Head Vs Heart - An Exploration

If we're always 'up in our heads' we become disconnected from our heart- our capacities for connection, empathy, and love. If we're always seeing through the eyes of the heart we may lose access to our clear-mindedness and discernment and become overwhelmed by emotion. In this talk, I explore the mind and the heart as two modes of being and ways of seeing that are often out of balance in us.

Transcript

The theme that,

Why it's really close to my heart is because I have seen in myself and in lots of people that the rational mind and the heart tend to occlude each other.

They tend to eclipse each other.

People who are very strongly rationally minded tend to lose access to their heart and their feelings.

And when someone is heart-centered and someone's rational-centered,

It's like two ships passing,

A lack of connection.

And then there are people who are so heart-centered,

So feeling-centered,

That they can't really connect with those who are seeing the world from a rational place.

So I want to explore that with you.

And I'll do a little bit of just unpacking my experience and ideas of these things,

And then we'll get into some experiential stuff.

So I see the rational mind and the heart as two central functions in our lives.

And they can work in harmony and in synergy.

And maybe when we think of somebody who's mature or inspiring or let's say emotionally or spiritually right,

They are working in harmony.

They're working together.

The heart is serviced by the mind and the mind is informed by the heart.

But they're often working in ways that hinder each other,

As I mentioned.

The main place I've seen this,

And I'll risk getting into stereotypes,

And it's just that,

Is in the men I've worked with.

Many,

It's not,

First number that came to my mind is 80%.

80% of the men that I've worked with are so rationally oriented that they're really distanced from their heart.

And they're longing for that heart.

They're longing for it,

But the rational mind is taking such a seat that it never gets off the throne and lets the heart really have access.

So that's really what I'm going to do.

So that's really touched me because I know it's possible for us to be in a place where these work in harmony.

So let me talk about the rational mind and just see what's resonant for you about this.

It,

For sake of expression here,

I'm simplifying things.

I'm making something that is nuanced into a caricature in a way,

Just so we can really look at this.

So the rational mind,

You could call it the know-it-all when it's in strong form.

First of all,

The rational mind,

Or the rational orientation,

Or the rational voice,

However you want to think about it,

It loves knowledge and it has an intellectual capacity that is helpful.

I mean,

The fact that we are on this call right now is due to somebody,

To many people,

Really taking their rational mind further than it had been taken before.

And here we are communicating beyond time and space and air conditioned homes.

That's because of the rational mind.

The rational mind,

The rational view sees a world out there that can be fixed.

So it sees things in terms of problems.

It tends to instinctively think about how it can understand and make something work better.

And it tends to explain to you how it could work better.

So the other,

I think,

Resonant for me,

Stereotype is the thing about mansplaining.

If it was women who had more identity with rational mind,

Maybe we would be calling it womansplaining.

But because more men are identified with the rational mind,

Where we call it mansplaining.

The rational mind,

To break this down further,

Sees things in terms of causality.

It wants to know why things happened.

It sees things in terms of cause and effect.

Is something wrong?

Yes.

What's wrong?

Let's find out.

There must be a reason.

It's reasonable.

Whenever we're thinking in terms of things have a reason,

That's actually the rational mind.

Even if we're thinking spiritually.

When we say everything happens for a reason,

In a sense,

Even though that's religious language,

We're thinking rationally.

So the rational mind tends to see things logically,

And it wants to make sense.

It wants to make sense.

So here's the interesting thing.

When the rational mind is dominant,

Somebody has an emotion,

Or they share it,

And the rational mind wants to know why it's happening.

Why is this emotion happening to me?

Rather than the emotion itself being an intimate communication,

The feeling itself speaks.

The rational mind wants to know where it came from.

It wants to make sense.

One thing we can notice pretty quickly is that if we're really attached or caught up in the rational mind,

We don't relate to intuitive or poetic truths.

And you might think of people in your life who are strongly rational,

Who are strongly identified with the rational mind,

And how they react to things like astrology,

Or chakras,

Or Zen Buddhism,

Or romance even.

They don't relate to poetic truths because the world is an object for the rational mind.

It just is out there in some way.

Let's measure it and understand it.

It tends to be disconnected from emotion,

As I said.

Now,

In the flexible person,

We would have access to both,

In the person with a holistic development.

A tendency that I have observed is that the rational mind can be a way to distance from emotion.

It's a way to get away from the mess of feeling,

A way to get away from the helplessness that we can have with emotion,

Or the way we can be intoxicated or captured by feeling.

It's a way to distance from that.

Rationality,

For example,

The scientific rational view,

Actually celebrates itself as a triumph over the lack of reason.

It celebrates itself as a triumph over instinct and being caught up in feeling.

But we can see that so much of patriarchy is built on that very thing.

It's a distancing from feeling and emotion in the body.

So it tends to live in a world of objects.

The rational mind doesn't access the intimacy and the relationality and the unity that we want,

Or at least that the heart wants.

It often sees people as objects because it's trying to understand something in the way that a rational mind does.

So lots more that can be said there.

And of course,

There are other sides to this,

Which I will be happy to hear.

Now let me switch to the heart.

And I'm using a broad definition here,

Not just emotional.

Maybe another word for the heart that is useful is innocence,

Which is something,

Curiously,

That the rational mind has assigned to a childlike state of maturity,

The quality of innocence,

Whereas it's not necessarily childlike at all.

So we could simplify things and say the heart feels and the heart loves,

And the intensity to which we have access to the heart depends on a lot of things.

It depends on the degree to which we inhabit our bodies,

Because the heart's knowing is through direct sensation,

Through feeling.

So I often am working with people and encouraging them to inhabit their chests and asking them,

Can you feel your chest?

Many people can't feel the living energies or textures in their chest or their heart.

It surprised me when I found out that,

Because I've always felt my heartbeat really strongly.

But many people cannot feel that.

They are not inhabiting their chests to a considerable degree.

There's a consequence to that.

The access to the heart has to do with openness.

So what I'm saying here is that there's something about willingness to feel.

There may be a reason why we don't feel the heart.

It may be much safer not to feel the heart,

Right?

And then to live in the heart more and enjoy its mode of being and sealing and seeing and feeling,

We would have to inhabit and be with what we don't want to be with.

You know,

There's dragons that guard that cave.

So that brings me to trauma.

If any of you have watched Dr.

Matei's "'Wisdom of Trauma' documentary,

Very beautiful documentary about trauma.

He was a addictions doctor who worked in downtown Vancouver with heroin addicts for decades.

And basically he says that everybody is traumatized and it closes the heart.

There's more pain than we have the capacity to feel when we're young.

And so we close the heart and we find ways of coping.

So to live more and more in the heart,

In a sense is a risk,

Because it means we feel more and more and we may have to feel things that we haven't wanted to feel.

The heart may open more with some people than others.

So there's something to be said for interpersonal resonance.

I think back to my stereotype of men,

Men fixate on women,

At least the American men,

Most of the American men I know,

They fixate on women as the means for them to get in touch with their heart.

And so they give the power to the woman because they don't know how to do that themselves.

But then when they're with the object of their affection,

It does open their heart.

And that's not a bad thing and it's not a good thing.

It can just be the way it is.

Certain people we feel safer and more resonant in the heart.

I have found in my voice dialogue practice that we develop on a level of the psyche protectors of the heart.

There are,

The heart has a quality of innocence.

It may be if you feel into,

And we'll do some of this in a little bit,

The age of the heart,

It may actually have a youthful quality to it.

It may actually be rather young.

So protectors develop.

Often the rational mind is a protector of the heart.

Often the critic,

The pleaser.

There's many different things that develop as a way of keeping us from feeling the heart and keeping other people from really touching it in a way that could be harmful.

These protectors are necessary.

You know,

They may be the result of trauma.

They're necessary,

They're not a bad thing,

But we wanna understand them or else we can't open the heart and experience the depth of our own love.

In contrast to rationality,

The heart is not concerned with being wise.

The heart is not logical.

We say foolishly in love,

Right?

From the rational point of view,

It's foolishly.

From the heart's point of view,

Love is its own fulfillment.

It's its own meaning.

It's its own wisdom,

Even if it's not wise.

So the heart being innocent tends not to think about causality.

That's why we will run into a road to save a cat.

We're not so much thinking about what might happen,

We're acting from the heart.

Or we may get involved in a relationship that's actually not helpful for us.

Or we may adopt a child that is actually gonna overwhelm us emotionally.

The heart is not thinking about,

Oh,

If I do this,

This is gonna happen.

We may have that voice in us to help,

But the heart itself is foolishly in love and is beautiful in being that.

It can be played like an instrument,

Just like the rational mind can be trained.

So in the European and in the Asian heritage,

We have long traditions of developing the intellect,

But much more emphasized in the West.

But in many traditions,

The development of the heart has long been cultivated and it can be mastered as well.

There are people who are masters at playing the heart.

They have PhDs in loving.

And that didn't happen to most of them just by their good childhood.

They worked at it.

There is skill to develop.

Here are two opinions I have I'd like to share with you.

And you may be noticing as I'm doing that is I'm in the rational mind describing the heart.

There's something ironic about this whole presentation.

I feel my heart as I do it.

It's giving me enthusiasm,

But this is a rational presentation.

I believe in observing myself over many years of meditation practice and intensive retreat and working with people,

Both as Zen students and as clients,

That the heart longs to be open.

We think that what I really want is a new car or a better career.

And that might be true for part of us.

The heart has its own desire and its desire is to be unfettered.

Its desire is to be open and open and more open.

And it suffers closure.

Heartache is our desire to wake out of our current limitations on love.

That might be another reason why we don't want to inhabit our hearts or our chest because it's speaking something to us.

We get in touch with the heartache that we carry that we might always carry.

Think about the world we live in now.

How could we not be heartbroken?

Our capacity for beauty and wonder,

I believe is connected to the heart.

And finally,

The heart is physical and we can feel the heart.

We can feel its openness or closure.

It's energetic.

Some things bring energy,

Vitality into our hearts and we may very well feel it in the heart center.

And the heart is spiritual in the sense that it's not something that we could say belongs to the mind or the body.

It may even be that the heart is beyond any of us as individuals.

Reviews

Best wishes.🙏

Thanks

I found that I wanted the talk to continue as I found it totally engrossing! I am thankful for this insight. Needed and necessary understanding for us to explore!

Really great talk…would love to learn more about how the heart & mind can work together to bring balance. 🙏🏽