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.
Therefore a sinkhole syndrome manifests 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 inner double-mindedness is normal in situations of
adjustment. There is inner double-mindedness so there doesn’t need to be outer
double-mindedness.
All this assumes a mature mind. The mature mind accepts what is
and doesn’t judge it. It’s always best that we do not judge what is from the
angle of right or wrong. We let it be.
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.
***
The heart’s role is to feel. The
mind’s role is to think. They can help each other when we feel hurt or troubled
as we process our struggles. The mind accepts what is and doesn’t judge it. Likewise, the heart
feels without judgment; we just sit with the feeling. It’s best we don’t judge
angles of right or wrong. We let it be.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
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