The Three Centers of Intelligence: Body, Heart, and Head

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Michael: Hello everyone, this is Michael Sloyer and I am here with my partners Hari Prasada and Rasanath, and today we're gonna be talking about the centers of intelligence. Hari, could you get us started? What are the centers of intelligence?

Hari Prasada: They are the faculties that we possess as human beings that help us to navigate life.

There are three of these faculties or centers, the. Body, the heart and the head, and those are available to all of us in full. Yet we lean particularly on one center according to our personality, our unique wiring, and especially our Enneagram type. And then also something about our wing or our secondary type.

Michael: What's so important about understanding these centers,

Rasanath: our Enneagram teacher, Russ Hudson, said something very striking when we were talking about the centers. He said, why do you want to be one third of a human being?

When we overutilize one of the three and underutilize the others, we are effectively not seeing and navigating the world effectively, and there is a significant price that comes with it.

And we experienced this in. You know, all walks of life. When we get into the centers, we can talk more about how the over presence or the absence of any one of the centers starts our, uh, navigation system. I. You know, when you think about a navigation system, you want all your measuring instruments to be working.

When a pilot sits in the cockpit, they actually go through all the navigation systems to make sure that they're all working the way they need to work, because there is a very big risk when even one of them is not working the way it needs to work.

And it is exactly that way with the human faculties.

Hari Prasada: And Rasanath, when you say over presence, you don't mean presence in the sense of being grounded, aware in touch. We will use that word presence a lot. And here it's not meaning that, in fact, what Raat is talking about is not even just like too much. Uh, you can't have too much heart.

You can't, it's not possible. It just means that one center is dominating and throwing the others out of whack. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying.

Michael: This idea of having only one third of our faculties is a very powerful thought to have.

Also as we step into the centers and over time talk about how the types in the centers are related, we will also discover how we undervalue some of these centers. We actually undervalue them. There is a fundamental belief that this is not required for me to navigate the world, and that is a bigger challenge because when we do wake up, there is a very different way in which we relate to the centers, but the fundamental undervaluing of the gifts that we have with these centers is where the problems originate.

Rasanath: Which is why it's so important to understand what these three centers are. What value do they bring to the complete human experience and navigation of this world?

Michael: So as we think about the head, the heart, and the body center, we want our listeners to already be starting to think which of those three centers am I undervaluing?

Hari Prasada: and that could mean that you're overdoing it and therefore you have a tenuous relationship with it because you are sick of it. You know, it's, like I said, you can't have too much heart, but you can have emotion that overwhelms you and that makes you feel really crappy because you can't control the emotion.

I. That's not too much heart. It's not even too much emotion. Exactly. It's not being grounded in your heart and in your emotions that come from the center, the heart. So it can be either way that I'm just avoiding, I'm not really using, or it could be that I'm, I'm feeling used by, and therefore I'm not able to appreciate what it's actually offering me and bring presence to that.

Michael: So let's get into the centers a little bit more specifically. Now, let's start with the body center. What is that one all about? The

Hari Prasada: body center is also known as the gut center. It is the place where willing happens, and it's also the seat of intuition. It's the force that drives our action and. It's something which we absolutely require in order to feel like we are a part of the world, like we're here and that we exist, we matter.

We need these bodies as our vehicle. And we also like to sense and intuit, how should I move? What should I do?

Rasanath: The body Center is also the most foundational in terms of our existence and when we are out of touch with our body, we are also tampering with the foundations of our existence.

Michael: It's making sense here that it's the gut center and it's also the seat of intuition because you hear people say, oh yeah, I feel it in my gut. And what they're saying there is I have some intuition that's coming to me through this center.

Rasanath: Yes. And when we are living in an age where the measure of, well, if someone trusts. You or whether you trust yourself is all moving towards well, where is the data? Right? Everybody's talking about data backed. There is a fundamental dismissal of the gut, which actually provides a lot of direction.

Intuition is a very big part of how we navigate the world,

Hari Prasada: and the irony is that everybody is searching after people who have good instincts.

Rasanath: Then you have to make decisions. In very high intensity environments where there is no data available, where there is no precedence available, how do you make decisions?

You have to rely on intuition and a lot of leadership, and especially leadership, which deals with uncertainty, which also deals with pioneering, doesn't really have precedence. You have to rely on very grounded and very present intuition.

Michael: So shall we move into the next of the three centers and we can go into the heart center?

What's that one all about?

Hari Prasada: The heart is the place that produces our emotions. We feel, and it's. Actually trying to get us in touch with a sense of who we are. 'cause the heart is the deepest part of us and it is the seat of the true self. So we're trying to find more about who we are through feelings that are deep, that move us, that actually get a rise out of us and create a sense of aliveness as well.

Who's that person who's feeling these things? That's what the heart is interested in.

Rasanath: The heart is also, again, in terms of leadership. This is a topic that in the past maybe 20 years has gained a lot more recognition. The term emotional intelligence, What is emotional intelligence?

The emotional intelligence is the intelligence of the heart. I. It's the capacity to sense subtlety. It's the capacity to be in tune with what are my own emotions? What are the emotions in the room? How do I respond based on what I'm experiencing and what others are experiencing? When we bring it in the context of navigating life, so much of life is about relationships and how do you navigate relationships effectively without having the heart intelligence, without emotional intelligence.

Michael: Attunement is definitely a big word for the types of the heart center.

Rasanath: Yes. And also, as Hari mentioned, the heart deals with questions of identity. Who am I really, I. It is the seat of understanding my connection, my sense of belonging, my purpose, A sense of meaning and my worth value.

So these are all very big questions that all of us universally grapple with, and the heart is the primary faculty that is engaging with those questions.

Michael: So it was interesting when we talked about the Body Center, we talked about it as the most foundational in terms of existence. The Heart Center is also critical in terms of existence.

It's just one layer up from the body Center. It's

Hari Prasada: a more subtle realm, so you can't have a heart without a body, which is why Snut says the body is more foundational. But at the end of the day, why do we even want a body if we don't have a heart? We don't have a self, we don't have anything. It, it's an inhuman machine-like way of going through life.

There's nothing to it. It's not desirable to have a body, so the heart is actually the most important. I said it's the deepest part of us. It's also the most important part of us. It is, I can't emphasize this enough. It is the seat of our true identity, and it's also the place where we cover our identity.

By trying to be something we're not letting our ego govern and create all kinds of projections of who I think I should be, rather than the deep discovery work, the excavation work of finding out who am I actually, which is even a spiritual process.

Michael: I feel myself very moved by what you just shared. thinking about the importance of the Heart Center, shall we go to the third?

I. The head center, what is that one all

Hari Prasada: about? The head center is the faculty that produces thought for the purpose of gaining clarity. We want to understand things so that we understand our relationship to them and can move accordingly. So the head is actually. Steering us. The heart is also steering us in, in actually a, an even bigger way.

But that's more complex. That's where unfulfilled desires, wantings longings, emotions we're not aware of are actually unconsciously running the show. But here, when we're talking about the head, this is like the steering wheel. This is how do I actually. Determine where I'm going to go and why. What's my logic, what's my reasoning?

And I'm trying to process the other information from the other centers through the mind, through the head. So the mind or the head is critical in that regard. Without clarity, we'll just be spinning our wheels, our emotions won't be able to direct us, and our gut won't be able to direct us because something is missing.

It's that sense of knowing, that sense of clarity, understanding, aha, it makes sense. Here's what I'm doing, here's how I think about this. Here's how I am going to be in the world.

Rasanath: My wife and I were driving last week and it was raining and the windshield was operating and. Every time the wiper cleaned the windshield, the wiper was operating on the windshield, and when the wiper cleaned the windshield, you could see the road ahead and the experience of that every time.

And I was just noticing how there was a subtle change in my own confidence as I was sitting in the seat when I could see the road ahead. It was different in terms of how I approached the world when I couldn't see the road ahead. It was different. So the head center provides us the capacity to see the road ahead with that clarity of vision, and then it brings a very different energy to how we navigate the world.

Michael: and for anyone who's not visually looking at us right now. 'cause you might be listening on audio Rasanath is doing some pretty phenomenal windshield wiper actions with,

So when you were talking, you mentioned the word clarity. The word confidence was also coming to my mind as you were describing what it is. As a result of that clarity, I can interact with the world. With a sense of confidence.

Rasanath: Yes, and I think in the time that we live in, confidence is a very misunderstood term because we think about confidence as some sort of projection of energy and real confidence is there is a quality about a very silent walk, one step in front of the other.

I don't have nothing to prove. I have nothing to defend. And I know where I need to go. I don't have to declare that. And then there is inner know clarity in terms of where I need to go. That's the quality of confidence that we are talking about here, when the head center is very available and it's functioning the way it needs to function.

Hari Prasada: The head also allows us to process information not only about the practical arrangements of the world, but. About where we need to go in a deeper sense. The head is our ability to gain knowledge about the self and knowledge about the ego, and to differentiate between the two to steer away from who we think we should be and remove the layers that are covering us, and to go into more who we are now, each of these centers is.

Pivotal to be utilized in that mission but it really can't be done without the head because how, what will it be based on? The whole thing rests on knowledge of those who've done it before and what is the pathway that needs to be laid out. And as Russ and I have mentioned one step at a time, figuring out what that step is and walking it.

Michael: So, again, coming back to this word, foundational, the body center is foundational in terms of our existence as a physical being in this world. Then we also talked about how the heart center is foundational to the deepest question in life of our identity of who am I? And then the head center is actually really foundational because we can't.

Truly process the other two centers without the head center. So now we go back to what you shared earlier of going through life with just one third of our faculties. Each of these are foundational in their own ways. How could we not want to maximize our adeptness with each of these centers?

That's

Hari Prasada: it. That's it. And you would be amazed. How little we capitalize, how little we really think about what these three centers are, what they give to us, and what we could do if we actually harness the potential of them. It is astonishing how little we understand and act on that understanding

Rasanath: the way our current society functions is.

there is a certain degree of speed that is required in terms of our decision making, in terms of how we interact when we bring all the three centers. The centers are not necessarily, they have orthogonal energy. We each bring in their own flavor, and they're not similar.

They're actually dissimilar in terms of how they work. But that dissimilarity is important because that is what really brings balance and effectiveness to how we live our life and our needs for speed many times essentially makes us ignore her one of these because we think we'll be much better that way.

And in fact, the result is exactly the opposite.

Hari Prasada: We ignore one, two, or even three centers because we're not grounded in the center that we lean on most. Right? So there's a lack of awareness in all three, in most cases, and being able to step into understanding each one of them and bringing them into awareness, conscious awareness, where we really embody their gifts, it's so powerful.

Again, why would we not take advantage? So this is a really, really vital way of looking at ourselves and our lives and determining, okay, who's the kind of person that I want to be and what am I going to do about that?

Michael: Well, this feels like a great place to close this episode, and we're gonna have a lot more on the centers that will show up in the feed.

So thank you guys both so much for the time today and for really getting to the heart of these three different centers. Thank you. Thank you so much.