Tussles occur within each of us when things don’t go right. When we’re hurt, the heart attends and the mind is convoluted in pathological spirals. Better still is the destination we get to where the mind knows that all’s okay – at the logical level – and it can gently placate the aberrant heart.
When things don’t go well for us we’re often thinking of the people enrolled in those circumstances—about what they might have ‘against us’. Most of the time, however, these people are not against us at all—or not the way it appears to us at least.
There is a coarse interaction between the heart and mind as we deal with hurtful and troubling circumstances.
The Roles of the Heart and Mind
The heart’s role is to feel. It is there as our instinct. We intuit and perceive things with it. And often we respond from the heart.
The mind’s role is to think. It is there as our way of sensing situations; with it we decide and therefore judge.
Because neither the heart nor the mind is exclusive to the risk of the other they work in unison to form our sense of wellbeing.
Common Traps in Feeling and Thinking
Merry-go-round thinking is what happens when the heart is constantly informing the mind of its hurt feelings and the mind’s not doing anything but complying or agreeing with that input. As a result we have a situation where erroneously caustic thinking erodes at our concepts of these and other living situations, and ultimately on our self-esteem.
A sinkhole syndrome is therefore manifested and it can continue to form into something quite dangerous to us. This situation sees us not responding to the self-propagated negativity in positive, countering ways. The lower we go, the closer we get to mental, emotional and spiritual ill health.
A Proposed Solution
Our best objective is to simultaneously receive the hurt so it can be dealt with and processed—not denying it—whilst we manage these levels and process the hurt in safety. We need to be destined for healing, ultimately.
Let’s not forget that one core life purpose is to receive our healing throughout our lives. There is a more-or-less continual need of it.
We need to develop a system of responding to our hurts in a way that uses the best faculties of both the heart and the mind.
This is best done when the heart is free to feel, and where the mind checks and validates the feelings before rebutting these situations with its gentle truth, empathising always.
Here we’re allowing and even encouraging a dichotomy to exist between the heart and the mind. The heart is necessarily (and healthily) irrational, but the mind counters it with an empathetic logic. This way we’re not at war with ourselves. A sensible peace is therefore thrust at the pandemonium we otherwise experience.
Rocking back and forth, then, the heart issues its hurt feelings to the mind and the mind then responds with loving care, so that internally we’re not being torn apart. We’re actually just innocently vacillating. This sort of temporal double-mindedness is normal in situations of adjustment.
This is how we were designed to cope with everyday life grief.
This is how we adapt to our changing circumstances and mature through them.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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