Let’s do the math and get to the heart of the matter.
When all the bad stuff in this world comes from hate, greed, aggression, and separation. And when all the good stuff comes from compassion, kindness, virtue, knowing thou self and generosity,
Then, isn’t the solution right in front of your nose?
Politics, wars, and conflicts are handmade, by people. Peace, unity, empowerment, love, and wisdom are heart-made, by other people.
Do the bad guys first have to become better people before this world can turn into the paradise it potentially is?
I know. I know. The world is a web of inscrutable complexity, but it’s still run by people. You. Me. Those other guys behind their screens.
Are self-awareness and following our hearts the one thing to do to create a better world together?
Let’s follow some truths as breadcrumbs to more clarity, and maybe getting just a few steps closer to even begin to understand where all the bad stuff in our worlds comes from.
Truth1: In the core of our beings, we all desire freedom, love, to be heard and felt, and a heart connection to others to create a sense of belonging and safety.
Truth 2: To control, suppress others, bully, hate, destroy, and seeding hurt doesn’t set anybody's soul free but creates more pain and suffering.
Truth 3: Heart intelligence and emotional mastery, on the contrary, will create healing, owning our shadows, and thus less conflict, toxicity, and more kindness, compassion, open hearts, and… a better world.
In this piece, I rehabilitate the wisdom of our hearts and our ability to become emotionally mature, wise human beings. And the way to get there.
Heart Intelligence and emotional hygiene
It is exactly these two very important capabilities that seem to be the needle in the haystack of today’s society. They are orphans left alone at the moment humanity decided to become more rational, more technological, more scientific, more problem-oriented, more of quantifying life by putting things in empirically visible boxes, more focused on economical growth, more greedy, and as a result of all of that, more divided than ever.
In our journey to move forward, we lost the ability to listen to our hearts.
We forgot we are vulnerable beings that need a connection to feel safe, and a place to belong. Instead, in our lack driven rat race, the primary response is often from fight or flight.
The school doesn’t teach us how our emotions work nor to deal with triggers, so the air in relationships, between colleagues at work, and in families becomes filled with toxicity from defensive responses. When we don’t know how to own our stuff, it is easy to feel like a victim of life and the world around us.
When this happens, the world essentially becomes an unsafe place. Consider the covid crisis. The virus operated as a magnifying glass for the fight, flight, and fear triggers. This became increasingly visible on social media, our digital meeting place.
Social Media Doesn’t Connect People from Their Hearts But from Their Loneliness and Anxiety
In our need for a safe place, connection, and the desire to be heard and seen, we reach out on our social media. Sadly, this drives us even further apart because of the rise of digital anxiety. Where 20 years ago our reaction in communication was merely driven by cognitive capabilities, now we react mostly from emotional defense alone. We also react much faster, almost instantaneously.
What happened to us?
Well, we are potentially connected with every single part of the world through our technology. The world has become our village, but it is not our home.
The tsunami of information and images is too much for our nervous system to bear. This creates digital anxiety.
Because of the constant overwhelm of our nervous system, 90 percent of reactions on threads on Facebook are emotionally driven. Before we even realize it, we are caught in the act of dehumanizing the people who think differently. They become a potential threat, and we react the same way when we get triggered in our relationship.
During the pandemic, the bombardment of, mostly fear-based, information caused the response and nervous system of many people to be overwhelmed in biblical proportions. Sadly, most people are not aware of this, many get kind of hooked on the dopamine this fight & flight gives.
According to the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, when people can't get themselves out of those negative emotional spirals, they become addictive behavior patterns.
Deep in our hearts, the digital anxiety makes us feel bad, all of the time. We feel separate and disconnected from our source and from others.
What to do, where to go, who to turn to?
There are many ways. Apart from using breathing techniques like the Wim Hof method, meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, or other embodiment practices, I want to focus on one very clear and effective modality that can ‘fix’ both: HeartIQ.
Despite the crash course of the world around us, we can choose to become more heart intelligent, and more emotionally mature. Every one of us can do this since we all have a heart and emotions. And for this, you are never too old to learn.
Heart Intelligence
My own experience has shown me that the more I silence my mind through meditation and yoga and being a lot in nature, the more I give space to my heart. But that’s not all. I wouldn’t be where I am now when heartIQ didn’t come into my life.
HeartIQ is a method for deep transformation founded by Christian Pankhurst. Christian has been Britain’s Top Coach and he worked with Neil Donald Walsh, the author of ‘Conversations with God’. HeartIQ showed me, mostly in circles with others, that the heart has its own technology.
This is how it works.
The fundamental of HeartIQ work is being in a circle and sharing with other people. Not so much from the stories that run constantly in our minds, but from feeling in the moment, from a sense of embodiment. The amazing thing I’ve experienced in New Eden, Christian’s center in Holland, is that when you sit in a circle with people, a so-called amplified field is created. This field offers space for true transformation, to heal deep traumas stored in our bodies, to become more real, present, and heart connected with oneself and others in the circle.
For this to happen, for anybody in this world to become vulnerable, to really open up, we need safety first. This is done by creating a strong container, for establishing a very clear structure. This structure is king, always. Leave the structure, leave the agreements made in the circle, and the amplified field of trust will deflate and circle members won’t feel safe to open up. One other part of this amazing heart intelligence is that whatever you bring into the circle, will amplify.
One of the main mechanisms for people not being able to enter their heart space is because our minds make ourselves wrong. Our minds are great sabotaging mechanisms, when we let them to. They keep us away from pain, from our trauma, because that once worked as survival mechanism.
In an open heart circle, the technology of connected hearts penetrates, so to speak, all of that what needs to be healed, to be transformed. A new imprint happens right at the moment people are in their most vulnerable place.
Your stored pain, your hidden trauma, is always caused by other people.
In heart IQ, when your body, mind, and heart enter again that very unsafe place of trauma, you find yourself now surrounded by loving and open hearts that will give you a new imprint — an imprint that you are worthy, that you are a beautiful soul. Your core unworthiness now has a chance to melt in the arms of the collective build-up heart coherence, a magical space of love and healing.
I have experienced that only a truly open heart connection with others healed me on a very deep level. I did so much ‘work’ alone in my life. I’d thought that I healed all my traumas, alone. HeartIQ intelligence lifted me up to another realm and taught me that we really do need others to deeply heal and transform. The pioneering mastery in HeartIQ of Christian Pankhurst, his life mission, made him the most amazing facilitator and coach I’ve ever met.
HeartIQ made me understand why human connection on an open heart level is crucial for further human evolution. We are interconnected beings. We can only really thrive together when we transform our deepest darkest shadows into power and gold.
Emotional Maturity
In our relationship with ourselves, our partner, and the world, we function healthy and in balance when we are in our so-called safety bandwidth. This is the space where we literally have the capacity to be open to others, to hear their stories, to feel into their hearts, and to take their expressed emotions in.
This safety bandwidth differs from person to person. A method like heart IQ can broaden this range. Generally spoken, the moment you move out of this range is when triggers come into play. You start to feel unsafe. You feel the need to defend yourself because, in your world, the other attacked you. Or you freeze.
Triggers appear when we no longer have space or capacity to take the other in, and we move into our so-called pain body. The more trauma somebody has experienced, and the more trauma is still stored in the body, the smaller the ‘emotional’ bandwidth is.
Nobody really likes pain.
So the next phase is to numb ourselves out in addiction. This addiction can also be the above-mentioned negative emotional habit patterns. We start to like triggers, our fights with our partners, shouting at stupid people in their cars, blaming everything around us that is stupid, and shaming wherever we can. The infamous blaming and shaming. It all comes from being the victim. In fact, it is also really easy to become addicted to feeling a victim.
Deep in our hearts, we feel being a victim doesn’t feed us nor nurtures our souls. It keeps us away from the responsibility to pick up our lives, to face our challenges, and to engage in painful growth. Maybe it is the only thing we know. I mean, they don’t teach emotional and heart intelligence at school (yet).
A turnaround can happen when we start to understand that a trigger is a valuable asset. In fact, they are the key to our deeper stored pain and traumas. There needs to be a certain willingness, a certain openness, and an intention to go there. This can feel very scary.
We only can start embracing a wider bandwidth of safety, a bigger range, when we begin to understand how to step out of the initial response to our triggers. When we become more aware of when, and how they happen. When we learn there is an alternative response possible.
Expand your Emotional Range
At the end of the day, you’ll need to pick up this challenge yourself, embrace your courage to widen your emotional range, face your trauma and let go.
Once I experienced I can expand my emotional range after transforming my triggers in my relationship into more awareness and being able to feel deeper, from time to time I feel the deep need to make the next growth jump.
Where to look inside of yourself, where to find the key for your next growth spurt?
I have learned it is at the place where I experience the most struggle. It literally fills me with almost nauseous resistance and fear. When I feel that, I know I am on the right track. Your ego and mind never likes to let go of any comfort zone. The truth is: you are able to expand your range infinitely.
You will never run out of growth.
Once you learn to actually practice emotional hygiene, with your family, your relationship, the groups you are in, your life will never be the same again. It demands that you continuously are real with yourself and others, from that amazing heart space of compassion and eagerness to learn and grow.
When these practices spread over the world, they will seed hearts that are set on fire with love, humans who start to own their shit as they say. People all over the world who prefer to be real and present with each other, who took the challenge to learn the intelligence of the heart, and who have taken the journey to become the master of their emotional lives.
Move from being trigger-happy to actually understand, heal, and own the pain underneath. That scar never leaves. We all walk around with wounded souls, and we will never be really done healing and done growing.
But that’s why we are here. To gently walk each other home toward a more loving, compassionate, and kind world. It all starts in our hearts.
Lucien Lecarme
More about heart IQ here
The Solution To All Problems in This World is in Our Hearts