One afternoon, I had a long and tense conversation with my Japanese girlfriend, who was at school in England, via the payphone in the zendo's common room. Lisa, an Australian woman I knew from Nagoya was also in the room and had heard part of our conversation. After I got off the phone, she apologized for eavesdropping but politely asked about the call.
I explained how my original plan for the August holiday was to visit Canada, in particular to spend as much time at the family cottage as possible. My girlfriend was taking advantage of her proximity to mainland Europe, travelling around the continent as much as she could before her year of studying abroad came to an end. She wanted to go to Finland, Norway and Sweden in August and, after much debating back and forth, I had reluctantly agreed to meet her there.
I also spoke to Lisa at great length of what a beautiful a place the cottage was. There must have something significant in the way I was speaking that gave her a clue to my inner turmoil. During a pause in my words, she said 'Boy, you really want to visit Canada in August.' Until that point I hadn't recognized how strong my emotions around my changed plans were. I had accepted on one level that my girlfriend wanted to me to come to Europe and talked myself into it.
At Lisa's words I realized in a flash how badly I wanted to come to Canada. I promptly called my girlfriend back, announcing to her that I wasn't going to meet her in Europe, was going to the cottage instead, and expressed my hope that she would come, too. We had a bit of a charged exchange after that, but after I got off the phone the first thing I noticed was how the pain in my gut, which had been with me night and day for the previous week, was gone.
It wasn't until many years later that I was able to truly understand what had been going on with my gut at the time. Fairly recently I learned the heart is comprised of neurons as well as muscle tissue, and that there are neural ganglia which connect the brain with the heart and the stomach. The most interesting aspect of this is how this connection confirms the TCM model of the body's three energy centres known as dantian.
My decision to acede to my girlfriend's wishes was a decision made in my head. I was attempting to please her at the expense of what was going on in my heart. That's when the gut kicked in, attempting to pull my focus down to my heart, to get me to acknowledge my true feelings. And it wasn't until Lisa gave me her feedback that I understood how much I was trying to go against what I wanted 'in my heart'.
For much of human history, our language has expressed the relationship between head, heart and gut through such expressions as 'follow your heart' and 'gut feeling'. The ancient wisdom of India, China and Greece expressed this, placing the mind - the centre of volition - in the heart. But this model for understanding the body was superceded in the West by one which gave primacy to the brain and the intellect.
It is only recently that advances in neuroscience, which have given rise to the disciplines of neurocardiology and neurogastroenterology, that doctors are understanding that the original model wasn't just poetic expression: we are primarily feeling beings; feelings are centred in the heart, not the brain; and the gut plays a significant role in this relationship.
The lesson here is clear: if we think too much about something at the expense of what we feel we will make wrong decisions about everything, from what we choose as a career to who we end up with as a life partner.
The brain is important, but it is in our hearts that we know the real truth about who we are and what we should do, moment to moment.
This is why meditation is so useful. It helps us balance where we place our cognitive emphasis, to pay appropriate attention to what our head, heart and gut are telling us at any given time, and help us to make better decisions about everything.
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