Connecting Your Head & Your Heart

Got this piece below in an eMail a day or so ago. It's from John Petrov of Attractor Genie, a personal development software application that although I haven't used (being a Mac guy) I have heard great things about from people I trust.

In this piece, John speaks about the connection of what I call "the Head and the Heart." It's a bit different from my take I learned mostly from Kurt Wright and his landmark book Breaking The Rules, which I use as a foundation in my Mentor-Coaching work.

I've taken the liberty of "interrupting" John below with a couple of notes. Please let me know what you find most useful & valuable.

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Hi, It's John Petrov, from Attractor Genie.

I want to show you how I've learned to make my heart and mind get along. Because unfortunately...

It's typical in our society to feel a conflict between what we want to do (our heart) and what we feel is practical (our mind).

We end up living 1/3 of our lives in a cubicle for the 'benefits.' We stay friends with people we only kind of like. We do and say things to fit in and seem cool that really go against what we feel is right in our hearts.

Because it's caused so much heartache in my life, I've spend a lot of time trying to diagnose the source of this problem.

Is my heart at fault? Are my feelings just silly and frivolous? Or maybe it's my mind that's to blame. It seems like it's always coming up with conflicting messages anyway.

And on it goes and we never really seem to get to it. There's a lot of social conditioning that covers up and obscures things too.

Even if you really feel like that's the right choice, how do you know for sure? How do you know it's not just what you think you should do?

All of this might sound a little over the top, but it's a real problem. It ruins lives because people can't make up their minds about whether or not the path of their heart is valid or not. They end up living a shadow of the possibility that they could. All because they couldn't make up their mind.

There's a simple answer to this problem. It might seem even a little too simple. But most things are. Bruce Lee once said "The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity." I believe this.

First... let's take a look at where this problem starts.
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Confusing the purpose of the heart and mind
The main reason we suffer from this illness of indecision, is that we've mistaken the purpose of heart and mind. The heart is like a compass, it's purpose is to guide the direction our lives should take. Our heart takes a birds eye view on our life and says 'this is where you're at and this is the direction you need to go.'

Our mind on the other hand isn't made for making purpose driven decisions. The nature of the mind is that it conceptualizes, organizes and compares information. It does this as best it can and says "here are the facts, here's both sides of the story."

If we compare our mind and heart to a courtroom, our mind would be the defendant and the plaintiff (both stories) and our heart would be justice or the judge (the right direction).

The reason we're so troubled by this conflict of head vs heart is that the mind is not only playing the prosecutor and the defense, but has take over the role of the judge as well.

The mind should never be the judge. The minds job is to compare and contrast. To sort things out and say "this is what I've got, do what you want with it."

But more often than not, our mind isn't doing that. Our mind is making our choices. What's worse, is even when we don't need our mind to be at work, it's still going. Comparing and contrasting everything. Brooding, mostly.

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NOTE: I'm adding this piece from Breaking The Rules here, because it's another view in agreement with what John's just written. Here the "mind" is the Rational/Analytical mind Kurt Wright refers to. The Heart is the "Intuition."

This brings to mind another key discovery from Dr. Sperry’s [Nobel prize winner Dr. Roger Sperry] work.

When the analytical mind is surgically separated from the intuition... it is completely incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction.

This finding has profoundly important implications for many aspects of our lives. For starters, we'll take a look at how it relates to effortless high performance. Remember, our analytical mind is programmable—just like a computer chip. The programming of a computer chip can best be described as the external manipulation of its one/zero, on/off binary code. Please note: the instructions must be initiated from outside the chip. The chip has no ability to judge whether the instructions are right or wrong, good or bad.
The instructions either work or they don’t, and this occurs quite independently from any right/wrong, good/bad value judging by the chip—which, of course, it cannot do anyway.

Here is where this gets tricky. Notice the extremely subtle distinction between the one/zero, on/off, yes/no binary code mechanism of the computer chip and the right/wrong, good/bad value judging that we attempt to do with our analytical minds. It is the built-in one/zero, on/off, yes/no capability, which makes our analytical mind so perfectly suited for its deductive reasoning task. Unfortunately, this exact same capability makes our analytical mind completely vulnerable to being deceived into thinking it can judge right or wrong, good or bad. In truth, however, it simply cannot execute the judging function....

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Have you ever noticed that even when it's completely unnecessary to think about anything, your mind is still going?

Have noticed that when this is happening, your mind is getting in the way of your experience? Just a few examples of this that come to mind for me are; watching a sunset, or taking a shower. My mind really doesn't need to be thinking while doing these things. There's no point. At all.

Taming the mind
Before we can get the mind to take a break when we don't need to be incessantly thinking, we have to make friends with it first. If we try to tell our mind to go away, or that we don't need it, we'll just encourage it all the more. Instead of a retreat we'll get a resurgence. We don't want that.

So if we want to end the conflict of head and heart, we've got to figure out a way to marry this disparate pair.

Remember when I told you the answer to this problem is simple? Well, it is. But it won't be easy at first, because we've been doing it all wrong for so long.

What we have to do is only use our mind to go with ourselves. The Latin root for sin means "to go against." So we have to learn to be without sin.

We have to learn to constantly realigning our decisions to be "with ourselves."

Have you ever wondered how to tell whether a decision is right? It seems so difficult, doesn't it? But it becomes so easy when you think "Is this choice going with me, or against me?" You'll find that the right choice is immediately evident.

If you can learn to practice this every time you make a choice, you'll start to regain your personal power.

You'll create a marriage of your heart and mind. Maybe then their child (you) won't have permanent emotional damage from the divorce it's been suffering from for so long.

Make the choice today. Just try it out. I think you'll like it.

Go with yourself.

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NOTE: One "tool" I've found extremely useful in helping me (guiding me) to "go with myself" in the moment is My Life Purpose. Please make the time to review the video about Life Purpose here in The FoggBlogg. Just click the link.

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To your success,
John Petrov

PS: The cleansing you will experience after completing this exercise will invigorate you. If you want to turbocharge this process please consider using the Attractor Genie Software.

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Please, let me know what you appreciate most about John's perspective and the whole idea of marrying the Head & the Heart. 

Thanks.

I appreciate you!

 

 

 

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