Ultimately what holds you back or drives you forward is the thought in your mind of how something is going to feel. Truth is you never know until you do.
Lead with your heart, not your head.
Your mind will always be there to create stories, your heart might not always give you the why and the how but it will always show you the right way. Many people confuse ‘following your heart’ with following your mind’s attachment and investment into the object of love, and hence your thoughts.
You can follow your heart by loving someone and leaving.
You can follow your heart by loving someone and staying.
Many of us live so disconnected from our hearts that the idea alone feels so foreign. We don’t know how our heart feels in our body.
We know what we think it means but we don’t actually feel it.
Especially during painful events and sorrows, the tendency is to harden. To close our hearts. Not to feel.
But really what is needed is the opposite of that.
Keeping our hearts open through pain helps us transcend the pain. It helps us feel through it without unnecessary resistance that we create in our bodies by trying to push through it.
Underneath it all is really a fear of death. We think if we were to remain open and to feel it all we would die. It might seem irrational when we make this belief conscious but at some point in our life it was rational.
For a child in pain and nobody around to soothe them it could very well mean death.
Our psyche is too scared of its own death.
Imagine all the ideas and beliefs it has acquired in all these years? In one moment they disappear. Disappear to the point that you don’t even know who you are anymore.
You are just existing.
The moment of bliss at the top of the orgasm, the moment of transcendence at the highest peak of pain.
Both are scary because it is a loss of consciousness. and in a society that identifies so deeply with the intellect to lose yours even momentary is equal to insanity. Perhaps this is why these experiences loaded with shame for many.
We are both scared and ashamed to lose ourselves — to lose that “I” that is really illusionary armour that is getting you through your day-to-day.
It is an armour because it helps you to create the distance between your own heart and those of others. Because it can take you out of your body, existing forever in your head — in the ideas of what something is or could be, of what somebody thought and said, of how something would feel and how something felt.
The mind is not familiar with the now. It knows the past and the future. That is the only way it can sustain itself.
It makes stories and creates thoughts by using the remembered words of the system of sounds that we call language. The stories that are based on events and experiences that it has seen and felt but ultimately that are no more.
The mind can entertain. It can be loved for its wittiness. It can create stimulation for the mind of the other.
Stimulation that can be taken to such peaks, that we are having orgasms at the intellectual level.They call them sapiosexuals — an inevitable outcome of the society that holds intellect at the highest value.
And while intellectual compatibility and ability to have engaging conversations is important — after all our mind is still a part of us, many are living at this level. Many are loving at this level — the level of thoughts but not the level of hearts.
At the level of thought we will always be separate. The mind is the very mechanism that creates the concept of an “I”. The mind is that which creates stories about what that “I” is.
The heart just feels. There is no seperation. There is no “me” or “you”. There is just love. Pure and innocent.
The kind of love that doesn’t need anything, the kind of love that doesn’t see the separation created by thought. It doesn’t see race, class, gender, religion.
It is not bounded by the categories of thought.
It is a deep feeling from within. The feeling, the energy, the vibration that perpetuates our very existence. It is the kind of sixth sense that many of us forgot that we even have.
The mind tries to grasp it but no matter how many words I use to describe it. It will always be the finger pointing to the moon but not the moon itself.
To feel into our hearts, the mind needs to quiet down. The thought needs to give way to the feeling. Both of them are parts of us but we just have identified with one over the other.
“What if the difference between those who are in love and those who are not, is that the former actively think they are?”, I wrote a while ago.
I thought I could too think myself in and out of feelings. And to an extent perhaps I could, if I always kept my heart closed.
If it felt like love, maybe I could think it wasn’t, so it wouldn’t be.
This is why many people struggle to tune in to the universe and manifest things into their reality. Universe only speaks the language of love, and the heart is its portal.
What is god? What is spirit? What is that feeling beyond, the deep connection with everything that is?
I kept asking myself those questions. I kept holding on to different things to get me there — people, things, continuous meditation, yoga and spiritual teachings. I was trying so hard to sustain that feeling.
I thought it was somewhere beyond me, somewhere outside to be found that I can bring about.
Only to have realized the feeling that I was trying so hard to grasp was love.
That connection to the universe, to others.
That feeling of peace that I have felt when staring at the eyes of my love. The same peace that I have experienced for the first time doing yoga.
It is true that all those things help. They help to remove the barriers we have built in our hearts.
But love… we have it within. It is always there for us.
It is not somewhere outside to be found and searched for.
Love is what is everywhere, all around us, above us, under us, perpetuating air, water and earth.
And we are just like a radio that needs to get tuned in to its frequency.
Not through force, but through gentleness, through openness, through receptivity and willingness to surrender.
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Anna Aksenovich is a writer with a background in Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. She is fascinated with human behavior and has recently launched her own publication Know Why to dig deeper into the workings of the human mind and find answers to the ultimate question “Why do we do things that we do?”.
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Previously Published on medium
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