What is the meaning of 'heart'?

Increasingly I am hearing significant voices from the spirituality and wellbeing arena speak of a ‘heart revolution’ taking place in our world right now. Just a few days ago Howard Martin, one of the original founders of HeartMath, spoke the following words.

“A heart movement is unfolding creating a ripple effect that elevates the vibration of our entire planet.”

I love hearing such statements as they resonate on a deep level and validate what I have been sure about for a long time – that amongst the rubble of our crumbling old world, one that has honed in on the power of the individual brain and championed the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality, inevitably leading to an ‘either/or’ way of thinking and increasing separation, there are green shoots pushing through representing a new collaborative perspective that values a ‘both/and’ approach and nurtures connectedness. This is the way of the heart.  

If such a movement is underway, a collective awakening of hearts, then it seems a good idea that we do our best to explore what the heart actually is. Only then can we fully understand the significance of the emerging paradigm. To help others understand the heart more deeply is precisely my intention through the work of Heart Source and the Awakening Heart Collective and with this in mind, I present to you some thoughts on the meaning of ‘heart’. Let’s start with a contemporary definition.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines ‘heart’ as follows:

1.      The organ located in the chest that sends blood around the body

2.     The central or most important part

3.     Refers to a person’s character, or the place within a person where feelings or emotions are considered to come from

4.     Courage, determination, or hope

The use of ’heart’ to describe the organ located in our chest is straightforward and the most obvious definition. If you were to ask a group of people to describe what the word ‘heart’ means to them, you would expect the vast majority to begin by mentioning the physical organ. They may not know a great deal about the structure of the heart or how it works, but one thing they would know for sure is that its job is to pump the blood around the body.

The second definition is also straightforward and deeply familiar to us. Without much pause for thought, our group of people would quickly come up with ‘central’ or ‘most important’ as another definition, and we know how acquainted we are with this meaning by how regularly we use the word this way, as in: ‘the heart of the matter’.

The third and fourth definitions are less clear-cut. We are moving away from a simple ‘this word equals that meaning’ and starting to attach states of being, emotions and deeper significance to the word ‘heart’. With these definitions, the heart is beginning to reveal its other sides, its meaning is not just literal, it is symbolic, often acting as a metaphor. We see this from the abundance of common heart idioms, some of them listed below, and it is clear from these how profound is the association with our emotions. Many emotions, not just love as we might expect - the first phrase in the list, ‘to wear one’s heart on their sleeve’, means to openly display all manner of emotions.

1. To wear one’s heart on their sleeve – to openly display one’s emotions

2. A big heart - said of someone kind and loving

3. To break one’s heart - to cause someone emotional distress

4. To capture/steal/win one’s heart - to make someone fall in love with one

5. Heart goes out to - said in regard to feeling sympathy for someone

6. Heavy heart - sadness

7. Harden one’s heart – to shut down empathy and become callous

8. Gladden one’s heart - make someone happy or gratified

9. Heart skips a beat - said of someone excited, frightened, or surprised

10. Melt one’s heart - cause someone to experience uncontrollable emotions

11. Strike fear into one’s heart - cause someone to be afraid

12. Take something to heart - to be emotionally affected by something

13. One’s heart bleeds for - one is sympathetic

14. Close/dear/near to one’s heart - loved or valued by someone

15. Didn’t have the heart - when one cannot bear to do something hurtful

16. Warm the cockles of one’s heart - cause someone to feel positive emotion

With these, and many other phrases peppered throughout our daily language, the heart clearly speaks to us modern people of emotion. In a nutshell, we interpret the heart as the place from which we feel, whether that be joy, love and compassion, or fear and sadness. It is not just spoken language that tells of this relationship, body language does too. One gesture, so deeply ingrained we do it without thinking, says it all – a hand placed on our chest over our heart centre emphasises and multiplies the deeply-felt emotions we wish to express, or we feel in empathy with another.

In contrast to the heart - our source of emotions, the brain and associated mind is the place from which we believe thoughts arise. Frequently we compare a person guided by their head, basing decisions on clear-thinking, logic and reasoning, to a person guided by their heart, someone influenced by their emotions. The fact that the means of decision-making by the latter is often regarded as inferior and less reliable says something significant about this old world we have been inhabiting. A macho society often considers the heart, with all its messy emotions, to represent the feminine aspect of our nature and even associates its displays with weakness. Not only is this notion inaccurate, but it also misrepresents the multidimensional complex heart because, as we revisit the heart idioms, we find something other than emotion emerging from within it.

The fourth dictionary definition for heart is given as courage, determination or hope. Courage has been associated with the heart since ancient times, in fact the word originates from ‘cor’, the Latin word for heart. This connection still remains strong today, as the common phrase, ‘faint of heart’, meaning lack of courage, demonstrates. But if the heart is the place from which we feel, how do courage, determination and hope fit with this? All three could be associated with emotion, but for the first two there is a strong element of will, and will is a reflection of strength of mind. Could it be that we have misplaced the mind, incorrectly assuming it finds its home in our head? To ‘have one’s heart set on’ means to be obsessed with obtaining, and to ‘put one’s heart into’ means to do something with conviction or enthusiasm, both are linked with mental strength. Similarly, our moral values have underlying them a blend of emotions and mental strength and these too are closely associated with the heart, shown by phrases such as ‘cross my heart’, said as an oath to assert one’s honesty, and ‘from the heart’, meaning with sincerity. Then there is memory, a quality modern people most certainly associate with the brain and mind. So why then do we describe memorising as ‘learning by heart’?

These commonly-used idioms, and others, hint at the heart as more than a vessel of emotion. They speak of it as exhibiting qualities of discernment, decision-making, intelligence and even thinking. But this is not the way most people of today view the heart; the heart as home to an aspect of mind is an interpretation from a previous time and one that has been largely overlooked for the last few hundred years.

As we are beginning to see, a contemporary view of the heart ignores important aspects and in fact, by the historical peak in our materialistic focus not so long ago, the heart had shrunk to a mere shadow of its former ancient self losing its complexity, depth and character. This shallow two-dimensional heart consisted of nothing more than the physical machine made of flesh and the emotional heart, most prominently the romantic heart. 

But if we are looking for older, deeper meanings of ‘heart’, we should still probably start with one of the modern dimensions, the emotional heart (and specifically love), as, unlike several other heart qualities, this one has stood the test of time. Love between individuals has several guises from romantic love and desire, fondness and affection, to attachment and infatuation. Closely related are compassion, empathy and kindness. And then there is the ultimate; unconditional love. Our distant ancestors knew that all forms of love and compassion find their home in our heart. For example, a verse from an ancient Egyptian poem demonstrates the old association between the heart and romantic love.

“Is there anything sweeter than this hour?  for I am with you, and you lift up my heart”

Extract of a poem discovered at Deir el-Medina

And a quote from the Bible links compassion to the heart.

"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you."

Ephesians 4:32

Despite the ancient origins, we find the heart-love association as strong as ever today and in modern life we use the heart symbol increasingly to express all forms of love, not just for people but also for things and places - when we can’t find the words, an emoji heart, in a range of different colours and sometimes with adornments, will say it for us.

But as we’re exploring the meaning of ‘heart’, we should also consider the true meaning of ‘love’ because some would say in its deepest sense love extends beyond the boundaries we use to mark out an emotion and encompasses a spiritual quality that sees it merge with our very life force. Could it be that this broadest notion of love is also linked to the heart?

In the deepest recesses of our most powerful organ, we find not just love, but also our personal life force, our sense of Self. And although the heart as keeper of our ‘essence’ is not something you find mentioned in the average dictionary, it is a knowing in all of us so ingrained that it stays with us beyond conscious awareness. If you ask someone where they reside in their body and ask them to indicate with their hand, you will find that almost always people place a hand on their chest in the region of the heart. In this moment, a person demonstrates an inherent knowledge they may not know they have, a timeless understanding that in the physical body, the heart is home to the essence of who we are.

The heart has been regarded as the seat of our soul since as far back as we’re able to delve. The idea has filtered down into every spiritual tradition and although there have been deviations at times, has formed a fairly steady understanding in most cultures throughout history. Such a concept is difficult to test and verify of course, but, in terms of our essence, there have been fascinating observations surrounding those receiving the heart of another in a transplant scenario, displaying personality traits and the likes and dislikes of their donor. Paul Pearsall describes a number of these cases in his book, The Heart’s Code.

Whatever makes up our essence and whether or not this gets transplanted along with the physical heart, we know instinctively that the most important part of us lies in our heart and this reinforces our understanding of heart as the ‘centre’ or ‘core’. For me, the heart as ‘centre’ is the truest and most profound meaning and it relates not just to the centre of us, but the centre of everything in existence. In every person and every thing the heart is found where the two sides, the two extremes, come together and meet, at this point duality gives way to Oneness. I am not certainly not alone in thinking this and one of the greatest teachers on the heart, Ramana Marharshi, puts it like this.

“The entire Universe is condensed in the body, and the entire body in the Heart. Thus, the Heart is the nucleus of the whole Universe.” Ramana Maharshi

I wonder if these words resonate at all for you. I imagine they might, as the deeper meanings of the heart sink far down into our psyche and although, over the centuries, there have been forces seeking to disrupt this knowing (another story), all efforts are futile. Despite our conscious minds still holding many questions about the heart, the deepest part of us already knows the answers, and always did.