Before you read this, I want you to think about a time in your life when you were not sure about a very important relationship, maybe the most important one you ever had or were going to have, where doubt and belief wrestled in your heart and you had to decide – should I be with this person or not? Are they the answer to my dreams, the fulfillment of my desire to give and receive love, or someone who will ultimately lead me to pain, loss and unending sadness?

“Do not follow/stray after your heart and your eyes, which you lust after.” Shema, third paragraph.

This brooding piece of the Shema prayer cautions us against following after our heart, with its power of ruinous seduction. But do you remember, in every 2 a.m. conversation you’ve ever had with a distraught friend or someone having a relationship quandary, advising them, “trust your gut instincts” and that will lead you out of the darkness into the light? “Listen to your heart,” and it will guide you where you need to go, and away from what does not “feel right.”

Where does the truth lie? What to do with our hearts?

Part of the problem here is that the very thing which brings us to love and joy and freedom also can be the wrecking ball that swings through our lives and leaves everything in tatters. Should we listen to our heart or run away from its tendency to obliterate rational self-interest? The answer lies in whether we are being led by our hearts back to who we really are, our true essence, or if it is just a vehicle transporting us to a foreign land where we will not end up nurtured or flourishing.

The great Buddhist teacher and spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh writes of how we use looking for love as a form of self-escape: “Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong…Because we feel empty, we try to find an object of our love. Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object of our love. When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for.”

Unlike many popular images, the heart is not some wild untamed beast that we cannot control, forcing us to move in a direction we did not choose. The heart is a reflection of something deeper within us, and sometimes that is a loss of direction, a confusion about who we are and need to be.

One of the brilliant aspects of this verse is the insistence that it is really the heart–and not our eyes—that lead us astray. Our tendency is to believe that it works the other way around – you pass a store window and your eyes are drawn to an item you cannot afford, and you regret it as soon as you see next month’s credit card bill. But the tacit understanding in Shema is that the eyes are led to where the heart has been directing them all along. And if you are harbouring a grudge against someone, your eyes will interpret their actions in the worst possible light. You will see what you want to see. One might call this the dilemma of “the night before.”

If we go to bed, and the argument we have had with our partner still lingers in the air, and nothing has been done to address it, then it is not surprising that at the break of the day, as the sun rises, the unresolved heaviness in the air envelops the room where we now lie awake. We are carrying the residue of that argument. And it pervades everything we do and think and see the next day, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

In his powerful short story, “The Things They Carried,” the American author (and Vietnam war veteran) Tim O’Brien offers a list of items that soldiers in that war would transport on their backs and in their packs, but also the trauma that was lodged every day deep within the silent and most grief filled area of their hearts:

“They carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive…They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried… They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight…They carried their own lives.”

Each of us, in our own private ways, “carry our lives” every single day. At times, if one stops and breathes slowly, one can feel the tangible weight of that life bearing down on us, a subtle invisible burden that begins to expand and take up space, even as it has no form and no matter. If we do not face it directly, it will stay with us, go underground and begin to leak out in other ways.

We are all suffering and trying to make ourselves feel better. So it is little wonder that he heart’s promises of even short erm relief find such a willing audience. We eat drink, snort, smoke, have sex, gamble, space out, scream, watch porn, watch anything, but the common denominator is the attempt to assuage, trick, numb, seduce, sidestep the hurt we feel. But your vulnerabilities will find you every time.

Perhaps Shemais too harsh on all of us fragile human beings, or perhaps it is trying to do us a favour with its brand of tough love, like a friend reminding you for the two hundredth time not to blindly traipse after where your heart says it wants to go this week, careening towards a fall. But my experience of myself, and most everyone else I’ve known, is that Biblical verses and prayers can urge us and exhort us to stop acting irrationally and self-destructively, and move towards a saner, healthier path. And if we listen, we’ll probably avoid some really wasteful detours in our life. But in the end, we are going to make our mistakes, the very same ones, again and again, until hopefully, at some point, through an inchoate mix of experience, a loyal friend’s gentle advice, and a small light of awareness shining through the cracks of our pain, we learn to slowly redirect our wandering eyes and heal our restless hearts.