The Person
The person is the focal point of heart theory. Without being a person, you would have no heart, no vessel to go inside and find what you are carrying around (content) or find what is troubling you. Without the person that you are, there would be no center to live from, and there would be no IGS, no feeling tones, no Invitations arising for you, and no felt-sensing to help guide a life. It is the person who lives, and who wants to live a life you care about. The implicit life principle in each of us is forward moving, it aims at something, whatever you may call it: Individuation, becoming irreplaceably unique and whole, complete, or self-actualizing, and in spiritual terms, self-trancending. It is the person inside, who recoils in fearful feeling tones from threat or challenge, and who wants to take delight in the world by opening the heart’s doors and embracing what life brings to you. In short, it is the person who has a heart and who can develop skill in using it to chart a course in life and navigate through any situation, no matter how small or large, that arises.
It is crucial to realize that the person is not the personality, which is a combination of traits, conditioned patterns forged in development with whom a person may mistakenly identify. The personality, to a degree, can be changed, improved, dis-identified with, and so on, and has many stable traits. The person, on the other hand, is a mysterious ontological presence. The person is the one who has various personality traits and who has a name and so on. My granddaughter is two years old. I remember when she was born. It was an unmistakable experience when suddenly there was a new being in the family, a new person looking out from behind a pair of shiny eyes; a new and somehow unavoidable presence in the room.
Heart psychology is a little map this inner person so that he or she can find the heart, listen to it and act from it. When this happens the inner person grows, develops, expands in many directions like the unfolding petals of a lotus.[i][i] One of the most compelling and resonant phenomenological statements about the inner person and growth has been made by Eugene T. Gendlin. I find it difficult to surpass:
“…when a person’s central core or inward self expands (i.e., in a direction) it strengthens and develops, the “I” becomes stronger. The person—I mean that which looks out from behind the eyes—comes more into its own. The increasing strength and development of the person is essential to a successful psychotherapy.
….One develops when the desire to live and do things stirs deep down, when one’s own hopes and desires stir, when one’s own perceptions and evaluations carry a new sureness, when the capacity to stand one’s own ground increases, and when one can consider others and their needs. This last item here is not contradictory to the others. One comes to feel one’s separate existence solidly enough to want to be close to others as they really are. It is development when one is drawn to something that is directly interesting, and when one wants to play. It is development when something stirs inside that has long been immobile and silent, cramped and almost dumb, and when life’s energy flows in a new way.
…Nothing is more important than the person inside. Therapy exists for the person inside, it has no other purpose. When that inner being comes alive, or even stirs just a little, it is more real and important than diagnosis or evaluation. [ii][ii]
The heart is what draws our attention to interesting and lively things. It is the heart which stirs the imagination and arouses new life energy. The whole point of living from the heart is so that the inner person can grow, develop, and come more into its own, with new sureness, and with delight, joy, and deep satisfaction in living. Each person has an embodied heart, and in the deepest paradoxical sense, the heart is the core of each person.
We now have the basic structure of the heart developed in the interlocking major terms: Center, Vessel, Doors, Person, and in the interlocking minor terms that are specific to the nature of the internal guidance system, or IGS, with its feeling tones and how to use them. We do not yet have the process of ‘living from the heart’, or ‘walking a path of the heart’ mapped out. To this we now turn.
ãAll Rights Reserved by C. Michael Smith, Ph.D. Copyright 2005
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