fill your heartLast night I was watching the film Jerry McGuire when one of the characters said, in essence, ‘If your heart is empty, what’s in your head doesn’t matter.’

The words struck me as a significant truth. If your heart is not filled, if it is empty, it doesn’t matter what your brain tells you.

So often you can walk around, reasoning things through with your mind yet always feeling like something is missing. On the surface your life might look pretty amazing to the average passersby but underneath things are not so amazing because your heart is not being filled.

So how can you fill your heart?

Filling your heart involves realising first of all that you’re entitled to follow and look after your heart in the first place. Many of us forget this because we think we need to live to make others happy. But that is an exercise in futility because, if you’re not happy inside, you will never make the people close to you happy either.

So first of all permit yourself to follow your heart and do what is right for you.

Secondly, know that following your heart may displease others because they will want you to do what makes them happy, not what makes you happy. But still I encourage you to proceed along your path, not the one dictated by others.

Thirdly, in following your heart you can begin to fill it by gifting yourself the time to do what makes you feel good and brings you peace. It may be a few precious moments spent meditating once a week or perhaps you want to scribble a few lines of poetry in a notebook in those minutes before the kids come home. Whatever it is that lifts your spirits and fills your heart, gift yourself that thing because you deserve it.

So much time is spent in our lives reasoning things through but, in the end, I truly believe, if your heart is empty then what’s in your head simply does not matter. And a lifetime spent ignoring the needs of your heart will result in a lifetime where you will never really have peace.