If the heart could speak, what would it say? For over forty years, Louise's heart has been the focal point of her life. While the biological heart is central to human survival, when Louise's heart began speaking to her over forty years ago through physical symptoms and many years later in audible words, it became necessary for her to revisit her own understanding of what the heart actually is.

This talk explores the traditionally accepted understanding of the heart as a biological organ through a scientific narrative, reflecting on other ways of knowing that the heart makes possible. In this sense, this talk highlights a contemporary approach towards knowledge that seems to have split the individual, and the individual’s view of reality, into two – championing the rational intellect over other ways of knowing; including the intuition and the imagination. Indeed, according to numerous scholars across multiple disciplines, those of us living in the modern world have lost connection to our imaginations and subsequently we are living in a radically-reduced version of life. Such reliance on one particular mode of cognition is therefore understood to affect our lives and engagement in the world in often detrimental ways.

Through personal reflections, this talk explores the consequences of the modern preference for narrow approaches towards knowledge production - making the case for the imagination as a way of knowing that offers the opportunity for individuals to look into the world beyond outward appearances and create deeper meaning in life.

Understood in Sufi mysticism as an organ of perception and the seat of the imagination, the heart is known to possess the ability to hold multiple visions of reality and disparate viewpoints in creative tension. Certainly until only recently in the West, the heart was long considered an organ of great wisdom and intellect – central to an individual’s successful navigation of life in all of its complexity and mystery. Given the numerous challenges that face global humanity today, Is it possible to re-imagine the heart as a valid place from which knowledge about the world is generated? The journey that Louise has taken with her own heart has transformed her relationship with, and understanding of, her heart, herself, others, and the wider world, in numerous beneficial ways.

Louise is a PhD researcher at Canterbury Christ Church University having submitted her PhD in September 2019. Louise takes an imaginal, autobiographical approach to exploring ways that heart-centred knowing (in contrast to rational, head-based knowing), might support different ways of engaging with the phenomenon of conflict specifically, and wider global challenges in general. She is also a personal academic tutor on the MA Myth Cosmology and the Sacred.