The Wisdom Living in our Hearts
We are all thinking about some problem that’s in front of us. Replaying our options. Thinking of outcomes. Things we can say and the way to say them. Justifying our position. Promoting our agendas. The mind is happy - it’s occupied, it’s needed, it’s crunching on all cylinders like a well trusted machine. But the solution to the problem keeps getting further away, like a mirage in a desert.
Your mind says: “just give it a few more permutations and we will be there”. But you don’t feel any progress. No clarity, no resolution, no calm - just more anxiety, and “what if’s”. It’s a negotiation, it’s not a solution. Do you have your problem?
I recently came back from a weekend workshop with Guru Singh at Kripalu. One of his key themes was to balance the mind with the heart and the gut centers. With perfect exclamation he pronounced all of us humans out of balance on that front - as we live in a mind-captured body, driven by yes/no, good/bad thinking. And living as such, statements like: “what does your gut say?” Or: “your heart knows the answer” - sound ridiculous, unattainable or hypothetical at best.
But after a couple of days of Guru Singh’s magic, the heart begins to open and the gut’s wisdom ignites from the recognition it finally gets. Balance finally re-appears and starts to feel real.
We then proceeded to coach our neighbor on issues they were confronting in their lives. What keeps them blocked from complete commitment to personal excellence? We have 5-7 minutes per person. Sounds like an impossible problem to solve, no? A total stranger in front of you, with a totally unknown history and circumstances. How are you supposed to help them solve some of life’s hardest questions in 5 minutes?
The person in front of me looks sad, and tells me about being stuck and not knowing how to get out. As she speaks, my mind is quiet. My eyes are focused on her beautifully sad face. I register the infinite depth of cosmos in her round eyes.
I am perfectly hearing and understanding her words. I am not thinking about what I am going to say. When she finishes, I take a breath and let the words come out.
They are coming from my heart, filled with love and not judgement.
They are pouring from my gut with determination, confidence, and a clarity that my mind would have doubted a million times over. After a few minutes of back and forth, my neighbor’s eyes lit up and her face shines with a big smile. She starts to talk from a new place. She says she knows what needs to be done and where to start.
When it was her turn to give me wisdom, it felt even more powerful. I thought there was no way she could help me because I have thought of all the reasons already. When it was her turn to speak, she says: “listening to you, it appears that what keeps you from reaching your full excellence is the fear that once you reach that state, you won’t have this goal to work for anymore, life will feel empty of struggle to reach this goal and you are afraid of that."
I could never have thought of that, and it rang so true.
Is that the kind of wisdom that lives in our hearts and our guts?
Remember your problem?
Now, ask your heart-gut team to solve it in 5 seconds! One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Done.
If it’s silent down there and you got the answering machine with no answers (or the mind plunged into a speed thinking race) - it’s time to take a break from thinking, and do a yoga set, have some belly laughs, take a warm bath, give someone a hug, and tell yourself that you really really love yourself (although your mind will doubt it, your heart will love you back for saying it).
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