There is a delicate balance I’ve been trying to lean into for most of my life—the space between heart and mind, between what I know deeply in my bones and what I can explain with reason and research. It’s not always an easy balance. The heart speaks in whispers, in symbols, in sensations that defy language. The mind wants clarity, evidence, structure. My mind wanders to what I learned in school. At the bedside of those dying.

But I’ve come to believe we need both. We are wired for both.

Knowing and knowledge are not the same thing. Knowledge comes from the outside in. It is gathered, taught, verified. It gives us language and logic and shared understanding. Knowing, on the other hand, rises from the inside. It’s what we feel in our gut that has no particular prompt other than something is weighing on our mind. It’s intuitive, often wordless. It’s the feeling that something is true before there’s any proof. And in my experience, it’s rarely wrong.

For years, I lived inside this tug-of-war. I wanted to trust what my heart was telling me—that there was more to my symptoms, more to my fear, more to my experience of illness than could be captured on a test result. But I also wanted to be taken seriously by doctors, by therapists, by the world of clinical care at the bedside. I didn’t want to be dismissed as “too sensitive” or “emotional” or “dramatic.” So, I kept quiet about personal yearnings that called to me as a heart patient too scared to speak up in fear that others would judge me frail.

So I learned how to walk the bridge. I started finding language that honored both the intuition of the soul and the intellect of the mind. I found science that supported what my spirit already knew—like epigenetics, which gave a name to the generational grief I felt in my chest. Or neurocardiology, which explains how the heart holds memory and emotion in ways we’re just beginning to understand.

It’s not about choosing one over the other. It’s about integration. It’s about honoring that the heart and the mind were never meant to be at war—they’re meant to be in conversation. When I listen to both, I find clarity. I find peace. I find truth that doesn’t need to shout to be heard.

So now, when I write, when I speak, when I tell my story, I try to hold space for both. I speak from the heart, but I bring the science too—not to validate my experience, but to give it wings. Because I believe that when we blend spiritual knowing with scientific language, we invite others into a fuller understanding of what it means to be human—complex, feeling, thinking, and whole.