How to Align Your Head and Heart When They Disagree
A while back, I broke. 😮💨
The quiet kind. The kind where you hold so much for so long that one ordinary Tuesday, you just can’t anymore.
I'm the one in charge of the medical side of caring for an aging parent. Maybe you are too. At the end of life, almost everything becomes medical, and the umbrella I carry for the family just keeps growing wider. Some days it feels like it covers the whole sky. I could carry it, so I did, until the weight of it all finally caught up with me.
What I found in that breaking was a quiet war going on inside me. My head said, you’re responsible, you’ve got this, keep going. My heart said, I am so tired, and I cannot keep carrying this the way I have been. Two truths, pulling opposite ways. And me, stuck in the middle, spinning.
Maybe you know that exact split. Maybe you’ve carried something heavy that everyone just assumed you’d keep carrying. Your head says one thing. Your heart says another. And no matter how hard you think about it, you can’t think your way out.
That stuck place is the moment your head and your heart pull in opposite directions. Bringing them back onto the same team can feel like the hardest part of any real lasting change. 💛
It’s also how you finally get unstuck.
✦ Why Align Is the Step Everyone Gets Stuck On
Transformation moves through three steps.
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You awaken to the pattern.
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You align with what’s true.
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You activate into action.
Awaken is a head thing, conscious and smart, great at spotting the loop you keep running. Activate is a body thing, the doing, the steps, the go.
Align is the one in the middle, and it can feel sneaky-hard. It lives underneath the thinking and the doing. It’s a heart thing. A being thing. A felt thing.
You can’t think or do your way into alignment. You can only get quiet enough to feel it. 😌
(I know. If you love a good plan, hi, me too, “just feel it” is the most maddening instruction on earth. I still find myself resisting it because I’m naturally a doer.)
That’s why you can know exactly what you “should” do and still not do it. Some part of you never got on board. Your head signed the paperwork. Your heart never said yes.
The Chariot card in tarot shows alignment, the art of harnessing your energies so they all move the same way. Two horses, one driver, and your head and your heart are the horses. When they pull in different directions, the chariot just sits there, going nowhere. All that effort, no movement. That’s exactly what being stuck feels like.
(Tarot, the way I work with it, is a psychological mirror, a way to glimpse what your subconscious already knows. Nothing to do with fortune-telling.)
✦ The One Question That Aligns Head and Heart
So how do the two horses ever face the same way, get on the same team, and pull toward the same goal again?
For the longest time, that stumped me. Then I started picturing the heart as a compass. Your heart is like a compass needle, and it always points to its own true north, the choice that’s aligned for you. It has known the whole time.
You don’t have to figure out where true north is. North isn’t up for a vote. You just have to let the needle settle. 🧭
When you spin in your head, weighing every option, it’s like grabbing that compass and giving it a good shake. Suddenly all ten directions look right, and you’re somehow more lost than when you started. The spinning is just motion.
In a recent Soulfull Circle, a woman said something I’ve heard so many women over 40 say. She’s always been the responsible one. The fixer. The one everyone leans on. And right now, her head and her heart are at war over a hard boundary with someone she loves. She’s been shaking her compass for months, honestly years. Me, maybe you, too. 🥹
Your head says, this is what a good person does, keep showing up, keep smoothing it over. Your heart says, this is hurting me, and something has to change.
So when your head and your heart are at war, you can ask the question my clients have heard me ask a hundred times:
What would love do? 💛
(The funny part? One of the women beat me to it, the way my kids love to quote my own words right back to me. 😅)
Underneath that question is the one that really unlocks it. How would love be, right here, in this exact moment?
Alignment is a way of being. You feel how love would be right here, and from that being place, the knowing-what-to-do arrives on its own. 🦋
✦ When Love Points to Acceptance
Your heart, your true north, can point somewhere your head doesn’t want to go. Sometimes it points to acceptance. And that’s where a lot of women freeze. Accept it? But I don’t approve of it.
Accepting what is doesn’t mean approving of it. It only means you’ve stopped pretending it’s something else, so your energy is free to move again. I went deep on that difference right here if it’s tugging at you.
The needle can’t settle while your hand is still on the compass, pressing it toward the direction you wish were true. Acceptance is taking your hand off. It’s being done pretending the needle points somewhere else.
You can disagree with someone completely, you can dislike a situation with your whole heart, and still come into enough alignment to keep moving in the same direction toward what matters.
In caring for an aging parent, what I finally had to accept was harder to admit. I’d made every problem my problem to solve. Every single one. And somewhere in there, I’d forgotten something obvious. I’m one of a whole team of siblings, and each of us has different strengths. I could accept what is, that this is too much for me to carry alone, and get resourceful, and ask for support. That’s what love would do! 😉
Your head wants to fix, control, and win.
Your heart just wants peace. 🕊️
So if you’re caught in a head-and-heart war today, try it. Get quiet and feel how love would be, right here, in this moment. Once you can feel that, the knowing-what-to-do shows up on its own.
Your peace is never waiting on anyone or anything else to change. It’s waiting for you to come home to your true north. 💛
xo,
Dr. Sue
P.S. Every Friday at 11:30am Eastern, I go live on Substack, and I would love for you to be there. This week I’m going deeper into the Align step and how to feel your way through when your head and your heart disagree. Align Your Head and Heart — One Question Does It. See you there. 💛
P.P.S. This is exactly the work we do together, every single week, inside the Soulfull Path Membership. If you’re tired of untangling your head and heart all alone in a journal at midnight, come find your people. We’ve got you. Join us here → 🌱
