That

I can’t say it any better…

“But we are Divine beings. And we are loved, unconditionally, by the Being in whom we subsist. To realize that is to need nothing else - not the approval or attention of others, not the realization of ambitions, not beliefs or rituals. It is to recognize that the unworthiness that we feel is because we have chosen to live in poverty, in the presence of riches. It is because of our awareness, that permeates all our being, of incompleteness, of being cut off from something, of having forgotten something, of living a ‘wrong’ life, lost and unfocused however ‘important’ we make out to others that we are.”

-James Souttar

Mental Elaborations Again

My mind engages itself, it likes to argue, to examine, to use logic, to put everything into a box that I can understand. The more I fight against the flurry of thoughts, the more my mind is engaging…a sort of vicious cycle. Thoughts are affected by conditioning and many times contain the voices of others that have placed thoughts there, and these thoughts drown out my own thoughts to the point where sometimes I don’t even know what I think any more. My own thoughts seem distant from me. Whose thought was that? Was it mine? Really?

I know I am fairly easily influenced by others, but really only when I am stuck in the realm of thought as my mind elaborates further and further into the vortex. When I recognize that I am trapped in the cycling of thought, and become aware that I am doing that, I try to stop and access something deeper…something I can only call my heart, to discover whether there is truth for me or not. So I ask myself why it seems so easy for me to get lost again in the realm of thought, so easy for my heart to be subjugated, rather than the other way around. Why is the mind so powerful, and where does the power of its grip come from?

There are times and moments when it seems all thought has disappeared, and in those moments I’m not even aware that I’m not elaborating on some thought pattern. These times can occur when doing mundane, everyday things like taking a shower, or they can occur when working on a painting or even playing tennis. I’m not even thinking that I’m not thinking. I am just being, and time has seemingly stopped. Whether five minutes or three hours have passed, it is all the same to me, and I am unaware of anything that has gone on before or will be coming later, suspended in being just myself as I am, wholly sufficient and accepted and loved without judgments.

Perhaps it is my hope that I will manage to reverse the amount of my time that is spent in these moments where I am just who I am, loving, accepting, and without struggle with the amount of time spent in my mental elaborations and self doubts …and the grip of my mind will be loosened from the hold it often has on my heart.

Follow the heart

Follow your heart, choose a path with heart, make sure that the heart is guiding and directing you..

What does it mean to follow your heart, and how do you know whether you really are listening to your heart? How do you discern between what is mind driven, heart driven, or even fear driven? Are there questions to ask, a litmus test? And what is it about making decisions from the heart that makes them “right” decisions as opposed to making them from some other place? If you do make a decision from the heart, is it less likely you will feel regret or feel you made a “wrong” decision and look back and torture yourself about the path not taken?

What exactly IS the heart when viewed in this context? Is it intuition? Gut feeling? How do we peel away the layers of conditioning and fears to really listen to the heart?

I know there are decisions I have made from the heart, but I’m not at all sure I know what that means and certainly I cannot articulate how I know that. I also know I have made decisions based on fear, and also after much mental work…lists of pros and cons, etc. There are decisions I’ve made with the assumption of them being heart driven, only to find out later they may have been clouded by other factors based more in fear and anxiety. If the wisest decisions we can make are guided by the heart it seems like it would be a good idea to give some consideration to discerning our heart’s desire and separating out the contamination that has come from years of hurt, confusion, conditioning, fear, and doubt. What does the voice of the heart sound like? What does it look like? How do we go about recognizing it?