What is Heart iQ?

Heart iQ is a practice of opening. It trains what Christian calls capacity: the bodily ability to stay present with what is actually happening, in you and between you and another person, without overriding, numbing, performing or withdrawing. Most of us learned early to close somewhere. We stopped feeling our bodies, or stopped letting love in, or lost the nerve to say what was true. Heart iQ works directly with those closures, in good company, until staying open becomes something your nervous system knows how to do rather than something you believe in.

It helps to be clear about what it is not. Heart iQ is not therapy. Nobody diagnoses you and nobody treats you, and when someone needs clinical support the team says so plainly and helps them find it. That boundary is written down, along with our commitments around consent and safety, on the ethics pages. It is not self-improvement either. Self-improvement assumes there is something wrong with you and keeps your attention on the deficit. Heart iQ starts from range: the question it asks is how much of life you can currently feel, and in which direction you would love more room.

The practice moves between three settings. Alone, you widen what your body can hold. In pairs, structured ways of speaking and listening keep two people connected through the conversations that usually break connection. And in a circle, a small group brings its combined attention to one person at a time, which makes it easier to feel yourself than it ever is alone. That group dimension has its own full introduction on the circle work page.

Insight tells you why you close. Capacity decides whether you can stay open anyway. Many people who find this work already understand their patterns well: they have read the books, they can name their attachment style, they know exactly what they do when they feel hurt. Then the moment arrives, a partner says the thing that usually ends the conversation, and the knowing counts for very little. What counts is what your body can do under that pressure.

Christian draws the distinction with a jacuzzi. A peak experience feels wonderful while you are in it, and then you climb out and go back to whoever you were. Capacity is a baseline rather than a state you visit. It is there the moment you wake up, in your work, in your relationships, in the way you carry yourself through a hard conversation. A single profound experience changes something temporarily; repeated experience changes something permanently, which is why Heart iQ is a practice rather than an event you attend once.

The orientation follows from that. If your system learned to guard and filter, then even in the presence of real love and real care the felt experience is still one of lack, because only a thimbleful can land. So the work does not begin by trying to get you more of anything. It begins with the vessel itself, your nervous system and your relational range, and gradually expands it until more of life can move through you without overwhelming you or being shut out.

None of this discards insight. You cannot change what you cannot yet see, and part of the practice is learning to track what is actually moving in you from moment to moment. The order is what changes: seeing serves opening, rather than replacing it.

Christian Pankhurst began his working life as a chiropractor, and early in practice he noticed that many of his patients’ physical symptoms carried an emotional story. So he ran an experiment. Instead of adjustments, he invited a group of patients to evening workshops on feeling their emotional and energetic life, then watched their symptoms shift. The results unsettled him enough that he left the profession and sold what he owned, then went looking for teachers.

Over the following years he studied group dynamics with seminar leaders across Europe, Australia and the United States, spent a year as the protégé of Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, and was mentored in circle work by Tej Steiner. In 2009 he won Britain’s Next Top Coach, a public competition whose final round was a single-take, ten-minute coaching session put to an open vote.

The method that emerged from those years of live facilitation became Heart iQ. In 2015 Christian founded New Eden, a retreat centre in the Netherlands purpose-built for immersive group work. His book Insights to Intimacy lays out the relational teaching in written form, and there is more of his story on the about page.