The Power of the Heart: Finding Your True Purpose in Life (3 page)

For me inspiration is essential. Creativity is essential and I can only find it through the heart.

And through the heart, you find insight. In fact, the heart gives you the insights you
need
, as well as ones that you may not expect—insights that allow you to find your way.

 DEEPAK CHOPRA

Your heart knows all the answers, so put your attention there and reflect. That’s the first thing you can do.

Your heart creates love and it connects you with others—with the people you love and with people you are meant to know. The heart also connects you with all other life in the world.

 JANE GOODALL

We think of the heart in the poetic sense, the seat of love and compassion and it’s this heart that is so terribly important.

 MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

The truth of who we are is the truth of the heart, the truth of who we are is the love that lies beyond the body.

And your heart connects you with all of creation, the universe—with God.

 MICHAEL BECKWITH

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. simply called it “The love of God operating in the human heart.”

Let’s explore with the Co-creators the many meanings of the heart and how we can connect with its amazing powers.

Paulo Coelho was one of the authors and teachers highest on my wish list to interview for my movie about the heart and for this book, partly because the power of the heart is the central theme in his popular novel
The Alchemist
. The main character, Santiago, travels to Egypt in search of a hidden treasure only to find out that the real treasure lies within him.

I met Coelho in his office at his apartment in Geneva—to me the holiest of holy sites, where he had written so many beautiful books. Coelho’s office has a calm, serene atmosphere with family photographs and modern art on the walls. The screen of his computer showed a manuscript in progress, which made me feel like a Beatles fan between jam sessions at Abbey Road Studios, seeing a Gibson SG 1964 that John Lennon had just played.

I explained my mission and told Coelho about my study of law, how I had dreaded going against my parents’ expectations, and how I’d awakened to the heart’s power. We immediately resonated with each other and Coelho told me that his own heart awareness had compelled him to write. As a teenager, Coelho had known he wanted to become a writer, but his parents objected to that career choice. They also considered him unhealthily introverted and obstinate, and actually had him committed to a mental hospital when he was seventeen. At age twenty, Coelho went to law school, at his parents’ request, but dropped out to travel around the world. Later he became a songwriter and a journalist.

 PAULO COELHO

From the moment that I realized that I wanted to be a writer, I said, “It may take ten days, ten years, or twenty years, but I am going to write.” I started by writing songs; I started writing articles for newspapers. I had no choice but to follow the thing that I wanted to do.

You will never be able to escape from your heart.

So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.

—PAULO COELHO,
THE ALCHEMIST

During a walk along the ancient pilgrims’ path to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, Coelho had an awakening that led him to write his first book.

Coelho’s story moved me to tears. He had lived and embodied the power of the heart. His story shows that sometimes you need to be terribly brave to follow your inner voice and passion when no one but you can hear or comprehend it. But your courage will be rewarded. The road from head to heart may not be short or easy, but it will lead you to your destiny.

Nothing is really a cliché when you really, really do it from the heart. And if you really feel it, and it’s real, and you know people who have felt it, there is nothing clichéd about it. It will bring you to your knees. It will make you cry. And that’s my job: to tell those stories in ways that surprise us and remind us of the opera that we’re living with every mistake and every new chance.

—DAVID O. RUSSELL, FILM DIRECTOR

The heart is so much more than a vital organ. Your heart is the center of your feelings. As Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” When you express your deepest emotions, you instinctively put your hand to your heart. And when you indicate yourself in conversation, you point not to your head but to your heart.

Our language is full of expressions that refer to the heart as the seat of our feelings. We describe someone who is affectionate as “open-hearted” or “warmhearted” and someone who is cold and insensitive as “heartless.” Someone is near to your heart when you care a great deal
about him. You give someone heart when you encourage her. You lose your heart when you fall in love. But the most captivating phrase of all to me is “to follow your heart”—to do what you love doing most.

Trust yourself. Then you will know how to live.

—GOETHE

The language of the heart is feelings. When you follow your heart, you listen not to your head, but to what you feel is right. The voice of your soul also speaks through your heart, which, like a compass, points you in the right direction. The seat of your soul—your spiritual essence—is within your heart.

 HOWARD MARTIN

Many thousands of years ago, people in various cultures all around the world saw the heart as the center of intelligence within the human system. The earliest writings I’ve ever seen about it go back 4,500 years ago to ancient Chinese medicine. This notion of an intelligent heart persisted throughout history.

Besides being an emotional center, the heart was long believed to hold an intelligence and have the ability to make decisions. In traditional Chinese medicine, the heart is the seat of connection between mind and body. The Chinese characters for “thinking,” “thought,” and “love” all include the character for “heart.” In yogic traditions, the heart is literally and figuratively our internal guide. In Japanese, two different
words describe the heart:
shinzu
for the physical organ and
kokoro
for the “mind of the heart.”