As a society, we give a lot of power to our heads. We value intellect more than creativity. We prefer to use "reason" rather than express our feelings. We are taught to doubt our instincts and our intuition; instead, we are supposed to seek out empirical proof before we make a decision. And if we have a metaphysical or spiritual experience, we are told that it's "just our imagination." Our minds and our intellect are certainly wonderful and necessary things, but we are missing half the picture if we do not balance it with our heart and our feelings.

It's not surprising that our heads are so dominant. It's constantly thinking thoughts and chattering at us. Our head is pretty difficult to ignore, really. Out of the thousands of thoughts we think each day, if we winnowed out the really useful ones from the ones that aren't particularly relevant, we might end up with only a few hundred that were notable. And a fair chunk of the thoughts that would be tossed aside are the lies that we tell ourselves.

In our human form, our minds are held hostage by the ego. It's not a "bad" thing; it serves a purpose. But it is a terrible liar, and we have to recognize that in order to heal. Your ego is the one who tells you how worthless you are, how powerless you are, and how undeserving and unlovable you are. These are all lies. Of course, the ego is clever, and it tells you these lies in such a way that you won't realize that it's lying. It whispers doubt in your ear when your feelings urge you to take a new path, a healing path. It assures you of failure when you're about to succeed. It tells you to settle for second or third best, because you'll never get what you want, so why bother trying? It sows fear instead of love. It says, "See? I told you so" whenever things don't go the way you expect them to.

Your feelings, on the other hand, are your barometers for truth. They will never tell you a lie, but your head will shout them down and tell you to ignore them, deny them, and stuff them, because it knows that if you listen to them, you will find your truth. And when you find your truth, the ego loses its power over you, and you will be free.

There are a couple of hurdles to overcome with our feelings, however. The first is that we don't like negative emotions, so we go to great lengths to avoid feeling them. We stuff them with control issues, food, alcohol, cigarettes, anything we can find to avoid feeling them and thinking about why they are present in our bodies. The second hurdle is that we may not know what our feelings are after we've stuffed them so effectively. It doesn't help that our feeling center, the heart, has a soft, quiet voice, while our head is loud and brash. Our head easily shouts down what our heart is saying to us.

For those of us who are really good at shutting down our emotions so that we don't have to feel them, reconnecting to our heart again can be a challenge. If we've done this, we don't know it. It's incredibly easy for our heads to interpret the lack of any major feelings as "being happy." But our heart knows better, and the pent-up emotional energy will seek to come out wherever and however it can. This is how illness manifests in our body.

So, how do we begin the process of accessing our emotions, understanding and acknowledging them, and connecting our heart with our heads so that our ego doesn't rule the ship? First, we must respect the importance and value of our emotions and know that they are as important as our intellect. Then we commit to listening to their message, even if it's something we'd rather not hear. If you are unhappy and need to make changes in your life, your emotions are already telling you that. Pay attention and thank them, because this message comes directly from your spirit and the greater whole that we call God.

God speaks to us in the quiet voice of the heart. This is the voice that we must tune into. In order to do that, we must make time for it. Meditation is a great way to quiet our ego and listen to our heart. Whatever we give attention to will grow, and if we make time to focus on our heart and on our emotions, our emotional intelligence will increase, and with it our spiritual intelligence. As we strengthen this connection, we will open the pathway between the heart and the head, and they can work together as equals, as they were meant to do.

Related links:

• A Course in Miracles
• To heal, feel
• Healing your inner child
• What it means to speak your truth
• Opening the heart
• Psychic warfare