Dr Tony Bates: It is easy to lose touch with our hearts

Clinical psychologist Dr Tony Bates explores what it means to live a full life where we are equally open to good and challenging experiences

Dr Tony Bates. Photograph Moya Nolan

‘Heart’ is a word we understand intuitively. Putting my heart into whatever I am doing suggests that I believe it is important and deserves my careful, committed attention. A person with a heart is open and compassionate. To respond with heart to someone in crisis is to listen to them without judgment and be willing to sit with them until we find a way forward.

We naturally point to our chest area when we use the word heart. It represents a gentler, kinder aspect of us that is open and receptive to life.

Sometimes referred to as our ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’, the heart is not easily defined. I think of it as a basic goodness in each of us capable of touching and being touched by life. We say, ‘My heart went out to him’ or ‘I took her into my heart’. Our thinking minds allow us to adapt to new challenges and evolve our understanding of the world. Our hearts enable us to care about it and be present to reality.

We recognise the difference between people with an open heart and people who’ve shut down their hearts. Most of us have encountered the latter. Maybe life has bruised them once too often. Setbacks and sorrows have left them with a bitter taste. They harden their hearts not to leave themselves vulnerable.

Some may appear cold, mistrustful, and calculating in their dealings with others. Their work and social relationships may look successful, but they give them little joy. Their lives lack vitality. Somewhere along the way, they lost the heart for it all.

American psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote: ‘We are generally afraid to become that which we glimpse in our most perfect moments.’ 

Perhaps we are afraid of our own power; afraid to breach the confines of our safe, small, and familiar identities and open our hearts to a world that will always surprise and challenge us.

It’s easy to lose touch with our hearts. To judge, criticise and shut out reality because it doesn’t live up to our expectations. When this disconnect happens, we only see what is lacking in ourselves — and others — rather than appreciate what we’ve survived and achieved. If we feel conflicted, insecure, lonely, or confused, we decide something is wrong with us. Instead of holding our problems with kindness, warmth, and compassion and allowing a more creative solution to emerge, we push our discomfort away and become lost in repetitive negative thinking.

Two potent forces are at work in each of us: our desire to be open and responsive to life even when it may be challenging and our need to keep our lives as safe and predictable as possible. Part of us wants to wake up to this radically changing world, while another part can only bear so much reality and prefers to remain half-asleep. From birth to death, these two opposing forces work hand-in-hand.

We are more likely to be open than play it safe when we are young. We may adopt some protective behaviour strategies to cope with our insecurities, but we remain flexible and open to risk new ways of engaging with life.

As we age, it’s easy to settle into behaving in habitual ways. Our better-be-safe-than-sorry relationship with life becomes so familiar that we imagine it is all we can ever be.

Somewhere in middle life, our conditioned ways of living begin to overpower our innate openness. Unless we become aware and recognise what is happening, our habitual strategies can cause our personalities to freeze into a living rigor mortis.

Modern philosopher Ken Wilber describes four core tasks for becoming human: We must grow up, clean up, wake up, and show up. We need to mature physically and emotionally, address unresolved issues that may hold us back, and wake up to the wonder and mystery of being alive.

The spiritual journey — let’s call it ‘waking up’ for now — involves opening our heart to being surprised by life and keeping it open in the face of difficulty.

This six-week series will explore ways of connecting with the heart, with what is deepest in us, and allowing life’s energies to flow through us.

Becoming human is always a work in progress. No one is ever ‘cooked’. Because the person I was yesterday isn’t big enough for what life asks of me today, and the person I am today won’t be enough for what life will ask of me tomorrow.