Head vs Heart

Follow your Heart.

I have no idea from where that expression originates, but I do know it sounds like a beautiful idea.  Your heart is full of dreams, plans, and desires.  It’s also easily broken, stomped, and shattered, so you protect it with an idea that you will follow it at all costs.  Hearts take people to amazing places.


However, my heart has taken me right into some of the worst seasons of my life.

How many times has your heart sworn to you, “If you would only follow me, I will give you everything you desire?”  It says loudly, “This thing in front of you is what you really want, so reach out and take it!”  It whispers, “It’s about you getting what you need, so don’t worry about anyone else’s feelings.”  

You answer, “Yes! I’m following my heart so it must be right and good and true!”  And afterwards you're left feeling wasted, ashamed, and downright stupid...knowing your heart just lied to you.

Scripture says “The heart is deceitful of all things.” Yet at the same time it also promises “The desires of the heart.”  

My heart is both beautiful and dangerous.  I’ve learned to believe in it and question it - all at the same time.  

And I do that with my head.  I learned how my feelings lie to my head, and that my brain can in fact choose to believe the lie, or not.  I then can choose how I feel.  


I’ve told you here before that I said to my husband ‘I don’t love you anymore.’  But what I didn’t tell you is how those feelings magically and miraculously came back.  Because they didn’t.  I made a conscious choice to love him again.  It was purposeful and planned.  I took the power away from my heart and gave it to my head.

On the flip side, the head can be easily manipulated.  Who hasn’t experienced one of my favorite terms, the mind fuck?  You know after it’s happened to you, when you’re sitting dazed and confused in your own muck wondering how on earth you let your brain think in that direction. That someone or something has spent weeks twisting your head into believing something that you know in your heart is entirely wrong.  After all, all your friends and family have told you it’s wrong, and that you should listen to your heart.

Thus, my head is powerful and vulnerable at the same time.

The key, is to find the truth in both.  To question both your heart and your head.  To seek out what is true in your heart and to compare it to what is true in your head and vice versa.  

Never let one lie to the other.  

If it’s not good, loving, right, and just - it’s probably not true.