10 Things You Didn't Know About Your Heart
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
We’re going to take you on a little journey through to heart.
You don’t need to understand anything yet. Just notice what you feel as you read. Notice what stirs… and what softens.
The human heart is nothing short of miraculous. Long before your mind is awake, your heart is already working. Long after you stop thinking about it, it keeps going. It continues beating when you sleep and adjusts instantly to your emotions, your breath, and your environment without ever asking for permission.
Your heart begins beating before your brain is fully formed.
Let’s take a moment to geek out together...
The heart you carry inside of your chest pumps nearly 100,000 beats each day.
Modern research in neuroscience, cardiology, and bioenergetics continues to confirm what ancient wisdom traditions have always known: the heart is not just an organ. It’s a center of intelligence, communication, and coherence.
Your heart generates the strongest rhythmic electromagnetic field in the body. It’s measurable several feet beyond the skin using sensitive instruments. Institutions like the HeartMath Institute have helped bring this research into the mainstream, showing how the heart’s rhythms influence the brain, nervous system, hormones, and emotional resilience.
You’ve likely felt this without needing the science though. You’ll notice that sense of feeling calm around certain people, or unsettled around others without knowing why. Your heart is constantly informing how you feel, think, connect, and heal.
In fact, more information travels from the heart to the brain than the other way around.
Let that land for a breath.
Understanding the heart more deeply (physically, emotionally, and energetically) is one of the most powerful doorways into deeper self‑awareness and healing.
So let’s slow this down and begin. Not just by learning about the heart, but by listening to it.
10 fascinating things you may not know about your heart
1. Your heart has its own nervous system
The heart contains its own complex network of neurons, called the intrinsic cardiac nervous system. Some researchers refer to this as the “heart brain.” While it doesn’t think the way the brain does, it processes information, learns patterns, and communicates continuously with the brain.
If you pause for a moment here, you might notice that your body already knows this. Your heart often reacts before your thoughts do.
2. The heart communicates to the brain more than the brain communicates to the heart
Most of the nerve fibers connecting the two carry information upward from the heart to the brain. In other words, your emotional and physiological state is largely shaped by signals that originate in the heart.
This is why trying to “think your way through” feelings rarely brings resolution. The message is not coming from the mind. It is arising from somewhere deeper than thought. The heart moves through sensation, resonance, and truth that is felt rather than thought.
3. The heart and brain use the same chemical language
The heart produces and responds to many of the same neurotransmitters and hormones as the brain, including dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and norepinephrine.
Your emotional life is not happening in one place. It’s a whole-body conversation.
4. Your heart generates a powerful electromagnetic field
In fact, the heart’s electromagnetic field is the strongest rhythmic field produced by the human body. What research is beginning to show us is that the heart is constantly communicating with the brain, influencing how we think, feel, and respond to the world.
You don’t need to perceive this directly for it to be true. Its effects are subtle, woven into your breath, your emotional state, and the way your body or being moves through moments before your mind catches up.
5. Emotional states affect heart rhythm, and coherence matters
It’s not just about how fast your heart beats or not, but the quality of its rhythm that can tell a story about you. Stress and anxiety tend to create irregular, disharmonious patterns that further dysregulate your nervous system. More resourced emotional states like trust, appreciation, and safety create smoother, more coherent rhythms inside your chest.
Coherence often feels like relief. Like something inside you finally settling.
6. The heart influences hormonal balance
The atria of the heart produce atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), a hormone involved in regulating blood pressure, fluid balance, and stress responses. This means the heart is not just responding to the body. It is actively shaping the internal environment.
When the heart feels supported, the whole system tends to follow.
7. Heart rhythms influence the entire body
The signals generated by the heart help coordinate your brain activity, breathing, digestion, and immune function, creating an experience of internal harmony. When the heart finds steadiness, the body tends to organize itself around that signal.
This is why tending to the heart often creates changes everywhere else, even in places you were not trying to repair.
8. The heart forms before the brain in the womb
The heart is the first functional organ to develop, beginning to beat around day 22 of embryonic development. Before you even know how to think, you know rhythm and resonance of your own heartbeat.
Something in you was already moving, already keeping time, long before you were capable of understanding it. Let that sink in for a moment.
9. Humans entrain to each other’s heart rhythms
Your nervous system naturally synchronizes with those around you, especially people you feel close to. In subtle ways, your heart is always in conversation with people, with spaces, with moments; sending and receiving invisible signals. Your presence matters; sometimes even more than your words. A regulated heart can calm another without effort.
This might explain something you’ve felt but couldn’t quite name. Why you sense someone’s presence before they speak. Why certain spaces feel nourishing while others feel draining.
Why you know something before you can explain how you know.
10. The heart responds to meaning, not logic
The heart doesn’t process information linearly. It doesn’t wait for proof and it doesn’t require a full plan. Instead, it moves through sensation, resonance, and truth that is felt rather than thought. It responds to emotion, symbolism, intuition, and resonance. This is why something can feel right or wrong before you have words to explain it.
This is also why the mind often feels overwhelmed in moments of deep love, grief, awe, or beauty. These experiences don’t fit neatly into mental frameworks. They bypass and often transcend logic, and can often only be understood with the heart.
The mystery of heart intelligence
Stories of heart intelligence dance at the edges of science and mystery.
In the field of energy medicine, there are anecdotal reports of heart transplant recipients experiencing emotional or perceptual shifts following surgery. While interpretations vary, these stories invite us to stay curious about consciousness, memory, and where information is held in the body.
Across both research and lived experience, one thing is consistent: the heart processes information differently than the mind.
It is:
Nonlinear
Nonverbal
Holistic
Intuitive
Deeply intelligent
Your heart is constantly communicating. The question isn’t whether it’s speaking… it’s how to listen. And if you’re willing to slow down and take the time to really understand.
Caring for your heart energy
Because the heart is so responsive, it is also deeply sensitive.
When you live in a state of chronic overwhelm, overextension, or emotional armoring, the heart naturally contracts and closes. You may notice this as tension or heaviness in your chest, a subtle feeling of closing off and moving away from sensation.
When you feel safe, seen, and present, the heart naturally softens and opens. This often shows up as ease or lightness in your chest, a quiet softening and desire to lean into the moment.
From an energetic perspective, the heart is always oscillating between protection and connection; like a gate it’s either open or closed.
Neither is wrong. But having awareness gives you a choice.
A choice to notice, to tend to what’s needed, and to meet yourself with care.
Gentle practices for heart opening
Before we talk about practices, it’s important to say something honest:
Most of us want our hearts to be open… but very few of us get to choose how that happens.
Heart opening is rarely graceful or intentional. More often, it is humbling. It arrives unannounced. It interrupts. It brings you to your knees before it brings you back to yourself.
It’s the breakup you didn’t see coming.
The grief that envelopes you and then presses into you like a immovable boulder. The moment someone shows you unexpected kindness when you’re exhausted and your guard is high.
The plan that collapses, only to reveal something truer underneath.
These moments soften us because they bypass the mind entirely. They do not ask for permission. They go straight to the heart.
So if you find yourself longing for more openness, tenderness, or connection, know this: nothing is wrong with you if it hasn’t happened “on purpose.” Many heart openings arrive sideways, disguised as loss, surprise, or grace.
Heart energy is powerful, love. It does not need to be forced open with positivity and shoved into submission. It responds to something much simpler, and honestly much more courageous: presence.
Being willing to stay.
To feel what is here.
To let the moment touch you, even when it hurts. That is where the heart begins to open.
If you want to gently support coherence and openness, here are a few ways to tend the space without pushing it:
Meditate: Even a few minutes of slow, steady breathing can invite regulation. Rhythm returns. The system remembers itself.
Smile: Especially at yourself. A soft smile signals safety to the nervous system and subtly shifts brain chemistry. It is a small gesture with a quiet reach.
Work with elevated emotions: Gratitude, appreciation, awe, and compassion have measurable effects on heart rhythm. Music can be a powerful ally here too as it has a way of carrying you where words cannot.
Connect with the heart physically: Place a hand on your chest. Breathe into the space around your heart. Notice sensation without needing to interrupt, interpret or fix it.
Gentle movement & yoga: Postures like sphinx, camel, child’s pose, or supported fish and bridge pose invite the chest to soften. The body and heart will open when it feels safe and supported.
Reflect and journal: The heart speaks in sensation, emotion, and imagery. Writing gives those signals a place to land.
And most importantly, notice what shifts.
Notice how you feel before and after.
In your body. In your creativity. About your relationships.
The heart rarely opens all at once. It opens in moments. In quiet softening. In the spaces where you let yourself be touched by your own life.
And one more thing that matters to say…
These practices can be incredibly supportive. They help regulate the nervous system. They help you navigate stress, uncertainty, and moments that are outside of your control. They create space and soften your edges.
But they cannot, on their own, change the way you see the world. They cannot untangle the pain your body learned to carry long ago.
Deep tension and heavily armored hearts usually have roots in unmet needs and unprocessed trauma. Moments where it was not safe to feel, to trust, or to stay open.
If your heart feels chronically guarded, if openness feels frightening or unreachable, that does not mean you are doing something wrong. It means there is something asking to be met more directly.
Getting to the root matters.
Going deeper often requires support, presence, and sometimes another human walking with you as you listen to what the heart has been holding.
The mind cannot know the answer
Before you read this, let yourself settle. This isn’t a concept… It's an experience. Let it land in your body, not just your thoughts.
Sometimes the heart teaches us in ways the mind can’t follow. For me, this happened when I experienced a love that outgrew every container I had built for it. Every time I thought I had reached the edge, or somehow ‘figured it out’, it kept expanding.
Not in a dramatic way. Not loudly. Just quietly, insistently expanding beyond what I thought was possible. Like happy tears that squeeze themselves out of your eyes or a muscle cramp in the center of my chest, clenching in celebration.
The first time I really felt this kind of love in my adult life was when I adopted an orange tabby cat named Bubba. He was a kitten actually, barely 4 months old.
It sounds simple, maybe even a bit trivial, but my love for him was enormous.
Everyday I witnessed myself loving him more. I don’t really know why it surprised me as much as it did. I mean, he was just a tiny little being, but he was also my mirror.
Every day my heart expanded and my mind felt… gooey. Soft. Confused. Melty. Unable to calculate.
In an effort to bring definition and logic, I would decide in my own mind, “this is it, I’ve reached the maximum and now I know what love is.” Like, surely this is as much love as a heart can hold.
Then he would do something that melted me deeper, like play with a water droplet in the shower like it was the most fascinating thing that ever existed in all creation. Or he’d look at me with complete trust, curl into my chest and lean into me, existing so fully as himself. The joy and aliveness that beamed from him was electric. And just like the grief that I already knew so well, the heart showed me again that she knows no limits: in pain or love.
I learned that love does not behave logically. It does not plateau. It does not obey the rules that the mind is used to applying to things, like energy, time, or emotional bandwidth. It doesn’t ask for permission. It just expands.
Where does this “more” come from? The mind cannot know the answer.
My experience with Bubba cracked something open and revealed a truth my mind still can’t fully grasp: love is not finite. It isn’t something we run out of once it reaches a certain size. It grows us as we grow it. Love comes in like an explosion of disillusioned bliss, stretching you achingly into expansion, then leaving you in awe in its wake, wondering wtf just happened.
It was then that I began to understand why people say having a child changes you forever. I don’t have children, but I can feel the truth of it in my body. This kind of love is the ultimate heartbreak. Not in the way we usually think of heartbreak, but in the way your heart breaks o p e n.
An opening to an infinite currency of exquisite expansion. A breaking open into a love so big, so wide, so unknown that it is genuinely terrifying to approach. Because if you really let yourself feel it, what you’re most afraid to ask or know: Who will I become if I allow this? What part of me will I outgrow?
And the honest answer is—you don’t know. The mind cannot know.
The mind wants what the heart cannot give: certainty, edges, and a sense of control. It tries to protect us from the unknown by explaining love away. But love lives in a place that knows without language.
The mind asks, "Where is this “more” coming from?
And the heart doesn’t bother with the question. She leaves you cozy in the liminal.
The heart knows that “more” doesn’t come from somewhere external. It isn’t earned or manufactured or added on. It isn’t transactional because it doesn’t recognize the format. It reveals itself when we allow ourselves to truly open.
The heart doesn’t expand because we understand it. It expands because we surrender.
Which is probably why love feels both intoxicating and destabilizing. You’ve probably felt this: The way love can feel like comfort and terror in the same breath. It the safety and the freefall. It asks us to soften our grip on who we think we are and let ourselves be reshaped by something larger. It asks us to trust in what we cannot see and feel what we cannot touch.
This isn’t a mental process. It’s a lived one.
We don’t think our way into deeper love. We feel our way there. We let love undress us, lay us bare, and stare compassionately at our wholeness. We allow it to move like warm light into the sharp places within us where we still carry the pain of the past and fear the future may repeat itself.
Every time the heart grows, it quietly demands us to become someone new. Someone more tender, more humble, and more trusting. The mind can witness this. It can marvel. It can be stunned. But it cannot lead.
Only the heart knows how to go first.
So when love begins to feel too big, too intense, too much to hold… this is a signal to lean in. You are standing at the edge of an expansion your mind cannot yet imagine. And that’s okay. Let yourself love and be loved.
The mind cannot know the answer.
Only the heart can.
Final thoughts
We are only beginning to understand the intelligence of the heart. But one thing is clear: the heart is a true alchemist.
It transforms emotion into information, experience into wisdom, and connection into healing. When we learn to listen — truly listen — we stop forcing our way forward and begin moving in rhythm with ourselves.
This is the work I guide in my Sacred Alchemy book series: learning the language of the heart, befriending emotion, and creating safety within the body so real healing can occur.
I invite you to stay curious, stay soft, and stay in the work. 🤍