Reincorporating the Heart

Andrew Graham McKay, Lisbon, October 2025

Perhaps you’ve heard that story from Ken Robinson?  The one about a girl in a primary/elementary school art class who is busily drawing a picture and the teacher walks up to her and in a patronising voice asks,

“And what are you drawing?” 

And without looking up she confidently replies, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” 

The teacher looks astonished and says, “But nobody knows what God looks like!” 

And the little girl replies, “Well, they will in a minute.” 

It’s a nice story, if only we all retained that level self-trust…

As a child myself, I couldn’t draw symmetrical hearts.  In the UK we still have a tradition of sending cards and, while I was growing up, letters as well.  Birthday and Christmas cards in family and valentine cards at school. So there were quite a number of occasions where it would have been good to have been able to draw a nice little picturesque heart, after signing your name or after writing, from a secret admirer etc.  Some people could do them really well, all symmetrical and bubbly.

Mine were always squint, falling over to one side with a flat bottom. Much as I tried, I couldn’t force my hand to draw the damn thing straight (and you only get one go with a card).   It’s not that I thought it was a big deal - I can vaguely remember concluding that maybe drawing pretty hearts was one of those things, like wrapping Christmas presents neatly, that women could do, not men. I can recall filing it with general background judgements about being clumsy, someone not to be trusted with delicate or sensitive things.

Many years later, at one point during my IA training, we were considering the heart from different anatomical angles and guess what I realised?

it is squint!

It wasn’t my clumsiness or ineptitude. In the fragmented, unsteady movements of my hand the child inside of me was trying to draw the heart in-situ as he experienced it somatically. 

To see the human heart anything like symmetrical you would need to be outside yourself looking in from the side with the body twisted at something like a 45% angle.*  This makes no kind of sense to a child who naturally would draw the body as he/she experiences it, on the inside. 

Trivial as this example may sound, it was so painful a realisation, to feel the conflict in the tissues of my own body, how I had negated the inherent knowledge of the child all along and blindly, arrogantly superimposed the view of my conditioned mind. 

This little thing - the shape of a heart - the shaky foundations underlying all the experiences and (mis)understandings built on top of it.   

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Here in Lisbon, a couple of years ago, I was working with one young woman who had always had the sense that she’s a fake.  Not a lier but that her experiences of herself somehow weren’t true or valid.

During one session, an incident from school came back to her, when she had felt a severe pain in the centre of her chest and felt, in all seriousness, that she was going to die.  Not wanting to die in class (and make a scene) she excused her self and managed to find her way to the school nurse. The seriousness of the situation for her couldn’t be overstated, it was a bodily felt experience so deep that she genuinely felt she was having a heart attack.  

On explaining the pain that she was experiencing to the “nurse” she pointed to the centre of her chest.  The nurse immediately told her, ha, the heart is on the left side not in the centre, it can’t be a pain from the heart, you’re talking nonsense and she was sent back to class. Scolded for being a stupid little girl. 

Having since become a dentist and therefore studied a lot of anatomy, she now knew that pain from the heart could easily be experienced in the centre of the chest.   Somehow the session allowed her to put these two things together and self-validate her childhood experience. 

Imagine the harmfulness.  To be told by an adult, in a caretaker role and supposed authority on the subject, that a deep pain in your own heart is false.  What option but dissociation from the body is left to a child in face of this denial of their deepest experience of themselves?

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Of course these two examples are, ultimately, opportunities for forgiveness (of self and other) and therefore learnings and steps on the path to allowing consciousness to return (to the heart).    I’m not making anyone wrong, there’s a purpose.  Have a look inside, you might find a forgiving child in there, who, despite everything, didn’t let go of his/her heart completely.  (Maybe you can say thank you.)

So, what's so special about the heart?

Awww, Do you think I’m saying something mushy and sentimental in talking about the heart?  Does your mind look down on your heart? This beating intelligence inside you?  So much greater than the mind.  Can you feel your heart now, swelling inside of you?  The great teacher of the heart’s lesson is here too (and so misunderstood).  This is where courage lives.

Don’t hide in intellectualism, embody your emotional vulnerability.  

Have the courage to overcome shame in the strength of your beating heart.

In allopathic medicine long, simply considered a muscular pump responsible for blood circulation, the heart is in fact full of neural tissue, has an important endocrine role and in many indigenous cultures is considered a primary organ of perception.   

From IA, we have mapped certain aspects of consciousness against and across the four chambers of the heart. Following its journey around the body, deoxygenated “old” blood is received (recognised) by the right atrium and passed to the right ventricle, the testing ground and opportunity for strategic (old-habitual-defended) or new choices to be made with foregiveness.  And if the lesson is learned, the left atrium then pays the bill and responds (rather than reacts) to the re-oxygenated blood returning from the lungs, and with acceptance the left ventricle manifests and gets its reward, sending blood rushing round your body again. Whoosh 

100,000 beats (opportunities) a day, 10,000 litres of blood propelled by the lub-dub twisting wave motion of the heart.  It’s astonishing that most of the time we aren’t aware of it.  Even your pulse carries more personal information about you than you might imagine - you can tell how old you were when you last lived in your heart just from reading your radial pulse!

The heart is in constant communication and feedback-regulation with the brain and the other organs.  Heart rate variability is a sign of psychological wellbeing (a metronomic heart-rate is associated with serve autism).  Clarity of interoceptive perception of the heart beat has a proven link with capacity for emotional self-regulation (see the delightful Sarah Garfinkel’s prize winning research for more.)

To emphasise, I’m saying that the heart and the brain are allies, constantly communicating and working together, responding one to the other.  It’s never heart versus brain, it’s always heart and brain versus mind. It is the mind that is the enemy of both.

Hearts like to be in proximity to one another.  (On a petri dish you can see individual heart cells flatline and revive just from being closer or further apart.) Lightheartedness also plays a part - it’s not all so serious - joy also comes from the heart - and the pericardium (the connective tissue surrounding the heart) loves to flirt.

Your heart is a real thing, it’s really in there, almost like a person that you’ve been ignoring, it has opinions, knowledge, it loves flow, it’s always been a critical part of your physiology and it’s meant to have been an integral part of your psyche as well. 

So try thinking, or better experiencing, your heart as a “brain”, a seat of intelligence, that can perceive/receive and process information from the outside, that can make decisions. I’m referring to practical stuff, like what you’re going to do, where you’re going to go, what you’re going to eat…. the heart can speak. 

Listen, and learn to trust each other again.

Hello lub, relax-whoosh-dub; hello lub, relax-whoosh-dub; hello lub, relax-whoosh-dub; hello lub, relax-whoosh-dub … are you listening?

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*Incidentally, the symmetrical heart symbol that we’re all so familiar with likely comes from avian anatomy, as human dissection was prohibited/restricted through much of European history by the Catholic Church.  Birds’ hearts are more symmetrical in shape and somewhat more upright in position.

Anatomical images of the human heart are typically shown from the anterior view: as it would be seen in another person looking from the front, rather than the posterior view with the apex to the left, which is the orientation that we experience (or don’t) inside our own bodies. Something more like this.