Giving rein to your heart instead of your head is the clever thing to do.

The heart is more than a lump of meat that pumps blood at the behest of the body and brain. Indeed for millennia’s the heart as been seen as an organ that contains a fundamental intelligence.

A story that illustrates this is where the lauded thinker Carl Jung visited a traditional community in Mexico in the 1920’s. He met with a leader who asserted that the white people were “ mad and uneasy, always wanting something more”.

When Mr Jung asked him why this was so he said they always thought with their head. According to him this was a sure sign of mental illness. When asked where he thought, he pointed to his heart.

The movement from thinking in the head to thinking from the heart can hard to trust. At first it may appear to the head thinkers that the transition to heart centred awareness will enable an inferior experience.

The fear is that to abandon the primacy of intellectual reason will plunge them into an infantile state where they might find they are forced to accept potentially absurd information.

This is not the case since thinking from the heart is actually a higher state of consciousness. It does not give logic the lead role, rather it uses logic to articulate and validate its conclusions.

Head thinking can never be certain as it frantically gathers the constantly changing and infinitely complex information upon which it must make it’s decisions. The Greek philosophers grasped very early that logic couldn’t prove truth.

Heart thinking seems to come from the very depth of our being, from every cell in our body. Unlike the logic driven processes of the mind, this knowledge seeps into our being and its certainty of knowing is utterly indisputable and entirely encouraging.

The conclusions that the head thinking arrives at can never provide a sense of deep certainty, particularly in matters of ethics, values, decision-making and behavioural choices. It is much better to follow your heart, even as you use your head.

Martin Hunter Jones is an honorary life member of the Australian Counselling Association. He has a practice on the Northern Beaches. Phone 9973 4997.