HeartCenteredness by Diane Brandon

“There is a wisdom of the head, and…a wisdom of the heart!”

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also.”

Robert Browning, “One Word More”

“It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.”

Blaise Pascal

There is a new trend these days toward becoming more heart-centered, one that is a positive trend in our move toward wholeness.

What do we mean by “heart-centeredness?”

Actually, the term “heart-centered” may be a bit misleading, as it might indicate a move from the head to the heart. I prefer, instead, to look at it as opening the heart up, a “heart-openness.” (And, as we shall soon find out, current scientific research hows that we may already be more “heart-centered” than we know.)

As a believer in wholism and in being whole, I feel that we are healthier and more whole when we develop and use more of our faculties and abilities. In the present context, this means that we want to use our heads and our hearts (as well as our guts, our intuition, etc.) – and have them all working together in a seamless whole. So, in order to become more heart-centered, we don’t want to stop thinking! We just want to open up our feeling center more and feel while we think and think while we feel. (We may not need open-heart surgery, as much as we may need heart-opening surgery!)

The move toward “heart-centeredness” in Western industrialized societies is truly a step toward wholeness. And it is not just Western societies that are starting to inch toward wholeness: interestingly, there is also a move in less industrialized “third-