Have you ever tried to go to your talky mind for answers and ended up feeling frustrated and confused, unable to find answers?
Have you ever realized how mean you are to yourself?
Have you ever felt so full of love you thought your heart would explode?
Have you ever felt so vulnerable you thought your heart would implode?
Something to do. My mind pulls for something to do. Is it pulling to get away? I don’t know, but it has an early morning sense of restlessness. My mind jumps around trying to latch onto something.
When the mind is searching, I can feel the physical tension; the cricky neck, and the tight right side. When I notice it and become aware, it seems to open up physical space within my body. In fact, when I think about receiving, taking in the moment as if I am a cup and each moment is filling and giving to me, I flinch from my right side, the tension releasing. Things my eyes capture, are they gifts coming straight into my heart?
According to the HeartMath Institute, “from our current understanding of the elaborate feedback networks between the brain, heart and mental and emotional systems, it becomes clear that the age-old struggle between intellect and emotion will not be resolved by the mind gaining dominance over the emotions, but rather by increasing the harmonious balance between the mental and emotional systems – a synthesis that provides greater access to our full range of intelligence.”
The HeartMath Institute’s mission is to help people bring their physical, mental and emotional systems into balanced alignment with their heart’s intuitive guidance. They were established in 1991, and they research and develop reliable, scientifically based tools that bridge the connection between heart and mind and deepen people’s connection with the hearts of others.
With this applied understanding it is easy to begin to grasp why forced positive thinking has the potential to do more harm than good.
ahhhh so it is. So it is.
Information has an amazing ability to transform our choices and illuminate our own knowingness. At the same time, information can keep us suspended in this middle space of never being enough. We see a headline promoting something, and we think, I want that because I don’t feel like I have it in my life. We place our hope in learning about something to get away from something we don’t like about ourselves. It’s easy to implement practices or methods to escape. Escape from what makes us uncomfortable, what makes us feel insecure, ashamed, fearful, sad, or angry. If we are not careful, we spend our days acquiring information to rid ourselves of things that have the potential to be our most prominent teachers. Meanwhile, those same things we perceive as obstacles keep showing up in different places with different faces trying to get our attention.
The Love boils up from the heart. It was not something that was done rather something that is always there. To feel it is to know that the supply is unlimited. Another can not take it away, remove or replace it. For it is.
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, the perfect, clear perception—which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh binds it, and makes all error; and to know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.
-Robert Browning
(Photo by Olivier Fahrn)
About a year ago, two questions came to me during journaling and altered my perception and reaction towards external things. These two simple questions moved me from fear and defensiveness towards the center that exists within myself, the place I experience and call balance.
The pictures you see are, but of a soul your mind created. What resides in the dark places are only dark because the light has not been brought. When you shine a light on the dark by drawing your attention gently to it, a lightness comes through an illumined sense of being.
Maybe it’s the doing from the place of the problem that is the problem itself. Maybe this approach keeps us mired in the same system that we so oppose, and the solutions are then only at the surface perpetuating the ‘us against them’ story.
Maybe not knowing the solution is where the answer lies that will offer new eyes and begin a new story.
(photo by Ken Treloar)
There is a lot to say about the beauty of being that infuses your doing with grace. One without the other is sure to bring you a life unlived. I am learning, through experience, my human life comes to life through balance; balance between play and work, doing and being, connecting and disconnecting.
