On Trusting Your Life

    A recent study has revealed that people who trust their feelings or follow their heart are able to perceive future events more accurately than those who subdue their feelings. On the conduct of a number of tests the results consistently revealed that people with higher trust in their feelings were more likely to correctly predict the final outcome than those with lower trust in their feelings. “When we rely on our feelings what feels right or wrong summarizes all the knowledge and information that we have acquired consciously and unconsciously about the world around us. It is this cumulative knowledge, which our feelings summarize for us, that allows us to make better predictions. In a sense, our feelings give us access to a privileged window of knowledge and information, a window that a more analytical form of reasoning blocks us from.” This privileged window hypothesis is a study conducted at the Columbia Business School lead by Mr. Michel Pham Professor of business and marketing and is referred to as the ‘Emotional Oracle Effect’.

I was swept off my feet when I read this. This is a part of the message that I have been saying through the title of my blog ‘Trust Your Life – all your needs are provided for’. Trusting our feelings and following our heart means to acknowledge that our life energy knows and understands what is best for us. So instead of running around pursuing a number of directions it is better that one listens to one’s heart and trusts the inner gut feeling which has the knowledge to choose correctly. Normally in our daily life circumstances we start thinking and apply our brains to the issue on hand, weigh the plus and minus and then try to reach a rational decision. More often than not we are led by our desires and aspirations and therefore end up making choices which do not fit our ability, resource, and our current physical as well as psychological condition. The right fit thus eludes us.

To follow the heart and trust one’s feelings means to be objective and brave, to be able to accept a choice that does not correspond to the voice of the ego, to accept ourselves as we really are, to be contended with the present. Such a person is bound to be happy, without a strain and at peace with the world. It would be a surprise if such a person fails to take the right decisions all the time. Unfortunately such an exalted state is enjoyed by a privileged few. The rest of us are busy rolling in the quicksand of the ego that we fail to hear voice of the heart, the famous ‘I-me-myself’ syndrome.

Man is generally opposed to this philosophy of trusting our own life. This perception is viewed in a way that it symbolizes we should stop dreaming and that no progress can be achieved when we apply our brains. However, this is not true. To trust our life does not mean to stop pursuing our goals. The objective is to know and accept who we are and to live in harmony with the whole universe in that understanding. It is to be able to distinguish between the real and the false and thus desist in the pursuit of false.