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"Follow your heart and nothing else..."

"Your heart is free..have the courage to follow it..."

What does it really mean to follow your heart? I hear those kind of sayings about the heart all the time, but they usually don't register. I don't know about you people but I have a mind that just won't stop. It goes 80 miles and hour in all directions, always driven by fear whenever my heart is not leading the way. Nothing screws up my life more than my own ideas, my own judgement, my own thinking of what I think is best for me and/or other people. My family's screwed up, so my mind tells me. The world's going to hell...New Orleans...9/11...gas prices...so my mind tells me. How I perceive the world w/ my mind just ain't so.

I'm making this thread just to reach out to you people so that you can have an outlet if you don't have one.
To just act w/ love....there;s nothing that makes me feel more at one with everything than when I feel that I am truly helping someone out and making them feel better...making them feel some hope.

To keep things simple....so hard to do. I don't know if it's just me, but I always have all these "goals" i gotta meet, and obessessions I gotta have.

Life can't go on the way it's been going....things have to change...and believing they will change for the good----that's the miracle...the wonder...the Great Love...the Great Hope.

How can we help people out in the world? This is basic kindergarden ideas....tomorrow, will you actually care about the person you pass on the way to work?....if you're like how I am most of the time, you won't...you'll be too caught up in your own obessession of yourself: "How do I look? I wish I looked better." "I wish I wasn't so horrid." "I wish my personality wasn't so ugly." ---but will I actually have love for the people on the streets. No I'll be too worried about the state of the world....about over population....pollution, and how it's gonna effect me and my ideal of the world.....mad b/c my ideal of the world isn't reality. Mad b/c I don't live in freakin' Middle-Earth....yes, I get truly resentful at that sometimes.

I miss the whole flippin' point! To love...now. Life's too short.


Sorry, I'm new at this..and challenged.

History of mankind has been a history of struggle; it is a marvel how an almost uninterrupted series of defeats forms something like progress. With the enlarged scope of mankind problems grow bigger proportionally: and there is no god to guide us on, no simple rule to lead us, nothing we could teach our children and wish our parents had taught us.
Don't follow your heart, your heart can be betrayed (and will be betrayed). Don't follow your brain, because you'll loose all joy in life. Take up the sapiens' burden; think of yourself, your society, your loved ones, your world, wreck your brain thinking and don't jump to easy conclusions, least of all those who promise heaven and ask for your money in one breath.

Hmmm. It seems I can't offer a solution except "there is no solution". The most disappointing feature of this is that it can't be displayed in airbrushed allegories or landscape pictures. Sorry.

Great post my elven friend! It all makes sense really.
I wish I had figured out how to follow my heart alot earlier in life,
but better late than never I say.
Life is too short to worry about what others think of you, for it really doesn't matter in the long run.
The brain has to temper the heart at times, and the brain has to know how to filter all the cr@p thrown at us daily. It also has to keep some guard up to protect the heart from those wounding arrows.
It is all a matter of balance, and sometimes I can become im-balanced one way or another.

But yes... love now for life is too short... that is right on!

I think we all learn too late what the heart knows. We justify things in our minds, like staying too long in a bad marriage because of 'vows' when there is nothing there to love anymore. I see this often in dysfucntional marriages, the I stay because that is what is right even though my heart is breaking every day.

I have never believed that God could want us to be in pain and have our hearts break.

Yes sometimes our minds have to temper what our hearts feel, but I consider the heart and gut reaction the same thing and they are usually 99% right.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for your post. I can't thank you enough. This thread couldn't have come at a more opportune time. Right now for me life is overwhelming there are so many debates going on everywhere (here, at home, at work) about everything (Katrina, the war, other stuff) that I feel lost and helpless, and forget about love.

Simple is good. Simple works. And I don't know about you guys but simple is exactly what I need right now. Some love would be nice too

Lego, you rule

Very interesting topic. I'd say, let your heart decide what to do, let your brain figure out how to do it.

***channels MariaHobbit***
This is starting to sound like the thinking versus feeling aspect of the Meyers-Briggs personality sorter.

[/channel]

It seems to me that following your heart means following the "love your neighbor as yourself" path, with emphais on both loving your self and loving your neighbor. There is no way to do that without some compromise between selfishness and altruism. Deciding how much altruism you can handle is something you have to weigh in your heart. If you let your head rule, and realize that altruism is often "throwing good money after bad", undeserved, or an exercise in futility when it comes to solving the world's problems, or even just your neighborhood's problems, you might be tempted to drop altruism altogether. But that would make the world one tiny bit crummier.

I like the story about the person who was in a beach loaded with stranded starfish after a storm, slowly pitching them back into the sea, one by one. He was told it would make no difference - there were millions of starfish stranded on the beach. And he replied, "Well, it makes a difference to this starfish," as he pitched it back in the sea.

(OK, so the starfish was probably dead, but it's a nice story anyway, and some sea urchin would probably really enjoy the meal.)

TheMary wrote:

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for your post. I can't thank you enough. This thread couldn't have come at a more opportune time. Right now for me life is overwhelming there are so many debates going on everywhere (here, at home, at work) about everything (Katrina, the war, other stuff) that I feel lost and helpless, and forget about love.

Simple is good. Simple works. And I don't know about you guys but simple is exactly what I need right now. Some love would be nice too

Lego, you rule

So I should probably mention something about following your heart since that is what the thread is about I view following your heart as being similar to following your gut. It's an instinct. Feel it. Go with it. Less thought more feeling.

And I totally didn't mean to post again quoting myself...arg

I think it all just comes down to being true to yourself. Trying to be someone else is a sure road to misery and madness. A hard lesson to learn first-hand, but I'm glad I did.

To follow one's heart means to do things that will never cause you to regret the decision you made, even if it didn't make a bit of sense at the time.