Posted By Joe Martino,
Collective Evolution
What does it look like to live from your heart? What is the mind’s
role in our experience? In my 10 years of studying and practicing living
from the heart, I’ve discovered an emerging trend: The spiritual
community has made a demon out of the mind.
There is no doubt that the mind is the source of suffering — the
incessant thoughts and worries, the endless ego stories, the mental
tricks we often play — but this doesn’t mean the mind as a whole is the
problem, nor does this mean we should avoid the mind.
It seems now that any form of thoughts, ideas, planning, logic, and
so forth get put into the category of “not in the flow” or “being in the
mind,” and this is simply a misunderstanding. I’ve seen people try to
avoid their mind like the plague, to avoid thought, avoid processing,
just because “the mind is evil” or other such misconceptions. So, let’s
dive into how the mind works so we can better understand its true role.
How Our Mind Works in Our Experience
You are a soul, playing out a physical experience on this planet.
Your soul enters a vehicle called the body that allows us to have a
physical experience on Earth. The body is made up of a number of
essential parts including your brain, which is comprised of many
components that ultimately serve to decode this reality into something
that isn’t simply an energetic soup. It also allows us to process
important aspects of the human experience, using things like logic and
calculation so you can understand how to walk, run, jump, communicate,
build, create, and so forth. Your consciousness USES the mind as a tool
in the human experience.
For example, when you receive information from your higher self,
through your heart to your physical experience, the mind processes that
information and learns how to use it within this experience. The
connection between the heart and brain is quite evident scientifically,
and the
heart actually sends signals
to the brain to communicate. The mind is a key factor in the entire
relationship between our mind, body and spirit. One can’t function fully
within the human experience without the other.
Where We’ve Become Unbalanced
So now we know that the mind is actually here working in our favour
to have the experiences we need. But it’s also important to mention that
in some ways, we’ve gone off course a bit.
The mind is layered and also contains a powerful program called the
ego. The ego can essentially be broken down into two layers:
upper ego and lower ego.
The upper ego has the basic understanding that we are separate, in
experience, from others and are playing out an individual identity for
the purpose of evolution. The lower ego is more about intense and
increased separation, strong identity attachment, fear, and incessant
stories. The lower ego has served us by showing us what it feels like to
be disconnected from our true selves and from others, unable to
live harmoniously with the Earth, animals, etc. This has been a tool in
many ways, but our challenge is now to overcome the power it has and
learn to find our true selves beyond it.
Why is this happening now? Living with it in the driver seat has
already taught us what we needed to learn from it, but for quite some
time, we’ve been resisting the change that is being presented to us.
It’s now time to move forward. This is why we’re seeing such a huge rise
in interest in this topic collectively. People are exploring
meditation, spirituality, the ego, and so much more as a reflection of a
collective evolution.
To create this
shift,
from our ego being in the driver seat and from overusing the mind to
living from our hearts and simply using ego and mind as tools, we must
focus on creating more self awareness. We must pay attention to our
thoughts for a moment and simply observe them. When we observe them we
begin to see that, though they are part of our experience, they are
nevertheless separate from us. Over time we learn to quiet those
thoughts by not giving them so much attention or weight and by using
tools like meditation.
This is a journey. It’s a practice, not something that happens overnight, and like building any muscle, it takes time.
Here are a few tips to start to quiet the mind.
How to Live From the Heart and What It Looks Like
When you begin to identify less with the ego and incessant mind
thoughts, you begin to FEEL more. This does not mean having more
emotions; this means having a deeper feeling within your heart. Some
might call this following your intuition or listening to your gut. It’s
about paying attention to the subtleness of each moment, the energy and
nature of what exists in presence.
What does this look like? Are you ‘zenned out’ constantly? No! This
is where a huge misconception comes in. Living from the heart does not
suddenly mean you don’t think, you don’t do work, you don’t live life,
or that you meditate all day. It means you begin experiencing this life
with your heart driving your experience. It means doing things from a
space of heart-driven consciousness rather than what your ego is telling
you to do for reasons you can’t quite describe. It’s doing things
because they come naturally versus out of fear or worry. It’s about
doing things because you feel it’s what you need to do, not because you
need to be keeping up with the Jones’ or following trends everyone else
is jumping on. There’s no emotion behind it; it’s simply neutral and it
flows lightly.
As you live from the heart you still use your mind, your body, your
logic, your creativity, etc.; your actions are simply guided by
something entirely different and your ego becomes a quiet program that
sits off in the background. Your monkey mind doesn’t have the same power
it does because you are dialed in to something different.
Do you need to meditate to get into the heart all the time? At first
yes, but eventually, no; it becomes completely natural and part of your
everyday way of being. It becomes automatic.
The process of moving from a state of being in ego or mind almost all
the time to living from the heart starts with getting the ‘stuff’ out
of the way. You have to ask the important questions: What does it mean
to be a human on this planet? Who am I? Why do I do what I do? What do I
feel I really wish to be doing right now? Why am I concerned with my
appearance or with what someone said about me?
When we all begin to live from the heart, we no longer need to
operate using theories or philosophies of how to be. Instead we live
naturally through oneness consciousness, which is what’s already
emerging from our hearts. We care for one another, we create systems
that work for everyone, we treat each other as equal because we do not
judge differences, and we collectively create a world where we can all
truly thrive and utilize the gifts we each came here with. Living from
the heart is where we are headed, but we must do the work to embrace it
and move it along. It won’t happen by simply waiting.
It’s a Process — Let It Unfold
Practice self awareness to avoid being hard on yourself during this
process, but also be aware of the limits we often place on ourselves to
justify certain behaviours. We often want to say “We’re only human,”
meant to imply that we make all ‘mistakes,’ but it’s a slippery slope to
constantly justify the avoidance of evolving beyond old patterns that
can be challenging to transcend by accepting it’s part of ‘being human,’
when it’s not. This is probably one of the most limiting statements we
can actually make about ourselves, as who we truly are is not human, but
a soul of infinite potential HAVING a human experience that happens to
be going through a massive
evolution
in consciousness at this time. The statement also allows us to blame
the human experience rather than taking responsibility and looking at
who we are and why things happen, and truly understanding and shifting
our experience.
Allow the various tools of our human experience to be there,
understand the role they each serve, and avoid demonizing any one of
them. They are there for a reason and, as far as the mind goes, let’s
remember how important it truly is in decoding our reality. Demonizing
useful thought, logic, planning, and creation will only limit our
ability to thrive and let our true self shine through.
https://openheartedrebel.com/2017/09/25/spiritual-community-demon-human-mind/
