A beautiful story I've been telling my clients for years, about who is really running your life, and how to restore the rightful ruler.
Are you governed by your head or your heart?
In the three-step journey I walk with my clients, the second step is called ‘Restore Harmony Within’, and it’s the one people find more challenging to picture. ‘Letting go of the past’ they understand, ‘Creating a new future’ they can imagine. But ‘Restore harmony within’? What does that actually mean, in the body, day to day?
(If you haven’t met the whole journey yet, it’s Part Three of this series.)
The clearest way I know to explain it is a story; the story of the Sovereign Heart. It’s a story about who is really governing your life, what happens when fear and doubt take over the kingdom and what it takes to bring the rightful ruler home.
The story of the kingdom
I believe that as human beings, we are designed to live from the heart. When we do, we live with passion and purpose, love and joy. We feel excited about what we want to create, stimulated by the desire to grow, connected to ourselves deeply and to others honestly. Love abounds and creation flows. This is our natural open state.
Picture it as a kingdom; and the kingdom is your body, your whole self.
The Heart is the King.
The King dreams and aspires; he wants to create and to grow. He has a vision for his kingdom. But the king cannot run an entire kingdom alone. To carry out those dreams, he employs a faithful and highly efficient administrator; the nervous system. The nervous system directs the body, coordinates its many functions and constantly responds to what is happening around us. The brain advises, the hormones communicate and each organ has its individual role and together they keep everything running smoothly.
While the King is secure in love and trust, all is well. The kingdom is peaceful, but it is not passive. It is alive, creative and productive. Energy is available not merely for survival, but for relationship, curiosity, pleasure, imagination and growth.
The King dreams. And the kingdom helps him create.
But life creates challenges. What happens when love is threatened or withdrawn? When trust is broken, when we’re hurt, when fear and doubt creep in? The King who once trusted life begins to question whether the world is safe, whether other people can be trusted, whether he can be trusted. And gradually the King becomes too wounded, frightened or uncertain to govern.
And a kingdom cannot run without a ruler; so someone has to step up.
The nervous system steps forward. The faithful administrator becomes the army.
Its purpose changes. Where it once organised the kingdom in service of the King’s dreams, its priority now becomes protection and defence. The gates are guarded. The soldiers are posted. Everyone becomes vigilant.
Where is the next threat coming from?
Resources that were once available for creativity, connection, growth, digestion, repair, pleasure and rest are increasingly directed towards keeping the kingdom safe.
The kingdom may continue to function. From the outside, it may even look remarkably successful. The person may work, raise a family, achieve, care for everyone around them and appear completely capable.
But inside, the kingdom is being governed by a very different question. Not, What would I love to create? But, Am I safe?
And this is an important part of the story: the army is not the enemy. It did exactly what it was designed to do. When the King was wounded and could no longer lead, the army protected him.
The problem comes when the danger has passed but nobody tells the army that the war is over.
Years — sometimes decades — later, it may still be standing guard.
Why this is the “restore harmony” step
Now we can begin to see the three-step journey differently. But healing the past is not quite enough.
Someone still has to help the King back onto the throne.
The army has to discover that it no longer needs to govern. The nervous system needs to move out of constant protection and return to its rightful role. The mind does not need to anticipate every possible problem. The body does not need to remain permanently braced. And the heart needs to become strong enough to lead again.
That is what I mean by restoring harmony within.
It is the movement from being a defended kingdom to becoming a led kingdom.
The army is not punished or banished. We don’t fight the nervous system for having protected us. Quite the opposite — we recognise what it has been trying to do. And, almost with gratitude, we allow it to lay down its weapons and return to being the extraordinary administrator it was always meant to be.
The vigilance can begin to rest because the rightful ruler is coming home.
What this looks like in real life
This may sound like a lovely allegory, but it is not abstract. You can see the difference between a kingdom governed by fear and one led by the heart in very ordinary moments.
It is making a decision based on what you genuinely want and value rather than what will protect you from somebody else’s disapproval.
It is speaking honestly instead of continually managing other people’s reactions.
It is being able to say no without being overwhelmed by guilt.
It is allowing yourself to be seen rather than constantly adapting yourself to fit what you believe others want from you.
It is meeting a setback and asking, What do I want to do here? rather than automatically retreating, pleasing, controlling, defending or attacking.
And importantly, none of this is about becoming harder. Sovereignty is not armour. It is almost the opposite; it is becoming safe enough within yourself that you can remain open. Strong enough to be loving. Grounded enough to hear other people’s opinions without automatically abandoning your own.
In my book, The Gift of Self-Worth: Rewriting Your ‘Not Good Enough’ Story, I describe part of this process as developing your II/PP, becoming an Independent Individual who can embrace your own unique individuality and independence, and from there step into your Personal Power.
This is sovereignty from the inside out. And it can feel unfamiliar at first.
If the army has governed your kingdom for thirty or forty years, the quiet authority of the King may initially feel less safe than the hypervigilance you have become accustomed to. You are learning to occupy a throne that may have been empty for a very long time.
How we restore the kingdom in practice
In my clinic, this is at the heart of much of the work we do: helping the army lay down its weapons and supporting the King back onto the throne.
We work through the body because this is where so much of the protective response is mobilised. Through kinesiology, I work with the body’s stress responses and use muscle testing to explore where imbalance may be held. We may work with the nervous system, emotional patterns, stress responses and the endocrine system, while also exploring the experiences and beliefs that appear to be keeping the person in protection.
Because you cannot simply tell a frightened nervous system that everything is fine. Anyone who has experienced anxiety knows this. Your thinking mind may understand perfectly well that you are safe, and yet your heart is racing, your stomach is churning, your muscles are tight and something inside you is saying, Danger.
The army has to experience enough safety to begin standing down.
And when it does, something changes. There is more room inside. The mind becomes quieter. The body can soften. The breath deepens. The constant need to anticipate, control or protect can begin to ease.
But even this is not the whole story, because the purpose of restoring the King is not simply to create a kingdom in which nothing bad happens. A sovereign needs something to lead towards.
Returning the King to something greater
This is where the deeper meaning of the Sovereign Heart begins to emerge.
The King, just like us, needs more than safety. He needs meaning. He needs inspiration. He needs to know that he belongs to something greater than himself and that his life has purpose.
In the Model of Compassion, I describe our life force as a two-way flow of energy. It is the connection to our wholeness.
From above comes what I describe as the Yang current — the journey of the soul descending into physical life. We might experience this as insight, inspiration, wisdom, imagination and purpose: that quiet inner knowing that there is something we are here to experience, become, create or contribute.
From below rises the complementary Yin current — the nurturing, grounding energy of Mother Earth. This is the current that anchors us into physical life. It brings stability, nourishment, grounding and belonging. It reminds us that we are here, in a body, on the earth, and that we have a place within the human family.
One current connects us upwards towards inspiration and purpose. The other roots us downwards into nourishment and belonging.
And they meet in the heart.
Perhaps this is why the heart is such a powerful symbol of sovereignty. It sits at the meeting place between spirit and matter. Between inspiration and embodiment. Between who we sense we could become and the human being standing here today.
When the heart is open, these complementary currents can meet and mingle. We feel grounded enough to belong and inspired enough to grow. There is passion, clarity and a greater confidence to act upon what matters to us.
The King is no longer ruling alone. He is supported from above and below. Rooted in the earth. Connected to the soul. And standing between them is the heart.
The Sovereign Heart
Now the kingdom begins to look very different.
The heart leads. The mind can offer its intelligence without having to control everything. The nervous system can respond when genuine danger appears without treating every uncertainty as a threat. The body can return to doing the work of living, repairing, digesting, resting and creating. And the soul can whisper its inspiration into a heart that is finally quiet enough to hear it.
This does not mean fear will never visit the kingdom again. It doesn’t mean we will never be hurt, disappointed or frightened. Life will still bring loss. People will still challenge us. There will be times when the army hears something beyond the walls and instinctively reaches for its weapons.
But something fundamental has changed.
The throne is no longer empty.
The King can turn towards the frightened army and say:
I see the danger. I hear your fear. Thank you for protecting me. But I am here now.
And perhaps this is what sovereignty really means: not controlling life, not becoming invulnerable, not never feeling afraid, but becoming deeply rooted in yourself while remaining connected to something greater than yourself. It is having enough faith in yourself to listen to your own heart, enough grounding to stand in your own truth, and enough trust in life to keep your heart open even when you cannot control what happens next.
This is the harmony we are restoring. Not perfection. Right relationship.
The heart leads. The mind advises. The nervous system protects when protection is genuinely needed. The body carries us through the world. And the soul reminds us why we came.
The King is restored to his throne. The army can finally rest. The kingdom becomes peaceful enough to dream again.
And the energy that was once consumed by survival becomes available for something much more extraordinary:
….. living.
Because ultimately, we were never designed simply to survive our lives.
We were designed to live them with love, with purpose, and with our hearts fully engaged in the magnificent experience of being alive.
Ask about the workshop and workbook · The Three-Step Journey — Part Three · Order The Gift of Self-Worth