The Heartmind
What every wisdom tradition agrees on, and why it matters now...
Note from the editors Ari Nazem & Tucker Walsh:
This article is adapted from a live transmission by Dr. John Churchill, from Day 1 of the Embodying the Open Ground Retreat, January 2, 2026.
96% of this article is made of direct quotes from the raw transcription. The remaining 4% has been cleaned or rephrased slightly for readability and flow by our in-house Planetary Dharma AI system which runs on the Claude Opus 4.6 model.
Listen to the original audio lecture below:
If you’d like to come into the mandala with us, join us for our next three-day online retreat (yes, the field still transmits) called Awakening the Heartmind on April 24-26, 2026. Read to the bottom for a token of our appreciation.
All the world’s wisdom traditions agree
Consciousness is located in the heart.
From the Andes, to the Sahara, to the Himalayas, to the vast expanse of the cold regions — all cultures, all eras, all the wisdom holders of our world agree upon this. So this is where we begin, friends.
And please, let’s not relate to these traditions as if they’re antiques. The world’s wisdom traditions are the inheritance we have from all of our ancestors across this whole beautiful planetary system.
By heart, I don’t just mean the physical organ. I mean the heart as the lived experience of love and care. The center of our awareness, and of our knowing.
This is also true in all the world’s medical systems, except contemporary allopathic medicine. Chinese medicine sees the heart as the emperor, or the empress, that integrates all the meridian systems. Ayurvedic medicine understands the heart as governing the five main pranic fields. Tibetan, Greek, and alchemical medicine all agree: your heart coordinates your body-mind.
This is an ancient, cross-cultural understanding. It’s universal.
Feeling-knowing intelligence
So what do I mean by heart here?
I mean a feeling-knowing intelligence. The heart is a feeling-knowing capacity where intelligence and feeling arise together. I don’t just mean emotion. What I’m talking about is the quality of being attuned to what’s arising in experience.
So this is a wisdom that’s lived — it’s not abstract.
When we’re operating from the heartmind, a sense of care is intrinsic to knowing.
Our ethics is felt. It is not calculated. We’re talking about a degree of sensitivity.
The split
What has happened?
From the point of view of a kind of sacred realism — or a sacred humanistic perspective that integrates the insights of the perennial traditions with contemporary psychology — there has been a split. Because of multi-generational trauma, the heart intelligence across the planet has been gently separated.
Our Western civilization — maybe even modern civilization — has often devalued the heart. And has devalued its connection to feeling and intuition. And by intuition, we mean something very technical. We mean a direct capacity to know things.
So because of that, our ethics has often become intellectual and separated from our way of being. Our embodiment has become disrupted. Because really, it is the heart, and the roots of the heart, that allow for a deep experience of embodiment.
The field that never ends
Think of the heart as an integrative field.
The heart generates a very powerful electromagnetic field. This can be measured extending beyond your body 5, 10 feet. And as the devices become more sensitive, we’re able to measure the field of the heart further and further and further.
What the traditions say is, actually, it never ends.
This field extends beyond the body, and it bathes every cell of your body in its information field. There’s research indicating that the cells are essentially calibrating themselves to the information field of your heart — its coherence, or its discoherence. Its ease, or its dis-ease.
And of course, that’s why when we’re in the presence of one another, the stronger the heart field, the less close you have to be to feel and influence each other. We all know that when we’re in the presence of other people, we feel things.
Your heart also organizes and coheres all of your brain activity. Think of the heart as the central organizing principle. A conductor of all of the various brain parts. And as it gets stronger, it coheres and organizes the electromagnetic field of your brain more and more and more.
The body listens to the heart.
Care, love, compassion
The heart’s developmental process begins with care, love and compassion.
And as the heart deepens, so does its ability to organize even how we think. As the heart field becomes more and more coherent, it can organize those structures in the brain. That leads to what we call systemic thinking. Then multi-systemic. Then paradigmatic. Then multi-paradigmatic.
And the reason why this is so important: it is systemic, and paradigmatic, and meta ways of cognizing that are needed at this time in the world, as we move toward, hopefully, a planetary interconnected civilization. That can only happen with the intelligence of the heartmind. Otherwise, as you know, we can see the ravages of separate cognition.
So the heartmind allows us the capacity of complex, intricate cognition. New ways of thinking and feeling that can evolve together. It integrates the left and the right hemispheres, the masculine and the feminine, the interior and the exterior, the rational and the intuitive.
The software and the hardware
The heart has always been seen as the middle way.
In terms of the kind of interior functions of our psyche, the heart is said to sit between the openness of the crown and the solidity of the root. Between pure awareness that is just completely open, and complete embodiment.
So the heartmind is a balancing and mediating intelligence. Balancing me with we. Above with below, inside with outside. The heartmind is the human center of integration, around which the human psyche was meant to organize itself.
From the perspective of the perennial traditions:
There is a way that the human software is meant to operate. And it’s not operating like that. Which is why the human hardware is struggling right now.
Attention is a flashlight. Awareness is the sky.
We need to differentiate between what we call attention, and what we call awareness.
Right now, as you read this — you’re looking at the screen, the words. You’re hearing the sounds around you. Your attentional system focuses on specific objects. Notice that in your direct experience. The specificity.
At the same time, become aware — consciously — that you are aware of the whole room. Not just the specific words you’re reading, but the whole ambient field in which those words are appearing. It’s a very different way of perceiving the world.
The heartmind, as awareness, is always sensing and knowing the whole field. Attention moves within the field of awareness, but it isn’t awareness alone.
Your attentional system is connected to your sense of self. The center of your little self, your self-structure — that’s your narrative self. “Hi, my name’s John, and this is what I do.” That’s your attentional system, because it attends to the specificity. But the heartmind tends to the wholeness.
And the reason this is important to understand is — how you perceive is who is perceiving.
See the flashlight? That’s the attentional system. But see the light of all of the sky. The whole. That is awareness. That’s the heartmind.
It’s not to say the specificity isn’t important. The specificity is actually an expression of the whole. But most of us go through the day just attending to the specificity, and losing the wholeness. We suffer because we’re so attached to just the specificity that we aren’t able to see the whole.
You’ve never smelt a rose
The great contemplative traditions are based on a very sophisticated form of phenomenology. Phenomenology is essentially the study of direct experience. As opposed to perhaps empirical study, where you cut things up. It’s what I like to call the stats and rats approach.
Stats and rats have got us a long way. We have this technology in front of us because of stats and rats. But the science of the interior is phenomenology.
Phenomenology says that all experience right now, everything that you’re experiencing right now, is arising within the field of your awareness.
So what you’re seeing right now — you’re not seeing an outside world. You’ve never seen an outside world. That’s not how things arise. What you’re seeing is what’s being generated within your experience.
You’ve never tasted chocolate. You’ve never smelt a rose. You’ve only smelt, and tasted, your experience.
Your experience right now is inherently intimate. The words you’re reading, the colors you’re seeing, they aren’t separate from your subjectivity.
Love is the warmth of this intimacy. Love arises when we recognize that there is interconnectivity. That there is no separation. And then the separation begins to soften.
We are submerged within reality. We are swimming within the ocean of our own experience. It is already profoundly intimate. But we defend ourselves against that intimacy.
And the sacred — it’s not found in some abstraction or some philosophy. It’s actually found in the depth and immediacy of your sensory experience. That’s why we can explore this without necessarily bringing any metaphysics to it. We’re talking about the direct experience of what it means to be a human being.
Anima Mundi
The heart gives rise to a particular kind of intuition. This is what’s called, in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, direct, non-conceptual knowing. Insight without inference. Immediate recognition. A natural human capacity.
The reason for this — it’s because the heart is the center of synchronicity, of synchrony. Your heart synchronizes. It creates the beat, the rhythm, the intricate rhythm of everything in your life.
But that field, that heart field, is also understood to belong to the planetary system. All the perennial traditions have a cosmology that understands that the Earth also has its own intelligence field.
And our heart resonates with this field. You can go and look up the research at HeartMath and other places. You’ll understand that we can measure now that your heart is in resonance with the Schumann frequency of the planet, which is being calibrated moment by moment by solar processes.
So heart coherence brings about synchronicity with the larger field. When it happens outside, we call that synchronicity. Meaningful coincidences. And when it happens inside, it’s called intuition. You’re directly knowing something.
But they are the same process.
And this is understood because the perspective of all the world’s wisdom traditions is that there is an anima mundi, a soul of the world. An intelligence system. We are part of a larger system. So before we talk about God with a big G, let’s just talk about a planetary system.
Our inner alignment meets outer alignment, outer timing, and life responds with synchronicity. This is because we are actually cells within a larger system. And the larger planetary system is also wanting to flower and blossom.
Not only do we have purpose within ourselves — we are part of planetary purpose. When we begin to align with the heart, we align with the intelligence of this planetary circulatory information system. And we begin to actually participate in a co-creative evolutionary process.
The heart is the key.
Feeling felt
How do we turn the key?
Allow your heart to come into relationship with the stability beneath you, as a thou. As if the ground were the good wisdom mother. As if the Earth, right now, were attuning to you, unconditionally.
It is.
We are held by this Earth system. It is a great mother.
Your heart, your loving awareness, discovers within the quality of holding — stability.
Your experience right now is trustworthy. The guidance is trustworthy. The community is trustworthy. Your experience is trustworthy.
Trust is a resonant quality of the Earth.
Just notice the deep receptivity. There is a presence. Right now, it is unconditionally attuning itself to you. We are allowing ourselves to feel felt.
What parts of you want to be felt, and held, and known unconditionally?
All we have to do is be willing.
Humility and sovereignty
Bring a quality of humility. Of surrendering.
Posture doesn’t matter so much now. Surrender to the Empress, to the Emperor, within you. Beneath you.
Continuously let go. Moment by moment by moment, release into the stability. There’s ground beneath you. It’s actually within you.
And from that quality of surrender, as you breathe in, just naturally allow your spine to lengthen. On the exhale, just stay where you are.
Come into a sense of sovereignty. Sitting upright and sovereign.
Find the meeting space of those two qualities. Find those two qualities meeting at your heart.
How released can you be? How upright, how sovereign can you be right now, without losing the release, without losing the humility? If it creates tension, then it’s too much.
Release first, and then respond. The deeper the release, the deeper the rooting. The more natural the uprightness and sovereignty.
What you are aligning to — when gravity pulls you into the ground and you stay upright — is the integrity of your experience. And that gravity is a massive force. A planetary force. And that planetary force is aligned with a solar force, as our planet moves around the sun. And the sun is aligned with a larger galactic force.
So as you just let go and allow yourself to be humble — and yet stay upright — allow yourself to sense the immensity of that.
Either operational, or not
So: the heartmind is the capacity to know reality, through whole-field awareness, where intelligence and care arise as one.
This is technical. It’s not mystical. It’s not vague.
It’s either operational, or it’s not.
Come sit with us
From April 24 to 26, Dr. John Churchill is teaching a three-day online retreat all about this: Awakening the Heartmind: Introduction to Bodhisattva Training.
Over three days, we’ll move through a full arc of practice. You’ll be guided into the release in the stable ground, into the feeling of being held and attuned to, into the meeting of humility and sovereignty at the heart, and the fundamental openness of experience beyond all constructs.
John will give you live pointing-out instruction on what’s actually arising in your direct experience, session by session. You’ll ask questions, and you’ll receive precise, real-time feedback. And you’ll be held in a sangha field built deliberately for this kind of work.
Three days to move the heartmind from intellectual understanding to direct experience. In the body, with others, in real time.
If you want more of what you experienced reading this, come sit with us!
Learn more and register at: heartmind.planetarydharma.com. The first 10 people to use the code OPEN-MIND get $100 off.
If you can’t join for the retreat, check out our monthly membership, The Gateway, for monthly calls with John and access to our Wisdom Library of dharma teaching and meditation recordings.
Dr. John Churchill is the founder of Planetary Dharma, a contemporary Bodhisattva training school integrating perennial wisdom, contemplative practice, attachment healing, and adult development.
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