Living a heart-centered life

What would a cardiologist say about living a heart-centered life?

Kristina asked herself that question when she thought about living from the heart.

Dr. Madalina Petrescu is a leading cardiologist as well as an international bestselling author, certified facilitator in the realms of energy healing, consciousness coaching, heart opening practices and instinctive meditation. work is to support people to shift out of living life from the default of the unconscious matrix, negative thoughts, and patterns, limiting beliefs in stories, and old wounds and into the expanded love and intelligence of their hearts to live a life of alignment, truth, and purpose. 

Her life transformation was ignited from her crisis to severe pain and burnout a decade ago, aligning her with her true hard path.

Kristina starts by asking what is the approach to the heart of Madalina and asking if there has been an evolution to her initial approach.

Madalina answers that initially, she just viewed the heart as an anatomic organ. But then, her attraction to healing opened other doors for her!

After a crisis, she started entering into spiritual work. And that transformed her view of the heart.

What is a heart-centered life?

Kristina asks about the definition of what would be a heart-centered life. Madalina says that, as children, having a heart-centered way of being. We’re showing purity, fun, freedom, excitement, and enthusiasm. And then, at some point along the way, there’s some messaging about, no, it’s not okay to be authentic. 

You got to be how they think you should be. Society, parents, school… So then you start suppressing that and going to the mind. Then it’s the thoughts, and then it’s these patterns, these images you try to fit into, and then the pressure and the stress associated with that. 

And so then when you realize, oh, wow, I’m stuck in a loop that’s not getting me anywhere, I’m just hitting walls. Then the question is like, okay, now what does it mean to have a heart center life? And what does that mean? 

But for Madalina, it’s like the experience comes down to about three steps that you don’t do, like systematically, but it’s more of a number one, you slow down. And you come out of the rushing and the running of the head because the head is always trying to run forward or backward. 

And when you slow down and start breathing, you’re really coming into the present moment. Because living a heart-centered life and being in your heart means that you’re in the present moment. 

You’re not in the future, you’re not in the past. And then, from that space, it’s really about I’m present, I’m here in this moment. You and I are right here at this moment. This is where life is happening. 

This is where I can tune into the essence and the feeling of my heart and start to receive and listen to the intelligence that’s guiding me along the way. So whereas in the mind’s way of living, it’s about thinking, pressure, and reacting to that and running like that from a heart center life, it’s more about being present, feeling, receiving, and then acting from that space. 

Heart and brain connection

And the follow-up question from Kristina: if you have a situation where you need to be focused and you need to use your mind a lot, can you combine the two? 

For example, you have to go on stage and deliver a speech. Sometimes we have to be in our brains. 

Living a heart-centered life is unifying and harmonizing the heart and the brain. So, of course, we need our brains. Our brains are so important. But usually the brain is coming from this kind of stressful, survival, fear, energy. 

And then you’re stuck in that energy, and now you’re having this pressure, this thinking, and you get all serious and tight, and you’re not going to have the best use of your conscious brain, of your awareness, of your ideas, 

So the heart actually, if you engage in your heart, you come into the heart. And usually, the way you do that is so easy that you just connect with something that you love. You get into that feeling of, what am I excited about? 

Returning to the speaking example, what am I passionate about going on stage? I’m so excited to connect with people and to share this message that’s going to impact people. So you connect to the enthusiasm, your why, your excitement. 

And even science has shown that from that space, when you’re connecting with your heart, you’re actually generating an electromagnetic field because you create and emanate energy in the heart space. 

And when that happens, actually, it sends messages to the brain saying, hey, it’s all good, no need to fight. Relax. And then, the brain starts becoming coherent with the heart. So this coherence starts to happen, and even MRI studies have shown that when that happens, there’s this unification of the left and the right brain. 

The frontal cortex becomes activated. You have more access to the smart, intelligent brain, the amygdala, which is like the reactive one. 

And then your body now starts to feel lighter, more relaxed, because it doesn’t have to go into this survival energy without the heart—the default. Unfortunately, if you don’t engage the heart first, then what happens is then it’s like the default of survival that comes in. 

So it’s actually this coherence that happens when you’re in your heart. It’s about engaging and creating a coherence that allows you more access to your conscious brain and emotional intelligence. 

From heartless to heart-centered

So, Kristina asks what are the symptoms of not living a heart-centered life. Madalina answers that the symptoms are about running on stress energy, survival energy, fear energy, the trying to seek outside to fill in the inner illusion of not enoughness. Survival energy creates disease.

Madalina told us that she was on a survival method, and running was her escape from everything. She had what Kristina usually calls the “perfect instagrammable life”, and one day, she was in so much pain that she had to stop.

So then, she started going into spirituality end living heart-centered. With the Heart Q.

EQ is emotional intelligence. So Heart Q is about heart intelligence. And the point of heart intelligence is that when we are connecting to the heart energy, the space of our truth, the space of our passion, the space of connectivity and feeling, of that love and harmony, what happens is you create a coherence, a state of coherence variance. 

You magnify an electromagnetic field. And actually, what happens when you’re in your heart intelligence, and you’re living life from that space, is that it actually activates your IQ because it activates your frontal cortex. 

It deactivates the amygdala, which makes you reactive. So you’re able to become more emotionally intelligent naturally. And it’s. Pro health, because now your well-being hormones are activated. With the survival energy, you’re flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. When you live a heart-centered life, you’re flooded with oxytocin and serotonin hormones. 

So now you have well-being hormones, and your body can heal and feel light. So that’s what the heart cue is. And basically, there are four things in relationship to heart cues. Number one is the process of awareness. 

Madalina shares: “You know, if the way I was living my life the way I was because I had no awareness. I just had no idea I was doing the best with what I thought. But the awareness just started opening me up like, oh, wow, I see now why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

How do you heal, then?

Madalina shares with us the three steps for living a heart-centered life:

So the first part is awareness. It’s loving awareness, not judgmental awareness. is about asking yourself what are those thoughts? What are those patterns? What are those limiting beliefs? What are those stories that I’m creating? What are the unhealed wounds that need to be healed? 

The second part is really about expressing. So more is needed to get it with our minds. 

We need to feel it in our bodies. So there’s a process of feeling and expression to embody that and translate it to true transformation. 

And then the third part is about really deeply connecting with our heart and exiting that survival matrix of the mind and really surrendering, dropping into the vastness of the heart and really from that space discovering, okay, who am I? 

Episode resources:

• Dr. Madalina Petrescu | ⁠Instagram⁠

• Dr. Madalina Petrescu | ⁠Facebook⁠

• Dr. Madalina Petrescu | ⁠LinkedIn⁠

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