Tap into your inherent wisdom, love, and wholeness as you journey into the depths of the heart. The great human quest is to discover who we really are—a discovery that changes our lives and the lives of those around us. With The Deep Heart, spiritual teacher and psychotherapist John J. Prendergast, PhD, invites us on a pilgrimage within, using the heart as a portal to our deepest psychological and spiritual nature. The “deep heart” is Prendergast’s term for our heart center—the subtle center of emotional and energetic sensitivity, relational intimacy, profound inner knowing, and unconditional love. “The heart area is where we feel most deeply touched by kindness, gratitude, and appreciation, yet it is also where we feel most emotionally wounded,” writes Prendergast. “Whether we realize it or not, the heart is what we most carefully guard and most want to open.” In The Deep Heart, Prendergast guides readers to safely open their hearts and discover their true nature. Through precise and potent meditative inquiries, insightful stories, and reflections drawn from his intimate work with students and clients, Prendergast explores the convergence of psychological healing and spiritual awakening that happens most clearly and powerfully in “the deep heart.” These short chapters, accompanied by guided meditations and inquiries, will invite and inspire you to ponder and discover the emotional, energetic, and spiritual depths of your heart.

Your body has a natural sense of truth. We can feel authenticity in ourselves and in others. However, this innate wisdom is obscured by our conditioning-the core limiting beliefs, reactive feelings, and somatic contractions that fuel our sense of struggle and veil who we really are. In Touch is a groundbreaking, experiential guide to the felt-sense of our "inner knowing"-the deep intelligence available through our bodies. Each chapter presents moving stories, helpful insights from spirituality, psychology, and science, and simple yet potent experiments for integrating the gifts of inner knowing into every aspect of daily life. Join pioneering psychotherapist and teacher Dr. John J. Prendergast to explore: * The phenomenon of "attunement"-how we accurately sense and resonate with ourselves and others-including an introduction to attachment theory, mirror neurons, and interoception (the ability to sense into the interior of your body) * Felt-sensing and the subtle body-our ability to have a whole-body sense of reality and how the seven major energy centers relate to common psychospiritual issues * "Shadows as portals"-how our dark and painful feelings and sensations can point us toward an essential radiance within * The art of identifying and undoing our core limiting beliefs * The four somatic qualities of inner knowing-relaxed groundedness, inner alignment, open-heartedness, and spaciousness-and how these subtle signals, once recognized, can guide our choices and help us to navigate life's challenges * The fruits of inner knowing-the realization of who we are in our depths and the great intimacy with life we can all enjoy "As we tune into our deepest nature, our body relaxes, grounds, lines up, opens up, and lights up," writes Prendergast. "So far this extraordinarily useful subtle feedback has been largely overlooked; almost nothing has been written about it. We need to both sense and decode these signals if we are to benefit from them. These bodily markers are here to be seen and used as guides to enable us to more gracefully navigate life and to awaken. They are part of our birthright, available to anyone." Here is his invitation to start listening in a profound new way, deeply in touch with reality and our shared journey of awakening.