Lead With Your Heart
July 9, 2023
Physical injuries have a way of showing me just how embodied my mental and emotional patterns really are. Last week’s fall has me thinking a lot about balance - and feeling the habitual places I become tense.
Physical balance is more than strength. It is also posture, proprioception, agility, and fluidity. Today I heard a senior qigong instructor, John Platt, talking about walking posture for better balance. He used the words, “lead with your heart”. Immediately I could feel how leading with my head in walking resulted in a head-first fall to the pavement and how leading with my heart, from the physical center of my chest, would change the way my body was able to react to a stumble.
I was leading with my head because I started thinking about needing to get home and get to work. I was leading with my head because my mind began to race out in front of my body. My physical posture was inseparable from my mind - it responded precisely to my mental and emotional shift into hurry mode. Physical balance is also mental! Mental and emotional balance are also physical. There’s no separation. I knew this in my head but I didn’t understand it in a felt sense.
I’ve been focusing on balance this week and noticing how my feet do - or do not contact the ground. I notice that sometimes my feet are slightly pulling away from the ground, rather than forming a nice solid connection to the earth. In my unending desire to “go faster”, it’s as if some part of me forgets I am a land-based creature and thinks I could fly. (I did fly, briefly, and the result was predictable!)
Tension - and the embodied ways I respond with tension - are intertwined with balance. As I am working I will start to lean into the screen. I tighten my brow as if this will make me think faster. I tighten my neck and shoulders as if to lift myself up from that pesky, slow-moving earth. When someone is upset, when someone needs something from me, when I need to solve a problem - in all of these situations I am tightening my body and pulling away from the ground.
The knot on my forehead becomes painful from tightening my brown and creates a headache. I’ve known for a long time I tend to furrow my brow, there’s a permanent crease between my eyebrows I refer to as the place my unicorn’s horn should be. What I didn’t realize until it became painful was how much energy this required.
My collarbone and sternum are sore from the fall and all the tension causes my neck and shoulders to tighten up and throb, adding to the headache. In some moments I am simply frustrated that a year after the sciatica I am once again tense and hurting. In other moments I am seeing how the injuries are helping highlight the very tension patterns I’d like to change.
I have taken “lead with your heart” as a mental idea in the past. I find it sometimes drains my confidence - am I leading with my heart or my head? How do I know? I find it sometimes stressful, as I want to lead from my heart but I don’t know if I know the language. Yet here, in one sentence, I’ve been given the answer. “Lead with your heart” is a PHYSICAL, felt, embodied concept. I can feel it, I don’t know have to analyze it.
When I let myself shift to the position of “lead with your heart”, I notice my shoulders relax, I notice my jaw relax, I notice my eyes relax. I can breathe into my belly more easily. What if I remembered this more often, both when I’m walking and when I’m working?
A part of me has always known that when I slow down I actually go faster in the end. Sprinters work on relaxing in order to go faster. When I was a golf instructor I knew that relaxation allowed you to hit the ball further, with more power. I knew this about physical activities but I hadn’t applied it to activities I categorized as mental, such as writing and working. I hadn’t applied to simple physical tasks like walking and doing the dishes.
Today I have been consciously practicing embodying “lead with your heart” and relaxing my brow as I am working. I quite honestly have no choice - it’s this or lay back down on the couch with the heat packs. I’m curious and curiosity and pain are a really powerful combination. I am intrigued to see if I can rebuild my pattern from tight and tense to “leading with my heart”.
Lee Holden often talks about how much energy we waste holding tension in our bodies and how much energy we waste where we have no power. He repeats often, “When you feel powerless, relax.” I’m starting to feel that in my body. I’m sure it will take a lot more practice.
Now I wonder what other ideas and beliefs I have thought of as mental - and what would shift if I experimented with them in the physical?
I furrow my brow too and I have a permanent crease between my eyebrows~” leading with your heart”~ love that. My tension is in my neck~ back~this week I am trying to rest when I first feel my back tighten up~ instead of pushing on ~ my mind is always going~ trying to slow it~ thank you ❤️
This reminds me of something my ballet teacher says, which is that you should hold your tension in the places where it matters. Dancers will often tense up their facial muscles or stiffen their fingers, as if that's going to help get higher jumps and multiple turns. When what they should really do is focus on core and postural muscles and rotators - that's a good kind of tension. That's tension that serves us and advances our purpose. But stiff fingers and a furrowed brow are merely a response to the stress of the moment. It may be impossible to release ALL the tension, but we can be mindful of holding it where it counts.