What if Love wasn’t just a feeling… but your decision-making compass?
Your authority centre is not your mind.
In trying to exercise more self-love and self-acceptance, I chose to approach life with the eyes of a scientist, looking at what comes to me as experiments. There’s no right or wrong answer, only results. This took such a weight off my shoulders and has allowed me to be more compassionate with myself and those around me.
From what I live and the results these experiences “generate,” I’m able to look at what serves me, discern from what doesn’t, and move on. This has been really liberating. I invite you to look at your life through these lenses too, if it resonates with you, of course.
Last week, in my own little world, my daughter was the force that helped me see and connect to a higher frequency. She reminded me how to connect with Love to help me take on difficult situations, especially those where emotions set the tone for how I respond.
Love is an energy we’re much more used to seeing under the lens of romance, physical attraction, or even control and possessiveness. We’re human beings, so emotions are part of what constitutes us. We are constantly dealing with situations that push our limits. We live in the extremes, trying to balance things out while navigating life. And Love is a big part of what moves us.
As David R. Hawkins says in his book The Map of Consciousness Explained:
“Loving is a state of being. It is a way of relating to the world that is forgiving, nurturing, and supportive. Love is not intellectual and does not proceed from the mind. Love emanates from the heart. It has the capacity to lift others and accomplish great feats because of its purity of motive.”
“Love emanates from the heart,” he says, and it’s an energy that drives us. In the name of Love, mankind has surpassed its own limits, done wild things, and literally gone crazy. In the name of Love, we are capable of what we doubt would even be possible. We discover a side of us that we thought never existed. We see others differently. We see ourselves, our world, differently. We become more human.
I really like how Hawkins says that “loving is a state of being.” He is referring to a level of understanding where you not only think and objectively look at your life through the lenses of Love — he is talking about ‘being.’ This doesn’t happen in the mind. You know things not only because your mind understands them, but because your body feels them! It knows!
In other words, you love because that’s how you are. Your mind acts as your inner compass that helps you locate your placement in the world, but it’s your emotions that tell you where you need to be.
In my searches to understand more about how we navigate life in this human body, I stepped upon a wisdom called Human Design (HD). It’s a combination of sacred and ancient knowledge that includes I-Ching, Astrology, Kabbalah, and Chakras, with a correlation to Quantum Physics too. HD can technically be seen as a self-assessment device, but it is, in fact, much more than that. Through a body graph or chart, one can understand their purpose in life, their gifts, their struggles, and the ways in which they can evolve to achieve their higher potential, in alignment with who they’re designed to be. In other words, it’s a super powerful tool!
In a person’s body graph — almost like a natal astrological map — along with other elements, you identify 9 centres just like the 7 chakras: crown, third eye/Ajna, throat, heart, solar plexus/emotional, sacral, and root, with 2 additional ones — G/Identity/Self Centre and Spleen Centre. These centres regulate the energy flow of our being.
Differently from what we are commonly taught, in HD your decision-making process is not seen as ruled by the mind, but by your authority. It’s the place in your body that knows what is correct for you. Your strategies get you into the right situations, but it’s your authority that tells you what to do once you’re there. It stems from one of the 5 Authority Centres — either the Emotions, the Sacral, the Spleen, the Heart, or the Self. For some people, depending on their design, it can come from outside the Self.
Today, I want to focus on 2 of these centres: the Heart and the Emotional Centre, to help you expand your view on the energy of Love — an energy that is sourced from within because it’s not dependent on external factors. It breaks down the walls that separate you from the world and, in doing so, creates an environment of support, nurture, and care — towards others and yourself.
The Heart, the Sacral, and the Emotional Centre constitute the three “motor centres” where your drive to act comes from.
As per HD, the Heart Centre is where your willpower, your desire, your self-worth, your values, and your proving energy are located. What you desire is expressed in your wants. It’s a constant balance between willpower and Ego. Your Ego is that inner voice that keeps telling you what to do, but not necessarily what you truly want to do, because it’s conditioned by the beliefs you grew up surrounded by. And so it will look for what makes you feel safe, even if it’s not what’s best for you — as long as it keeps you within what it can control, based on what it knows.
But you have centre that is actively pushing you to achieve your dreams, always balancing your selfish reasons with those for a greater good. That’s the force that activates your desire and action mode in the direction of your goals, and it’s located in your Heart Centre. You are equipped with an inner engine that drives you forward.
You also have an Emotional Centre, located in the Solar Plexus. From the 9 centres, it’s considered to be the most intense because of what it arouses. One of the greatest challenges we constantly face is how to balance our emotions while making conscious decisions, regardless of what is happening around us. And even though your heart carries the structural mechanism to guide you towards what you want to achieve, what really rules your life are your emotions. The turning point here is about achieving emotional awareness, so you’re able to differentiate what affects you positively or negatively and consciously choose what serves you.
Because in HD your ability to address your emotions and how your authority shows up depends on whether your centres are defined or undefined, you need to look at your chart to understand how it shows up for you personally. But for the purpose of this learning moment, let me help you a little here.
I have an undefined Heart Centre, like the majority of people, which means I’m always looking for ways to prove myself. But instead, I should be living in accordance with the situations, not taking them as ways to level my self-worth. This drive to go after my beliefs is inconsistent, which is different from being totally absent. It only means I will work harder to get where or what I want than those with a defined centre. But it’s when I start to compare myself to others that my shadows come up.
Because for those with a defined centre, willpower is so purely present. In a matter of minutes, they can achieve a goal that would take me, with an undefined centre, hours to do. They just trust and follow their heart’s desire, almost instinctively. Courage shows up on demand to get the party started. That’s why their point of attention should be whether what they initiate so energetically is in true alignment with who they are and for how long they want to commit to it.
You see, we each have a different way to initiate things. And I’ve only shared with you about the Heart Centre so far. It’s so unique. But society has made me — made us — believe we should all look at how we go about life the same way. As if we should all behave, act, perform, achieve, understand, and experience life the exact same way. We are not designed for it! Literally! It’s that contradiction between who you are and what you’ve been told to be that keeps creating beliefs that limit you, making you doubt your own power.
Let’s talk about the Emotional Centre for a moment. For those with an undefined centre, like me, we ride the emotional wave with those experiencing it. It’s almost as if we have no protection, no shield to separate us from others, and we capture everybody’s feelings as our own and amplify them. This is hard because it creates the Savior warriors in us. We want to rescue everyone in need. When things are good, we feel good. But when the vibe changes and gets hard, we go under the wave, liking it or not, carried away by the situation. But interestingly enough, we’re not comfortable dealing with our own emotions, which brings up a sense of misplacement and confusion. Discernment becomes our real superpower.
For those with a defined centre, tell me about an emotional rollercoaster! Ups and downs are constant. You intensely feel the highs and lows of life and experience feelings deeply. It can be chaotic and liberating at the same time. But it can bring you to exhaustion too. Because emotions aren’t stagnant, everything that comes to you eventually goes — and this applies to your decision-making process too. What feels super right and certain now may not seem the same way a couple of hours later. Time is really your best friend. Learning to wait until you feel a conviction that the option you’re choosing is the right one in that moment, is key.
Ok! Look how far we’ve come. Authority Centre, Heart Centre, Emotional Centre. I know it looks like a lot to take in at once. So let’s take a deep breath.
Generally speaking, regardless of whether your decision-making comes from your heart or your sacral/emotional centre, what I find to be really important to understand is how to find emotional clarity before taking action. And from what we just discussed, this is not a mental process. That’s where I wanted you to get to — to expand your thinking.
What last week’s message in the ALMA VIA Podcast was telling us to pay attention to is to learn about our decision-making abilities. In collaboration, we evolve and create our own inner resources. But when we are emotionally triggered — and from what I’m understanding, we’re at the starting point of something really big happening worldwide — we need to be very cautious and learn how we will enter this moment and how we will respond emotionally, in spite of what our reality may be.
Life is messy and pushes our buttons when we least expect it. There’s always a lesson that needs to be learned. The mind is where our thinking happens, but it’s not where the final stages of decision-making are processed.
To take it to a more practical example, the personal situation I shared in my previous post in regards to the launch of my Private Podcast — you can only imagine what this launch really meant to me. It’s a situation where I was heavily emotionally charged. Getting this project launched was a mix of proving my self-worth and honouring what I had committed to, with excitement and insecurity.
But once my daughter started to refuse to do what I expected her to do, an even bigger emotional wave took over me. Anxiety hit me hard! But this feeling doesn’t show up to the party alone. It brings in Frustration, Fear, Anger, and Disappointment. When all of them took the dance floor, you can only imagine the result.
A gazillion thoughts invaded my mind all at once, in a split second. In that moment, I couldn’t make sense of anything. My emotions were taking over and started to control how I was dealing with the situation. I was trying to keep my cool, but internally my head was spinning. My heart was dancing to a rock n’ roll song and the drums were hitting it hard!
How many times do we find ourselves in situations like this?
I was battling between my own emotions and my daughter’s — who has a defined emotional centre, by the way. Remember the roller coaster? — and amplifying everything while trying to come up with a quick solution, which is not a natural response for me, especially under such emotional pressure. I respond effectively to situations involving survival threats, for example, because I have a defined Spleen Centre. But this is a conversation for another day.
Just as the cards in last week’s message were showing us, when rigidity shapes how we look at situations, we lose ourselves in the process. I was stuck in my own mind. The day could only be “perfect” if things worked in alignment with my expectations. I can objectively look at what’s around me, have a narrower or broader way of perceiving life and its events. But it’s when I step outside of my mental trap and access my feelings that I’m able to understand how they are showing up for me and identify where I stand.
Certainty happens in the mind. Clarity is embodied!
In last week’s message in the ALMA VIA Podcast, there’s a passage that says:
“How you see yourself, how you see others, what you believe, what you want to build in your life, how you perceive the world — it all starts with a simple thought. But when you feel restricted, limited, it is so often rooted in your own perceptions of the situation — a reality you foster in your own mind. And although most of the time unconsciously, you end up creating a very unhappy reality for yourself.”
That’s the point my friends! Everything starts with a thought, but it’s our emotions that give the tone to what we are creating in our minds and in our world and become the driving energy that takes us into action mode!
Have you ever heard someone say to you: “Think before you act”?
I believe we need to think, FEEL, discern, then act! But we can’t effectively do that while being carried away by our emotions. We need to pause.
With my daughter, I was trying to be right. I was stuck in my own head. I was amplifying her emotions, which were all over the place. But in order to understand what I was dealing with and how to respond to it, I needed to get out of my own head so I could be present for her and for myself. I had to first calm down the emotions that were overruling my own thoughts, keeping me from seeing the big picture. I had to take myself out of the situation.
It was only after my husband got in to help and shone a light on what we could do that things started to unfold because he put a stop to the mental loop I was in. I know it may look like all this happened for hours, but believe me, it happened in less than 5 minutes.
But I wanted to take this situation as an opportunity to bring these concepts and present you with (what I think could be) a different point of view because, when it comes to our emotions, sometimes it’s hard to identify what it is we’re really feeling and how it manifests in our reality.
“Emotional clarity is when something feels right — the most peaceful, natural thing in the world. It is a clarity that resounds in your very being. Feel it, don’t think it.” — Chetan Parkyn — author of the book Human Design — Discover the Person You Were Born to Be
Human Design has been a great tool in my toolkit. I’m learning more each day, but it has greatly expanded how I understand myself and those around me.
The main purpose of our existence is to live our design. The challenges we face, the attributes we have, the qualities and characteristics we carry are all part of what we came here in this life to learn and live. And our spiritual guides are always here to support us.
Last week, the Universe showed me the most important lesson it had to teach me in that moment: to show me not only the importance of becoming aware of what affects me emotionally and how I respond to it (aka being present in my body), but also to remind me that I always have options and that Love is the energy that is going to shift the way I look at and approach life. Because that energy continued to show up throughout my whole week, in different mediums and formats — and still is.
This past Monday, the affirmation for the day in the Hay House calendar was: “I keep in mind that love is the most powerful force there is, and loving myself is one of the best habits I can develop.”
And later that same day, I received a message from an online business I follow on Instagram called Manifest Like You, where the owner intentionally sent me a Love message, inviting us to slow down and connect with the graceful vibration of Love.
And when my daughter asked me to bake a cake in the shape of a heart, and my son proactively came up with a strategy to create this shape from a square and two half circles, made an actual drawing plan, and handed it to me, I can’t help but think: Love is a powerful energy. It manifests in our lives gently, but we need to be fully present to see it.
Be it a coincidence or not, February 14th was Valentine’s Day, celebrated in over 140 countries worldwide — love was literally in the air! This is not me making this up!
Although I really think I must have been onto something, because when I accidentally found a skunk trapped in my basement window well, for some random reason I thought about that cartoon where a French skunk falls deeply in love with a cat, thinking she is also a skunk, and does the craziest things to get her to like him. Don’t ask me why I thought about it. It’s been years — decades — since I last saw this cartoon.
I mean, this is not just a coincidence.
To add to this, just so you can see how the Universe was really asking me to pay attention to this Love energy, over the weekend I saw a video from actor Eric Dane with a message to his daughters, where he shared the greatest lessons life taught him while dealing with ALS, an incurable disease that unfortunately ended his life this past week — less than a year after he was diagnosed. In the video, 2 of the 4 things he tells his daughters to truly consider in their own lives were:
1- Be present. Now is all you’ve got. Cherish every moment.
2- Fall in Love — not necessarily with a person, but with something that moves you; something that makes you want to get out of bed every day with excitement, that brings you Joy! And really go for it!
Nothing he said is new. But in simple words, he combined what I’m trying to bring to your attention today: Love is the energy force that drives us to build, achieve, and conquer our wildest dreams. It’s the energy capable of moving mountains, of transforming our reality, of changing the world! It’s more than an emotion — it’s energy!
When we live from this frequency, we understand from within what it is to be fully present because, in order to feel it, you need to be it. Love is not only a frequency — it’s a state of being. When we live in a state of Love, we move our lives in the direction of what our hearts long for. And through living our lives consciously present, we find emotional clarity. We feel, therefore we know!
This week, I’ve been asking myself constantly: how can I live from a place of Love more often? I’m not trying to be Pollyanna and think that from now on everything will only be seen through the lenses of Love, that life is magical and all is resolved.
From that nerve-racking moment I experienced last week, something started to shift. I noticed Love being expressed in different ways in my family — not because something magical was happening, not because it was Valentine’s Day or whatever — but because I brought this to my consciousness and started to notice it, and so feel it in my life. I made space for it to manifest!
We’ve been listening to each other more. We are considering our own feelings more. And almost unconsciously, I found ourselves making our routine simpler because we wanted to keep that emotional state, not overcomplicating anything. We were dealing with what was possible, not with our expectations. We were getting out of our minds and letting Love take the front seat and drive. We respected our own needs individually, too.
But don’t take this the wrong way. We also had moments when we could have listened more and taken on more acts of Love, because life continues to be imperfect. I had moments where I questioned my sanity! My 3-year-old proved why this age is called “threenager.”
But among all of this mess that life is, it’s been a delightful experiment. And that’s the energy I wanted to bring to our attention today, that can help us notice how we’ve been responding to challenging situations, and situations in general, so we can find clarity by being more present in our bodies, not stuck in our heads.
So I invite you to take on this experiential approach and see what life, the Universe, will bring to your attention more often.
Maybe you’ve already been noticing Love around you lately too.
If you listened to last week’s message in the ALMA VIA Podcast, how did the energy show up for you? What did you notice shifting or asking to be felt? Let me know in the comments :)
If you haven’t listened to the Episode, here is the link for you to join us there.
Our vibes speak louder than our words.
Be well!