The wings of my heart are beating
into the great unknown.
The voice of my Beloved
close yet distant calls me home.

~

I experience my heart as wayward and flighty like my white winged mare who resides in this chakra. But that’s a judgement of the brain. 

I learn that it’s Western culture which has come to value the thoughts of the brain over the feelings of the heart. This is not how we’re biologically made to be. Stephen Buhner’s* research shows the sensory information received from our surroundings goes first to the heart and then to the brain which processes it and sends it back for the heart to analyse and make decisions on. Andreas Weber** notes there are more afferent nerves leading from the heart than to the brain than vice versa and the heart is the manager.

Buhner tells us the heart contains pace making cells which entrain together to form the heart’s beat. These create its electromagnetic field which is five thousand times stronger than the brain’s. The heart’s electromagnetic frequencies are experienced as feelings as emotions and they are constantly affected by our interactions with the world and others. The heart, Buhner states, ‘is an organ of perception.’

When did we start valuing the thoughts of our heads over the feelings of our hearts? I think of the Celtic tradition of head-hunting and suspect it began with the warrior cultures of the Bronze Age and Iron Age and their druidic elites. That it was at this time the belief was propagated that the soul resides in the head.

I think of the story in Culhwch and Olwen wherein Gwyn ap Nudd feeds the heart of Cyledyr to his father and suspect it reflects an older belief in hunter-gatherer societies wherein the soul was believed to reside in the heart. 

And the landscape of my heart chakra is a an ancient oak wood, a temperate rain forest, where the people follow the ways not of the head but the heart. 

One of my biggest lessons has been learning to trust my heart. 

Several years ago I sacrificed my heart to Gwyn and it journeyed through fire and ice to be returned by Him to my chest in preparation for our sacred marriage.

Fire and ice. Hot and cold. Red and blue. The extremes of the heart. And still I suffer them with my rosacea (hot red face) and Raynaud’s (cold blue toes). 

I recognise both are rooted in being trapped in a sympathetic nervous system response due to being an autistic introvert with anxiety living in a loud neurotypical social world. I learn to calm my nervous system with meditation – by tuning into my breath and the beat of my heart. I strive to align my heartbeat with Gwyn’s and find when I’m doing shamanic and meditative work with others I’m able to cohere with their hearts. My resting heart rate falls and my heart rate variability rises but I know (not only in my brain but in my heart) I won’t be able to fully unstick myself from being in fight or flight mode until I’m financially independent.

For now I follow the Monastery of Annwn’s Rule of the Heart, striving to trust my heart, to align it with Gwyn’s, to listen to its perceptions as His people once did.

~

Chakra: Heart / Location: Chest / Colour: Green / System: Circulatory / Gland: Thymus / Sense: Hearing / Realm: Relationships / Element: Air / Faculties: Emotions and feelings / Animal: Winged Horse

~

*In The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature.
**In ‘Heart Wisdom: Exploring the Heart’s Role in Philosophy, Science and Mysticism’ https://advaya.life/