Picture the heart…
Cold. Unbeating. Heavy. Sinking.
How could it be that we can feel so dark and miserable?
How did we find ourselves here with this energy?
What is this state of mind that makes us physically rigid, mentally exhausted, and spiritually in a drought?
It’s this space that exists that steals us from presence and leaves us grasping for something to feel.
What is this feeling?
We’re not talking here about the broken heart of love. That’s something else entirely.
We’re talking about what makes us forget why we exist…
Attention.
No, I’m not calling for your attention.
I’m saying that attention — what we attend our minds to — is the sole reason for a sinking heart.
And also a soul reason.
Get it? Hehe.
So often we focus not on what makes us happy, but on what makes us feel normal; being a part of a pace that relentlessly keeps us from deep purposeful thinking.
Instead, we are acting repetitiously for things that aren’t intimately part of us as connected humans, only a part of the machine that is modern society.
No wonder we feel so rigid and cold…
It’s the flood of dramatic stories, the at-our-hands entertainment, the at-our-doorstep feasts, the constant barrage of information, and the desperation of an unverified future and a self-incriminating past.
We’re in so deep now, even as a society we can’t see how far we are from our peaceful, real selves.
…
A heavy heart is…a condition.
Not a character trait that so many of us think we just have to live through.
I’m not saying hedonism is the answer.
But I am saying that there’s something that lies between. Full-on anxiety and tension and suffering is a weird suffocation of Self.
It’s the pace of the world that steals our depth and control. And it’s the social industrial system that keeps us confused about our purpose.
Mindfulness.
Without it, we lose control of the narrative that plays out in our heads. In a fast world, it’s the automation of our thoughts that makes us miserable. Our fast-paced thoughts are our worries, our doubts, and our insecurities.
On the contrary, if we were able to slow down, to find ourselves in existence away from the race of the world, we can change the way we think.
We start to self-mediate between our darkness and our light.
We therapy ourselves.
When we can slow our minds, we have access to questions, thoughts, and confidence. We were meant to think deeply but can’t attain depth without patience and time.
There’s a terrifying thing about human consciousness.
We don’t have statistics about how or where our minds are on a ‘positivity scale’ throughout the day, and no one can make one.
Most of the time we have so much automation in our thoughts that we’re completely unaware of whether or not our belief or perspective about incoming data is being taken negatively or positively…loosely speaking.
If I told you to think about what pants you’re wearing right now, and how good you look in them, almost all of us are going to be negatively critical about ourselves.
But it’s an automated habit.
We don’t want to seem cocky, but we also don’t truly think that of ourselves when we have a chance to embrace it.
We don’t want to assume that we could look or feel better than anyone else.
It’s just easier to tear ourselves down. And it’s almost always because of a story that we never wrote in the first place.
Why are we so automatically demanding of ourselves to be perfect?
It’s as if we’ve been trained psychologically to humiliate ourselves to ourselves before we celebrate ourselves. And it may even go deeper than that. You may have directly related experiences with other people that taught you to degrade yourself.
However…
I believe fully that we desire to love.
Love for others and for ourselves.
But loving ourselves is no longer inherent today, it’s now a skill.
Without going on a tangent, my point is that the pain in our hearts is based entirely on what we don’t love about ourselves or the world around us. It’s fear and anguish of our past and our future perspectives.
We’re upset about never becoming more than what we were.
We’re scared about never becoming more than what we are.
We’re in doubt about never becoming what we want to be.
And it stays this way because of our lack of attention to the monologue that’s going on in our heads.
This is life-changing.
Mindfulness of thought is such a new thing to me.
To be slow enough to see what’s actually going on.
It’s frustrating and pretty exhausting actually to always find yourself in a bad state of mind.
BUT…
the more conscious we are of our thoughts the more we figure out how to correct ourselves.
As I said, I don’t believe in a hedonistic narrative. I think that’s asking a bit much. The modern world is suffering. It’s full of it. It’s how we respond to that suffering that makes any difference at all.
Suffering will never not exist.
Suffering is challenge. Suffering is the barrier to entry. Suffering is the very thing that creates.
And when your heart starts to sink, it’s never the world’s task to ease up on you. It’s yours to remove the heaviness of a situation and maintain forward motion.
To me then, the remedy to a sinking heart is taking those insanely difficult moments and letting them melt into the past.
The remedy is presence, and acceptance of what is.
It’s continuing to dream about what life has in front of you. It’s keeping your focus on what makes you feel real and connected to the humans in your circle, and dissolving your past.
Fully believe this:
You’re not who you were.
You’ll never again be who you were.
You — as you are right now — are moving away from your past.
You — as you are becoming — are moving closer to your chosen future.
Whenever your heart starts to sink, disrupt everything connected to it. Do not soak yourself in it. If your thoughts are dark, write them out, scream them into the void, or talk about them vulnerably. If your body feels dull, move immediately.
Believe me, we can very easily mistake ‘feeling our emotions’ for soaking in self-pity.
Crying because of a broken heart is valid.
Screaming because of betrayal or shitty circumstances is valid.
But sulking in self-pity and victimhood is never allowed. It’s a continuous black sticky hole of ‘going nowhere’.
The world around you isn’t happening to you, it’s just happening.
If your heart starts to sink, move with everything you have into your future.
And if you need a boost reader, I’ve got your back.
Truth and Love.
…
If you like my writing and the things I question, you might( I mean…probably) also like the questions and conversations on my podcast, The Rebel Minded Podcast. Find it with the link below on Substack, or on Spotify, Apple, and Google Podcasts.
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https://therebelminded.substack.com/
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Photo credit: Olivier Collet on Unsplash
