and still, you are

   

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Whose limbic system is it anyway? 

The emotional center of your brain does well to take orders from your heart. 85% of the fibers of the vagus nerve running between your heart and brain are afferent, meaning the majority of information conveyed there represents information flowing from your heart to your brain. 

The heart is a feeling center of great power and competence to inform and reform your brain. The neocortex, or thinking brain, can hijack the heart’s role, if you allow it to do so. 

Right now your heart may know and tell that all is well, right here, right now, in this sweet unfettered moment, and supply the limbic brain with cause for calm. Yet your neocortex, if you subject it to the blaring trumpets of crisis, fear and danger from every quarter, may throw you into a state of panic quite unrelated to your very real and beautiful immediate circumstances, and keep you in that state for the foreseeable future. It is more up to us what we task our limbic system to endure in any given moment than we might have imagined. 

Welcome your heart’s caress of your brain, rhythmically lulling you into a reality on safe ground with open sky far above the information tsunami. You can reclaim your limbic system! It is your domain.

—Gil Hedley 

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Blood flow is not a simple stream like we once thought. It is in fact composed of two streams, spiralling around each other much like the image of a DNA double helix, at the centre of which is a vacuum.

The heart itself has recently been discovered not to be a mass of muscle, but rather a ‘helicoidal myocardial band’ that has spiralled in upon itself, creating its unique shape and its separate chambers. This spiral dance is not only found in the bloodstream, but also in the blood cell itself! Blood cell’s in fact spin on their own individual axes of rotation. They are smaller spinning cells in a larger spinning vortex. 

Pair this with discoveries that the heart functions as an endocrine gland, has its own nervous system that makes and releases its own neurotransmitters, and omits an electromagnetic field that is far stronger than the brain’s, and we begin to move from the idea that the heart is simply a mechanical pump.

It is a spiralling organ of perception.

If that’s not beautiful, we don’t know what is.


—Gil Hedley

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You are not your body. That which you are persists like a perpetual wave through which the waters pass. The wave is not the water. And you are neither flesh nor bone, coming and going day by day. 

Whatever the matter is, you are not that! Breathe a sigh of self-welcome. You’ve known yourself to be who you are long before today’s particular aggregate of atoms assembled as that body you see in the mirror. Those atoms pass from you as quick as they came, and still, you are: persistent, beautiful, conscious, safe.


—Gil Hedley
treasure

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