The Body as a Site of Knowing centered in the Heart
The Question That Changed Everything
Three years ago, while writing my dissertation, I asked a question that became a seed of lasting curiosity: “What does the field of my heart look like?” It wasn’t a technical question. It was a perceptual one—less about gathering information, and more about sensing. Less about what I knew, and more about how I came to know. This question continued to guide my personal inquiry, shaping the way I understood both learning and being.
Through my research—particularly in conversations with coaches who had experienced moments of profound connection with nature, with others, or with something greater than themselves—I began to notice a pattern. These moments of insight were often described not as thoughts, but as experiences located in the body, specifically in the heart. Participants described knowing that felt luminous, embodied, and spatial. Often, this knowing came with a sense of light or a defined shape—frequently a sphere.
Gjikondi (2025) offers rich documentation of these experiences. Participants in her study described knowing as emerging from the “heart or chest,” associated with “light, warmth,” and vivid sensory imagery (p. 347). It was depicted “as a river,” an “airy oval flame,” “fresh blue,” “luminous light,” and “yellow-orange hues” (p. 247). In this heart field, knowing was seen “as a light,” “a bright yellow color,” “the size of a grapefruit” (p. 248). Others described it as a “dandelion,” “bright yellow light,” “a juicy, sweet mango,” “a neutral gender,” “a warm white light,” “a wholeness inside,” “a spark of yellow light,” “clarity,” and “white brightness like transparency in water” (p. 249). Still others described it “as a cube,” “a boulder,” “something bigger than an orange but smaller than a shoebox,” “as a blob of light,” or “as an expanding sphere” (p. 249). One participant captured it simply as “a solid truth in my heart” (p. 540).
What emerged from these descriptions was a vivid, embodied landscape of knowing—one not rooted in logic alone, but in deeply felt, often luminous experience. And in these metaphors, I found a deep resonance with my own question: that understanding can emerge not through analysis, but through a kind of light we feel rather than see. In this way, the heart becomes a doorway—not just to feeling, but to a relational, intelligent field beyond the individual mind.
From Dissertation to Devotion: The Heart’s Palette
After completing my dissertation, I made a quiet commitment to myself: to continue listening to my own heart, not just as a source of emotion, but as a way of being. I stopped organizing my life around productivity and performance, and began asking a simpler, deeper question: “What does my heart really want?”
That question marked the beginning of what would become the Leadership Apothecary—a creative, heart-centered space for exploring and expressing intuitive wisdom. Every reflection, story, and practice that has come through this space has emerged from the field of the heart. Collectively, they’ve become part of what I now call the heart’s palette—its colors, textures, rhythms, and intelligences. Through this space, I have begun mapping that palette for myself. And now, I offer an invitation for you to begin mapping yours.
The First Pulse: The Heart as Organizing Intelligence
At 22 days after conception, the human embryo begins to pulse. There is no brain yet. No identity. No story. Only rhythm—a vortex of spinning energy, pulsing at roughly 72 beats per minute. That rhythm becomes the heart. And the heart becomes the first organizing principle of the body. Everything else forms around it.
This biological fact raises a deeper question: What if the heart is not only the first organ, but also the first perception?
The Heart as Perceiver: Scientific Insight
This idea—that the heart is a perceptual organ—is increasingly supported by research. The HeartMath Institute has conducted several studies suggesting that the heart is capable of sensing information independently of the brain. In one landmark study, participants were shown randomized images—some emotionally neutral, others emotionally charged—while researchers monitored heart rate variability (HRV) and brain activity (McCraty, Atkinson, & Bradley, 2009; HeartMath Institute, n.d.).
Surprisingly, the heart responded to the emotional content of the images before they appeared on the screen, and before the brain registered any change. This suggests that the heart is intuitive, capable of perceiving information from the field ahead of conscious awareness. Moreover, HeartMath found that the heart’s electromagnetic field is 5,000 times stronger than the brain’s, and extends up to three feet outside the body in all directions.
This measurable field means that we are not only influenced by our internal emotional states—we are broadcasting them. At the same time, we are also receiving subtle information from the space and people around us. This three-foot field, then, may represent the true radius of our presence. It is within this radius that resonance, empathy, and intuitive knowing are most alive.
The heart is not merely reactive. It is relational. And it is always perceiving.
Ways of Knowing: Ontologies of the Heart
Depending on the lens we use, the heart takes on very different meanings:
In biomedicine, the heart is a pump.
In phenomenology, it is where meaning is felt.
In mysticism, it is the sacred center, home of divine love and wisdom.
In indigenous and ecocentric perspectives, it is a node in the web of life—connected to Earth, ancestors, and the more-than-human world.
In posthuman and process ontologies, the heart is always becoming—always in relation.
In quantum perspectives, it is an interface with the zero-point field, a gateway to infinite potential.
Across these varied perspectives, one theme repeats: the heart is not simply a structure. It is a perceptual field.
The Torsion Field: The Space Between the Spaces
Some contemporary researchers, such as Dr. Richard Bartlett, describe the heart as a torsion field—a vortex of spinning energy with a still point at the center. This central point is not bound by linear time or fixed physical laws. Mystics might call it “the space between the spaces”—a liminal zone where transformation happens, not through effort, but through alignment.
In this view, the heart is not merely a passageway. It is a portal. And the field it opens into is the source of coherence, emergence, and possibility.
Letting Go: Expectation and the Power of the Open-Ended Question
To enter this field, we don’t push or strive. We soften. We let go.
There is a paradox here: the more we grasp for a breakthrough, the more we resist it. Expectation narrows the field—it collapses possibility into what we already believe is likely. But neutrality, or presence without pressure, creates a fertile ground for the unknown to emerge.
In this receptive state, transformation doesn’t come through force or analysis. It arises through attunement. And one of the simplest ways to access this attunement is through the open-ended question.
Open-ended questions don’t demand answers. They offer openings. They disrupt linear thought and activate the right hemisphere of the brain—and the heart. I’m reminded of a moment from Star Trek, when Captain Kirk defeats an all-knowing machine—not with weapons, but with a question it cannot answer. The machine crashes. It cannot compute ambiguity.
Our logical minds often react the same way. But the heart, and the imaginative mind, come alive in the presence of the unknown.
So we ask:
What does my heart know that my mind doesn’t yet understand?
What color is this feeling?
What shape does this longing take?
These questions aren’t puzzles. They are invitations to shift from thinking to perceiving.
Imagination as Interface
In the human brain, the angular gyrus plays a unique and crucial role in perception. Located in the parietal lobe, just behind Wernicke’s language center, it serves as a multimodal integrator—gathering sensory input from across the body and synthesizing it into coherent experience. This is where raw sensation from sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell becomes meaning. It is a neurological crossroads where perception, language, and embodiment meet.
Researcher and author Nancy du Tertre, in her work on psychic perception and intuitive cognition, describes the angular gyrus as central to how we process intuitive information. She writes, “Our imagination is located at the crossroad of sensing and thinking—which is traditionally called perception.” (du Tertre, 2012). In her view, imagination is not simply the realm of fantasy or invention, but a sensory and perceptual system in its own right—one capable of gathering subtle cues and making meaning from them before the conscious mind catches up.
She likens this to the way certain animals navigate the world—not only through visual or auditory input, but through infrared radiation, vibration, temperature sensing, or magnetic resonance. These are not metaphorical ways of knowing; they are real-time, embodied, energetic perceptions that happen without direct contact.
When imagination is aligned with the field of the heart, this capacity becomes even more potent. Because the heart doesn’t just beat—it feels, it receives, and it broadcasts. Its electromagnetic field, measurable up to three feet in every direction, holds emotional resonance and subtle data. Within this field, truth is not always spoken—but it can be sensed. Not in the form of words, but as sensation.
So when we engage the imagination through the heart—not just through the intellect—we’re not making something up. We are perceiving what is already there, just beneath the surface of conscious awareness. That’s not fantasy. That’s field-based perception.
Leadership Apothecary Practice: Mapping the Heart’s Palette
Leadership often demands presence in the face of complexity, where cognitive intelligence alone may fall short. By turning toward the subtle, embodied intelligence of the heart—what is described in Gjikondi (2025) as a form of knowing that arises from the chest, often accompanied by sensations of warmth and light—leaders can access a deeper source of clarity, coherence, and inner alignment.
This practice is an invitation to explore that inner landscape. Through a series of imaginative, embodied questions, you are invited to begin mapping your own heart’s palette—the sensory, emotional, and intuitive expressions that live within you. The aim here is not to analyze, but to attune. To allow perception to arise from the field of the heart itself.
Take a deep breath and gently close your eyes.
For each question that follows, I invite you to respond quickly—no more than 30 seconds per answer. Let your pen move faster than your thoughts. Trust whatever arises. Don’t edit. Don’t overthink. Just let it flow.
Continue this practice until you’ve moved through all the questions—or as many as feel right for you in the moment.
When you're done, take a moment to read all your responses aloud, as if reading a poem written by your heart.
Then, sit quietly and notice: is there one image, word, or phrase that draws your attention?
Take a moment to draw it, however simply. Let it become an anchor. And throughout the day, begin to notice where else it shows up—in your thoughts, your body, your choices, or the world around you.
Imaginative Prompts into the Field of the Heart
How do I enter my heart? How does it feel?
What color is my heart?
When I go inside my heart, I see... I feel... I smell... I touch... I hear... I sense...
How deep is it?
What’s her shape?
You sit in the center of your heart. What does it look like? Feel like?
When you gently polish the center of your heart with a soft cloth, what hidden treasure emerges?
You are in a natural landscape. What non-human friend is called into your heart space? What do they look like? What is their message?
Where is the sacred center of your heart?
What song does she sing?
What is her sound of “Yes”?
What is her sound of “No”?
What does she look like when she is curious?
What does she look like when she is open?
What does she look like when she is closed?
What is the space between the beats like?
When I feel the light in my heart, I feel...
How does your heart feel when in nature?
How does your heart connect with the hearts of others?
What does your heart feel like in the silence?
How does your heart experience love?
When my heart goes wild, I feel... and I sense...
How does your heart radiate in the world?
Feel and sense your heart when you know. What does it look like, feel like, taste like?
References:
du Tertre, N. (2012). Psychic intuition: Everything you ever wanted to ask but were afraid to know. Red Wheel/Weiser.
Gjikondi, I. (2025). A phenomenological investigation of ecocentrism in coach education [Doctoral dissertation, The George Washington University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
HeartMath Institute. (n.d.). Research. HeartMath. Retrieved November 5, 2023, from https://www.heartmath.org/research/
McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tomasino, D., & Bradley, R. T. (2009). The coherent heart: Heart-brain interactions, psychophysiological coherence, and the emergence of system-wide order. Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary & Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Research, & Praxis, 5(2), 10–115.