Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash
These are the complementary energies of the head, heart and gut.
When Tami Simon, founder of Sounds True, asked renowned teacher and author Mary O’Malley to define enlightenment, she answered that it happens when the head, heart and gut align. Here’s what she might have meant, and what it implies for us.
The entire body — and indeed all of life — is intelligent, but conventional wisdom has tended to focus on the brain as the seat of intelligence. We actually have three discernible neural centres — the long-accepted one in the skull plus partners in the heart and the gut. Think of the head, heart and gut as a leadership team, deploying our resources of wisdom, love and power. Let’s look more closely.
The head is the home of our logical reasoning. It is a dividing and naming engine, conceptually recasting an undivided reality as constituent parts with predictable properties and relations. The head’s labelling role includes judging — applying the ultimate labels of good and bad. It answers ‘How’ questions that arise in life by theoretically isolating aspects of reality and identifying patterns among them, within and across moments. The head can cast its glance to the past and the future, and much of its busyness looks in these directions. A final important role of the head is as the ultimate storyteller. It observes the world and interprets it, based on its carving, naming and patterning prowess. We spend most of our time in our heads, spellbound in its narration, often mistaking this voice for our self. The gift the head can give us is clarity or wisdom.
The gut is the home of our ‘animal’ drives of fight, flight, food and f*ck. It is the driver of our moods and is central to both our stress response and our intuition. This nerve centre’s function relies on bacteria, so the ‘other’ is instrumental in ‘our’ self-regulation even at this most basic level. The belly lives in the present moment. The gift the gut can give us is drive or power.
Finally, the heart is the home of our connection to the world — the whole, undivided world. It accepts without exception. In its holistic spaciousness, the heart knows the reality of Life as a single flow and so surrenders to it. It welcomes what the head calls the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in equal embrace, valuing the truth of What Is above any preferences the head imposes. Like the gut, the heart lives in the present moment as a holographic shard of What Is. The gift the heart can give us is the greatest, love.
Let’s turn to the human predicament. The head creates concepts as it divides its representation of the world into pieces. The most powerful concept, the one that organises every story the head tells, is the separate self. This central image casts each experience in a new light, because the separate self claims to be the author of its own causal process, independent of Life’s unitary flow.
Now, we’ve got to give the head credit. It has balls! That’s shouldering hefty responsibility, separating the self from Life and setting out its own stall. The head is not evil. It isolates itself because this makes sense from its limited, disaggregating perspective. With that separation, the head moves from being a member of the self’s leadership team to claiming dictatorship. Why is this so?
A young child navigates a confusing world populated by larger and more powerful beings. The child depends on them for life and love. In this immature stage of life, the heart’s openness seems dangerous, leaving the child too vulnerable. The head, able to discern apparent threats and chart courses of action, becomes a refuge for the child. Judgmental narratives replace the intense experiences Life brings, experiences welcomed by the heart. And so, this child’s conceptual separate self, in distrusting the heart’s holistic knowledge and rejecting its gift of love, further separates itself from Life, turning its back to reality’s darker, uncomfortable half and substituting head-bound neuroses for what it rejects in the child’s direct experience.
The head continues to enlist the gut, and without the accepting influence of the heart, the gut’s dance with the head’s myriad threats and worries floods the body regularly with chemicals best reserved for rare moments of primal need. The gut isn’t stupid; it knows things the head cannot. But missing the heart’s connection to Life’s intelligence, the gut must do its best on a diet of the head’s false news. It misspends its power chasing ghosts and responding to non-existent emergencies. The self lurches raggedly when it should glide with Life.
The human awakening that we sometimes call enlightenment is largely about re-enlisting the heart — opening it, embracing it and inviting it to its proper seat in the leadership team. As the heart assumes its rightful place, balanced regulation returns, and the self surrenders to Life. The sense of separateness, the image and story concocted by the head, evaporates. Love bathes every experience that arises, the head clears and the body’s power aligns with reality’s unfolding, of which it is a magical sliver.
The trio of the self’s energies — Wisdom, Love and Power — now align with one another and with the flow of reality, with Life. This is the realisation of human potential Mary O’Malley and other teachers refer to, whole human being.