Where the Mind Can't Go
“You’ll never find peace of mind until you listen to your heart.”
Lately, without even trying, I seem to be seeing a lot of advice everywhere about using logic to think your way to every solution. I’ve heard people vilify emotions as “not real,” confusing temptations, and distractions that entrap the weak. There’s nothing new about this, because frankly, it’s all most people have ever been taught; what is new (to us in this century, anyway) is the idea that your emotional world actually has a useful purpose in your overall health and wholeness. This used to be more of an accepted common-sense principle, but from the advent of the idea of rigorous scientific thought came the collective decision to generally discount, and even bash, anything that could not be mechanistically explained and proven. In fact, in the last hundred years or so in which quantum physics experimentation has yielded some pretty wild and seemingly inexplicable results, many scientists have ignored or actively resisted this particular kind of scientific rigor because it’s just too challenging to their mechanistic beliefs. Unfortunately for society, so are emotions. So they’ve been painted as ridiculous, useless dead ends. Never mind that they’re key to maintaining overall health, most current science wants to write them off as random products of chemical reactions, all sound and fury signifying nothing. Sigh.
Don’t buy the hype. Yes, mental rigor and the exercise of sound logic can do much to improve our lives. But no, they are absolutely not the right tool for every job. If you think they are, you will allow your mind to spin in overdrive so that you can’t sleep or rest mentally because you’re always trying desperately to be multiple steps ahead of everything. You’ll have a hard time being aware of, and thus taking proper care of, your body. You’ll be almost unable to be “in the moment,” aware of who and what is all around you, able to take advantage of the opportunities available to you in that unique moment before they’re gone. You’ll find yourself feeling bereft of meaning and purpose, spun every which way by your mind’s attempts to explain everything—even that which is mysterious and not inherently linear. If you are dealing with any of the following, you will not be able to “convince” yourself out of your issue:
Heartbreak. We love and lose, whether because it was time for a relationship to end or change, or because someone died and we no longer have them available to us physically. These endings can be one of the hardest things to deal with in a lifetime, and the mind can’t solve the pain of them. We can learn to think more positively about them, but the emotions and desires that come up around them must be dealt with head on if they are not to ruin our life vitality and outlook.
Trauma. Thinking and talking about truly traumatic experiences can help us in some ways, but only somatic (body-based) techniques tend to really lighten the load permanently. Of these, the best I’ve encountered is EFT, because it’s among the most effective, it’s a self-help technique that is within your control to benefit from at any time and in any area that you feel safe confronting on your own, and because it encompasses so many different techniques that can be modified to best fit your situation. Sometimes working with a practitioner is the best thing, but there’s much relief you can create with it yourself.
Ingrained Fears. No amount of rationalizing will unwind major fears. Again, it’s techniques involving the body and the subconscious that seem able to get at where our biggest, most intractable fears reside.
Emotional Habits. While thinking and talking about your long-held patterns can help you to understand where they came from and to feel heard, you may need to find a way to allow an emotional release in order to be able to fully move beyond old patterns and create new ones.
Spiritual or Values-Based Conundrums. Sometimes logic is very helpful in looking at how to resolve conflicts of values, but sometimes they need to be felt through with the heart and in cooperation with the whispers from your spirit. As you contemplate these, the mind will tend to spit out judgmental, final-sounding solutions based on what you’ve learned from others throughout your life. Only when you have the courage to find your own solution, one that expresses your own truth and the messages you have to share with the world, will you find peace in the midst of such contradiction.
Some of the principles that will make your experience of life most meaningful, such as being guided by love, thoughtfulness, compassion, and contributing to the creation of a better world (principles that underlie most religious and moral systems of thought, by the way) are not always logical and linear. They involve truths exhibited by signals you receive from your body, mind, and spirit, and these form a complex web that can reveal what’s most important to you even you’d rather not admit it. Minimizing or fighting the existence of these other parts of self, other than rational thought, is a recipe for unhappiness. If you learn to listen to yourself on all of your natural human levels, you find your way forward to wholistic solutions. You progress in a way that feels authentic and respectful of you as well as of others who might be involved in your process.