The words that most struck me when I read The Alchemist were, "listen to your heart." These words stuck out on the page so much that if I didn't know better, I'd have thought that the words had been printed in bold.
This is one of many lessons in the book and the lesson I am writing about here. We don't hear words like this too often these days, but interestingly enough I had heard them the very same week that I picked up The Alchemist. I heard them from a dear person in my life who was learning that very same lesson that week. Knowing that the Universe sends messages to me all of the time, sometimes even through Dr. Phil ;), the second time I came across these words, I practically sat bolt upright.
Here's what struck me in the book. This is a conversation between the book's main character Santiago and the Alchemist. The boy Santiago starts out by asking the Alchemist, "'why should I listen to my heart?'
'Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside of you, repeating to you what you're thinking about life and about the world.'
'You mean I should listen, even if it's treasonous?'
'Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you'll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them.'
'You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you'll never have to fear an unanticipated blow.'The boy continued to listen to his heart as they crossed the desert. He came to understand its dodges and tricks, and to accept it as it was. He lost his fear, and forgot about his need to go back to the oasis, because, one afternoon his heart told him it was happy. "
Here we have it. The best reason to listen to your heart is because, it will drive you nuts if you don't and you will suffer without learning to do this. Could this be one of the leading causes of heart attacks? I don't know, but I suspect it may be true.
Many of us don't remember how to listen because we are so habituated to listening to our thoughts. We have a hard time distinguishing between the two. I'll be posting an exercise about this in the next few days. Please check back to try it out.
If you are skeptical about the truth of your hearts ability to speak to you, I have a very good and quite amazing article to share with you that will help you realize how powerful the memory of the heart is and how very separate it is from the thoughts generated by the brain. Take a gander at the article linked here below in which the following is written:
"There is the 8-year-old girl who got the heart of a 10-year-old murder victim, according to medical reports. Plagued by nightmares of the crime after her transplant, the girl used the images in her dreams to help locate and convict her donor's killer. "
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