The Battle Between the Head and Heart

I am an emotional person who feels things very deeply. Sometimes too deeply. Tears will flow during a Hallmark movie, watching a rescue video or even just talking about something that I am passionate about. Many, many tears have been shed when it comes to my cats. Tears of joy, happiness, laughter and of course, sadness and worry. I used to think that being emotional was a weakness. Now, I understand that ability to feel things on a deep level has actually been very beneficial for me to connect to my cats. That is until my head gets in the way. In a battle between the head and heart, the logical overrides the emotional and then things go awry.

Follow Your Gut

Because I have such a deep connection with my cats, I have what I call my “kitty senses”. My “kitty senses” start tingling whenever something is not quite right with one of my babies. Now, this is not magic or anything. It is being observant to my cats and knowing their behaviors. It is following my gut. Listening to my intuition. It is an ability we all have. It is that little voice that we hear. We just have to listen to it, instead of ignoring it.

It is when we ignore our gut, our intuition, our heart that things go wrong. When we pay too much attention to the voice in our head, we can lose sight of what is important. Our head can fill us with doubt, pressure and second guesses. Those are not always bad. However, in the battle between the head and heart, logic is the way of the head and that tends to get in the way of the purpose of the heart. Which is to feel, trust and believe.

Listen to Your Heart

Opening and listening to your heart can be difficult for some people. It causes them to be vulnerable and that is scary. But it is that vulnerability that allows us to grow. I have felt stagnant for a while. This was because I was focusing too much on my head. Paying too much attention to what was expected of me and how I should act. Letting my head dictate how I should feel and react. It was not working for me because it is not me. That is not the way I am built. I have grown so much over the past couple of months. My feelings of being stuck are being replaced with feelings of progress and growth. There has been a shift in my thinking where I acknowledge my head, but I follow my heart. And that has made a world of difference not only for me, but for my cats as well.

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” – Ernest Hemingway