The Valuable Art Of Perceiving From The Heart

Perceiving is not just about hearing, seeing and listening. Perceiving from the heart goes beyond this. It’s about feeling and knowing how to listen without judging. It is to have no prejudices, to take advantage of life with all its flavors and to touch reality with all its texture. This may seem strange, but it is something that not everyone can do or enjoy.

There are few areas of psychology that are as important and fundamental as the study of perception. How we capture things around us and how we organize and interpret it are part of who we are and how we interact with others.

It was during the 19th century that famous psychologists and physiologists such as Johannes Peter Muller and Gustav Theodor Fechner began to study the interaction between stimuli and perception. For a time, it was thought that the perception was completely natural. In other words, our experiences are determined only by stimuli, and not by factors such as memory, learning and past experiences.

However, this view has changed over time. We know that the art of perception depends on many different factors: our motivation, our emotions, culture, intuition, past experiences and expectations.

If we know anything, it is that everyone perceives the world differently. Some will perceive a certain color as blue while others will see it as violet. One person will see anger in a child, while others will see fear.

All this leads us to the following conclusion: there are those who watch but do not see and those who hear but do not listen. There are also those who cannot see beyond what they can see with the naked eye. But they envy themselves a world of amazing colors that they can only see if they perceive from the heart – with the heart.

If we asked a random group of people how many senses a person has, 90% of them would have said “five”. We have all heard from an early age what Aristotle told us in his book “Touching the Soul”. In this book, he explained that people receive information from the world through hearing, taste, smell, sight and touch.

But it is fascinating to know that we actually have over 20 senses, with corresponding “sub-senses” (for example, the ability to perceive acidity, sweetness, etc.). And we should therefore, for example, add others, such as chinaesthesia, proprioception, thermoception, nociception, echolocation and also the feeling of being on the alert. All of them open up a wide range of opportunities for us, which means that we can better adapt to our surroundings.

However, we should mention that not everyone develops them in the same way or to the same degree. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, tell us that “the feeling of being on the alert” varies greatly between different people. Some people do not find it easy to detect dangers, they are overconfident, which means that they rarely detect dangerous situations.

On the other hand, others have an “internal radar”, a sixth sense that warns them that certain people or situations are not safe. This mind is located in an area of ​​the brain that has the task of keeping us alert to unfamiliar or different situations so that we can make decisions as quickly as possible.

Perceiving from the heart has to do with sensitivity and openness. It is the ability to not only absorb what our senses pick up, but also to apply determination, emotions, empathy and intuition to be able to reach deeper interpretations. We call this type of sublime perception an “art” for a very special reason. It allows us to become more aware of things, nature, people and the world.

It should be said that it is not so easy to put this type of perception into practice. The reason for this is that it takes several processes: inner peace, the ability not to draw hasty conclusions, good self-knowledge and above all acceptants.

Perceiving sometimes means that you have to realize that you cannot change many of the things you see. For example, we must accept people as they are and then respond accordingly.

Perceiving from the heart is also one of the highest abilities that a human being can develop. Why? Because it allows us to sink our senses with our emotions by using our experiences. We do this with objectivity and a love that invites us to see the world through the lens of respect.

So let’s start exercising this kind of mental and emotional openness. Let us learn to perceive our surroundings with more awareness, openness and above all heart.