others. Your heart is not telling you to forget accountability for your actions.

Your body and mind – through cravings and procrastination – might tell you that you are tired, that you need nourishing. Your anger might push you to extremes. Your anxiety and fears might take over sometimes. Our lower impulses, greed, envy, resentment, anger, fear, jealousy, vanity, lust, etc. do sometime override our decisions, but they are not “the heart”. The heart is a deep-seated longing, a deep-seated knowing, within, that something is right for you, destined, Divinely guided, that there is a right direction, a right path for you, even if everyone around you disagrees and your mind says “no”! Following your heart is feeling all the fears, all the blocks, and still take the decision to follow what you know is right for you and ultimately guided by a higher power.

Is it unbiblical?

Several verses in the Bible caution about following the heart. Here are all the reference to “heart” in the Bible but generally this quote is the most used by Christian teachers: Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

This author, or this author, or this one, are prescribing you should not trust your heart because as your heart is sinful, by definition it cannot want what God wants for you. But the heart, here, refers to human emotions and motivations, human will. So, again, I would say Jeremiah speaks about lower, self-centered impulses and not “the heart”.

What other Bible verses are saying about the heart?

In the ancient testament, the heart, in Hebrew, means the seat of thinking, aka the brain, motivations and thoughts. And obviously human motivations can be wicked, sinful, or aligned with God. So the heart could be divided between what it wants and following God, or in New Age terms, between the ego and the Divine.

But look at Ezekiel 36:26 and 27 “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

Here God promises Ezekiel that – if he is willing, I guess – He will replace his heart of stone by a heart of flesh, and that Ezekiel, now filled by God’s Spirit will be able to follow God’s path and obey His rules. So with God’s help, we can purify our human heart from “wickedness”, from our lower impulses, and devote more of our life to follow Divine will, our Divine path. Read more here. This is a spiritual transformation we can all receive.

In conclusion, I agree that following your every emotions or feelings, without thinking rationally, is stupid and also unbiblical. But following your heart is something else. Following your heart = following your Soul (or God or the Divine) = purifying your lower impulses and aligning yourself with Divine will by expanding your heart, the seat of your Soul within you.

 

The heart as the seat of the Soul

The seat of the Soul in your physical body is your physical heart and also your spiritual heart, the heart chakra – as opposed to the idea that the physical brain is the  seat of the Soul. This is not a new age idea. It was already known in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and ancient Near East, and then in ancient Greece. Here is the weighing of the heart by Anubis against Maat’s feather of truth, a step for all deceased on their journey in the underworld.

In the Bible, God also judges men by weighing their hearts. For ex. in Proverbs 21:2 “A person may think their own ways are right, but the LORD weighs the heart.” and in Samuel 16:7 “But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.””

The heart is the fourth chakra in the 7-chakra system, and acts as an harmonizer between the lower chakras linked to the material world (physical survival, emotions) and the upper chakras linked to the spiritual world (expanded consciousness, intuition). The heart helps us make balanced decisions between our need for survival and our need to become enlightened and to embody our Divine self into our physical self.

 

Here are three women, spiritual teachers, who have helped me understanding how to connect to my heart and why.

Gigi Young

“The more you follow your heart, the more you are becoming who you truly are.”

Home

Rebecca Campbell

“Living from your heart takes courage because when you live from your heart there is nothing to hide behind. You are out there, for all to see. You are daringly saying, this is who I am and this is what I truly believe and desire. You let yourself be seen, like really seen. And some people might not like it. But your people will. When you live from the heart the most magnificent thing happens: you no longer need another person or external force to acknowledge or see you, for in living from your heart, you have already acknowledged and witnessed yourself. Be courageous. Live from your heart.”

https://www.rebeccacampbell.me/

 

Meggan Watterson

“What Mary Magdalene most wanted us to know is that we are human AND divine, and can access divine wisdom by listening and connecting through our own human hearts. No intercessors are needed. Embrace your human experience fully!” – Mary Magdalene Revealed.

https://www.megganwatterson.com/

 

Following your heart: your true life purpose

In this world, especially nowadays, we are bombarded by:

• what we are supposed to want
• what we are supposed to look like
• what we can’t ever be
• what we can’t ever achieve

and more …

If you listen to all and forget your true guidance, your heart, you will get lost.

If you listen to your inner guidance, you will see beyond the illusions, beyond the societal manipulations, and focus on what is already there, inside of you, your deeper calling, your Divine Spark, leading you to your true destiny … and your happiness.

I believe we came here with a Soul’s blueprint and that our spiritual guides always nudge us to come back to the original plan, even if we deviate. I believe our Divine guidance comes through our heart. I believe following your heart ultimately leads to embodying your Divine self into the physical.

3 times I had to follow my heart no matter how hard it was at the time:

• when I left my hometown and my mom

After high school I wanted to study at university but it was far away and my mom proposed that I would study something else closer to our village. I didn’t want to but I considered it for my mother’s sake. Suddenly I received this vision of my Soul decaying within my body and me living my life as a zombie if I stayed with my mother (no offense to my mother). So here I went …

• when I agreed to get pregnant

I wasn’t sure anymore that I wanted kids but I felt this rise, this wave coming, until a calling came in, through a wild orchid flower letting me know it was the right time and I couldn’t delay anymore unless I’d break my Soul contract.

• when I moved to Mexico

I  was speaking to another parent once about how we moved from Mexico to Japan, after living in Norway, and how the situation in Mexico is not exactly safe, and how Japan is much safer. I told him how I appreciated that the kids can now take the train by themselves to go to and back from school or go in town and shopping by themselves and how I simply felt like we were feeling free again … And he told me: “You must be very courageous for agreeing to move to Mexico in the first place!”

Suddenly I remembered how actually courageous the decision felt at the time. We were living in Bergen, Norway and it was really nice. It’s beautiful and a great town to be raising kids in but we knew we would be relocated soon. And after 4 years, my husband was told his next job was to be in Villahermosa, a small town in Tabasco. My first reaction was “nope”. My husband told me maybe we won’t have a choice. I thought “ok, let me think about this.” and I did some research:

It didn’t look beautiful. “It’s going to be ok!”, said my heart.

It didn’t look safe. “It’s going to be ok!”, said my heart.

I didn’t know Spanish. “It’s going to be ok!”, said my heart.

It didn’t look like a good place for raising kids. “It’s going to be ok!”, said my heart.

My mind kept finding excuses after excuses as to why this was a bad move but my heart kept saying this is what you need to do, your son needs this, and you are going to be ok.

So after saying yes, I had to get my mind on board: I made a list of demands to my Angels, especially regarding safety. And they told me: “Even though it is not a safe place, it doesn’t mean you won’t be safe!”. And it was true because the worst I had imagined happened to others people I knew … but not to us.

How to connect with your heart?

The easiest way to connect with your heart is to become aware of what is already present, to agree to let the deeper truth rise from within you. The Voice Within can be pretty loud and insistent, so if you can’t hear it, it’s most probably because you are not ready to hear its messages – you need an open mind – or it is because you are not used to it.

To open the connection with your heart, meditate or quietly contemplate your life. Use guided meditations such as above to help you. By doing it frequently, as a practice, you will become more and more attuned to your heart and fluent in your heart’s language, and it will be easier to center in your heart and weigh whether a decision is made from your mind or your heart space.

Also using oracle cards daily can help you forge a connection to your heart.

Another way is meditating/drawing as I explain here.

See here 8 signs you are not following your heart.

Thanks for reading. ❤️‍🔥 I hope this was a little bit enlightening. Let me know your thoughts below, or if you have questions …

May you find the courage to follow your heart more and more.

Let me know if an Angel reading + healing can help you, check out my Ko-fi page. ✨😇

As always I am very grateful for your support. Have a magical day.

Gretta 😘