The doors of the heart
The following is written in “heart language.” Nonlinear meandering, musing. Let your brain relax & your heart take in whatever pulls the strings.
This season, I am a student of the heart. I may or may not have been dragged to class kicking & screaming, but I’m here now.
Turns out, there is a reason there are endless songs about heartbreak: because it hurts more than the words “love hurts” could ever possibly convey. It needs gravitas to carry the weight.
The closest I can get to describing heartbreak is through the body physical. Like, when you wait too long to go to the doctor about a skin infection, & with a massive needle in hand, they say “I’m afraid this is going to hurt.” The metallic taste in your mouth in the milliseconds before the needle inevitably pierces you. Followed by an agonizing series of “I thought we were done, but we’ll need to do one more.”
Sting, OUCH, sigh, okay, WOW, fuckherewegoagain, rinse, repeat.
My “studies” have led me down some paths about this mysterious organ between our chests. And those paths lead to…doors.
Let’s explore, shall we?
The heart is a door to a different sense of time.
Did you know that your heart can tell the future? No really.
A 2004 study titled “Electrocphysical Evidence of Intution: Part 1. The Surprising Role of the Heart1” tested the heart’s response to different imagery, from the “charged” (i.e. other humans suffering, or loving) to the “neutral” (i.e. a bowl of fruit), and they found that the heart would predict what type of image was coming next, having a matched response seconds prior to receiving the stimulus of the image. The study also presented evidence that females are more attuned to intuitive information from the heart. I’ll just leave that there. Really, our hearts already know this all to be true, it’s just our brains that need some help getting on board ;).
So, the heart literally tunes us in to the realer form of time: the nonlinear swirl2. Through the heart, we can time travel. When a memory transports you to a past moment so visceral you can just bareeeely smell it. Or when - somehow - you already know that the words about to come out of someone’s mouth will devastate you in the seconds that follows. How about this one as a theory? I recently met one of those people where you feel you’ve known each other for lifetimes. I loved what she had to say about it: “What if it’s actually the future? Something in us already knows that we’ll become important to each other”
The heart knows way beyond what our brains can imagine, nonetheless articulate.
That’s why “I love you” often doesn’t feel strong enough. The sensation of it is too strong for words. And on that note…
The heart is a door to the mystery of the universe.
One person who certainly had some keys to the door of the heart was Rav Kook, a mystical rabbi from the late 19th/early 20th centuries3. He was an incessant writer, a poet. Fun fact, he was one of the first of his time to use pencils, because he felt it made his words move faster out of his hand. When you read him, it’s like you’re reading direct source code. It impacts you in a way you can’t put your finger on (I’m sure everything I’m sharing here is influenced by his words). And in that exact way, much of his writing was quite difficult to understand. Raw, unedited, a wild stream. And there’s a reason for that.
The music of the cosmos, to which he was attuned, is not systematic. The inner life of a soul is not linear; it crescendos, flowing in waves and echoes, always mysterious.
-Aryeh Ben David
He was tapping into the rhythms of the universe, which I imagine sounds more like Jazz than anything words can attempt to express.
“Always mysterious.” Here’s a hunch that may branch off into a whole nother piece: lostness is the normative state of the universe. They say only 4-5% of the universe is visible to us. So at least 95% of this cosmic pie is dark matter. Unseen. Mystery. Ipso facto, when you’re feeling most lost, most broken, when things don’t make sense, you are actually tuning into most of the universe. How’s that for a reframe? Just don’t quote me to your therapists.
And my oh my does Judaism ever know brokenness. Just look at the title or subtitle of any Jewish book. Take for instance, the newest pride & joy of the LA Jewish community: The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts & World by Rabbi Sharon Brous. The holiness of brokenheartedness, & the mending of what’s broken, a devotion across as many lifetimes as we’ve got. As it turns out, Jewish practice and law really boils down to this: Unlearning all the ways we have learned how not to love. I imagine that’s true across the core of every religion & spiritual practice.
The heart is a door to “the world of the wild self”
The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés
All we have to do is walk through with both feet. Simple, really. Brutal at times, but simple.
Lastly,
The heart is a door to big Us.
Behold, a series of simple generalizations!
Loving with a full heart means losing with a full heart (unless you win the lottery: life-long love, and then dying first).
When that inevitable loss happens in whatever form, grief cannot be contained. Grief wants to be shared. Grief need hands, ears, song, community. I think we’re collectively terrified of grief because of our culture’s lack of communal grieving space, but if we can follow grief’s “counterculture” instinct and share, the inevitable destination is remembering the collective nature of the heart. That the one that sits inside you is just a satellite in a much larger web.
It’s no wonder the heart has the strongest electromagnetic field produced by the human body, measured several feet off the skin.4 Not to mention the folklore of research on the power of prayer, the healing power of simply feeling love towards someone else (I read somewhere I now can’t find about how they were able to track a spike in Gamma rays remotely in someone who was being thought of fondly by a loved one? Perhaps I’m making it up. Very cool either way.)
This is all to say we are literally always having heart conversations with each other. We’re having one right now (yes, you and me). We don’t even need to know about it; we just need to mature our faith in this strange & powerful organ.
I have no need whatsoever to force this feeling of love. It flows straight from the depth of the wisdom of the soul. -Rav Kook
As my heart continues to shake, break, ache & mend this season, for so many reasons ranging personal to collective, I am learning to trust that as long as I shatter in the direction of open as opposed to closed, I get closer to unlocking these doors. I may be covered in guts and blood at the doorstep, but at least I have the promise of time travel. Not to mention the endless well of joy in the courage to go there, both feet in.
With love (and I mean it, more sincerely than these words can possibly convey)
-J
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8675025_Electrophysiological_Evidence_of_Intuition_Part_1_The_Surprising_Role_of_the_Heart
My personal favorite descriptor of this is “Jeremy Bearimy” from The Good Place.
Highly recommend going down this rabbit hole via “The Secret of Love” by Aryeh Ben David. Thanks to my mother for introducing this to me via anonymously sending me this book on Amazon. How’s that for a healthy demonstration of Jewish mothership?
https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/energetic-communication/