The heart-mind

We tend to experience our head as being the seat of the mind, which we consider to be the realm of thoughts, whereas our emotions are of a different world, perhaps of the heart. However this is a rather cultural division. Sages of the Indian tradition wrote of the heart-mind. If they wrote of the heart, they meant the heart-mind. If they used a word such as manas, which is usually translated as "mind" they  mean heart-mind. Is this a way of seeing that is useful for us?

It is not hard to experience the interrelationship of thought and emotion. For example, let's say we take a belief that I am not good enough. If you take that belief to be true, what does if feel like in the body. This is just a thought, a belief. But do you feel it in your head, or in the body? What emotions are co-arising as you take this belief to be true? Where in the body do you feel the emotion? Now let's take another belief, let's take the belief I am perfect just as I am. If you take this belief to be true, where do you feel it in your body? And what emotions co-arise with it? Where do you feel that emotion in your body?

You can try this also with memories, images, all kinds of cognitions. Can you have a cognition without a visceral feeling experience, or without emotion?

My own experience is that thought and emotion are always present together, and they always have a feeling right in the body somewhere, often in the chest region, that is, in the heart. Even though I have the cultural conditioning of thinking in the head, if I stop and examine my actual experience, the experience is mostly in the torso of the body, in the heart! Chances are high that I am not unique and this might be your experience too.

So it turns out that English is inadequate to express this, though we can turn it to reflect our true experience with some creativity. In the article I link to below, a Chinese man in a case study who is saying he could not rest, uses an expression that literally translates as I could not put my heart down. To draw attention to our true experiencing we might use expressions like body-mind or heart-mind.

If you have experiences of insomnia, perhaps next time you are laying awake you could amuse yourself by noting the experience in your body, rather than the churn of thoughts being in the head. Perhaps you could experience not being able to put your heart down on such a night. And see how it is an ever changing feeling-scape.

It comes back to somatic experiencing and yoga practice is about somatic experiencing, ever refining our ability to feel into even the subtlest experiences of the body. A slow and somatic yoga practice, whether you flow or hold postures, turning attention inward, reveals it all.


If you are interested, I found this academic article, Thinking Hearts, Feeling Brains:Metaphor, Culture, and the Self in Chinese Narratives of Depression that shows the cultural dimension of where we experience the seat of thought.

Image sourced from another nice article Wisdom is a Matter of Both Heart and Mind Neuroscience.com

Asking the question, what is true?

Sigmund Freud's posited construct of the mind was tripartite, consisting of id, ego and super-ego. Id is the instinctual drive; Ego is more than just a sense of self, it is the organising aspect of our psyche; while Super-ego aims for perfection and is super-critical, punishing imperfection with feelings of guilt and shame.

I am no expert in Freudian psychology. No doubt if I were I could write a book just talking about these three aspects of self and telling you how Freud's own thinking on them developed. But I am not and I cannot. It is interesting, however, that our common everyday use of the word ego has parted company somewhat with Freud's theory. Ego is the Latin word for I, so we tend to make the word synonymous with our sense of I-ness. What in non-dual tantra might be called ahamkara. 

The word ego is tossed around as if it is something undesirable. As such it is being confused with another term, egotism, which is the state of being excessively self-absorbed. So when we say something like "Oh, he has such an ego!" in that judgy, perjorative way that we do, we are really saying that he is egotistical, that is, self-absorbed. And what a terrible way to be, poor person!

Of course, the self in which this poor person is so absorbed is not that capital S Self that is used as a descriptor for the Universal Consciousness, beyond concept, which is therefore impossible to describe. No, it is the small s self, I, me. It is a thought and a bunch of ideas, beliefs about what "I" am.

Note well that it always another person, never ourselves that we hold this belief about, that they are self-absorbed and egotistical. Yet this belief about another is surely created as a reaction to another belief, that things should be a particular way which make me feel comfortable and this person is in someway violating that and therefore must be wrong, namely, they are self-absorbed. Is it not our own self-absorption that created a belief that things should go our own way that leads to this other belief that another person is self-absorbed.

The message here is that it is all belief, all thought and you just cannot trust it to be in anyway true.

Maps of the territory 

Freud's theory of Id, Ego and Super ego is nothing more than a map or model of the mind and sometimes perhaps its view is useful, but there are other views which might serve us better, sometimes.  It is like Google maps.  We can see the map, the street view, perhaps we might even be able to see a satellite image and so forth. We use the view that is most useful. 

The yoga tradition has also mapped the territory, in many ways, with the purpose of pointing us beyond the mind to the essence of our true nature.

What do we really know is true?

This is the essential question on the spiritual path. In many ways it merges into this other big question:

Who am I?

In answering Who am I? we might come up with all sorts of labels and beliefs. A name? That is a label. A place in a family, wife, husband, mother, father, sister, brother? Are they not labels too? Can a label be true? Do they tell you what is your essence nature?

It can be scary as you begin to peel away all the labels, all the ideas, all the beliefs and begin to recognise them as being quite unreliable, things that in fact feed your own self-absorption. The pathway to Self-absorption is destructive. Big S Self-absorption, which is to rest in your essence-nature, cannot co-exist with small s self-absorption. The moment we fall back into small s self-absorption we are forgetting our big S Self.

Small s self is quite worried about being destroyed and is as adaptable as a super-virus to any attempt to undermine it. But the thing is that it is the absorption that we are overcoming in order to abide in our essence nature. Then we can utilise the small s self to navigate life without being pulled into absorption, simultaneously knowing our true Self, which is so much more!

Practice

If you are ready for this scary journey here are some things you might do.

Practice iRest® Yoga Nidra meditation. Within the iRest protocol you are invited to examine your beliefs, pair them with opposites , notice the emotions that co-arise and trace them into the feelings in the body, pair them with opposites and ultimately recognise that neither is completely true, opening the way for experiencing that which is true.

Another practice is to take a notebook, a pretty one is best, one that you could really value. In it write everything that you think is true about yourself , others and the world. Putting it out there can help you find objectivity and might help the process of taking it into meditation and really examining its veracity. When it is full find an opportunity to ritually burn it. With it burn all attachment to those beliefs.

Surrender

In the end there is no doing, no practice. It is simply being prepared to surrender.

There is no such thing as a negative thought or emotion

Does your mind rebel at this statement?

There is no such thing as a negative thought or emotion.

I will stand by it.

It is not to say that I find every thought or emotion comfortable. Far from it. I just think that we should not regard them as "negative".

Every teaching you receive should be put through the filter of your own experience. Thus far I have found that the teachings that stand up in my experience are simple, which is not necessarily the same as easy. So it is with this statement. There is no such thing as a negative thought or emotion.

Reinforcing the belief that they are negative makes things worse

When I see the self help writings offering ways to "rid yourself of negative thoughts and emotions" I experience sadness. The expectation that you can rid yourself of uncomfortable emotions is so unrealistic. The teachers of these ideas are sincere enough, and they seek to help.  Their methods might work for awhile, but in the end those uncomfortable sensations will return.

In fact the perpetration of the idea that they are something you want to be rid of, the idea that they are negative and therefore undesirable, can actually create conditions for them to increase. Any strategy to push them away is bound to be unproductive and even increase the experience of those same emotions and thoughts over time. If they are undesirable, it is logical to push them away.

A radical shift in perspective is called for

As I said before, every teaching you receive should be put through the filter of your experience. To do that you must, of course, first give the teaching a preliminary assessment. If it asks you to do harm, to yourself or others, it is as well to reject it as being false. True teachings are benevolent, not malevolent. Beyond that you can only assess the effectiveness of a teaching by trying it out. I am sharing this teaching with you because I tried it out and found it to be effective, and so I take it to be true.

The radical shift in perspective is to regard everything that arises, including uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, as messengers whose message is a pointer to our essential wholeness. As messengers with such important and useful messages, the only thing to do is to welcome them and to enquire of them what it is they have to reveal.

The moment you turn towards, instead of away, from whatever is here, it ceases to have so much power over you. All the while you are turning away, pushing it away, you are in fact becoming more fused with it.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but in the act of turning towards it you are in fact de-fusing with it. You are immediately allowing it to be a movement in awareness, along with all other movements in awareness. Doing so frees up its passage to move on through, and its movement through opens the space for something else to move through and that something else might just be a more comfortable emotion or thought.

Of course, if a comfortable thought or emotion is present, it must be greeted in exactly the same way. It is pointless to try to fuse with it and hang onto it. It has come, as a messenger, allow it to deliver its message and move on through.

The dance of manifestation

This shift of perspective brings us into the position of witnessing what is going on instead of being caught up in it. From this perspective we witness the dance of manifestation. That part of manifestation that is this body is full of sensation, energy, emotion, and thought. These movements are coming and going  as a microcosm of the larger manifestation which is the entire universe.

Everything that manifests arises (is born), grows, stabilises and abides awhile, declines, erodes and decays and is reabsorbed. Everything. Can you think of anything that doesn't? Even a mountain. Even a planet. Even a star. Even the whole universe itself. Some things have a short period for this cycle, and some longer. Time itself is a part of the dance.

Compared to the cycle of manifestation of this body, the cycle of manifestation of any emotion or thought is short, sometimes fleeting, sometimes a little lingering, but short nevertheless, especially when it is being welcomed with curiosity.

And this is the message, or at least part of it.  It is simple. Everything comes and goes and nothing is permanent. This too shall pass! And in its time bound manifestation there is beauty. There is beauty in the grief, in the shame, in the sadness, in the nervousness, as much as there is in the joy, the friendliness, the compassion, the delight.

Who is doing the witnessing?

The rest of the message is in the answer to this question. Who is doing the witnessing? The emotion or thought, comfortable or uncomfortable, is a messenger. When we welcome it we open to the shift of perspective that reveals that witnessing aspect. This points us back to that which is witnessing.

Different sages, different traditions, have different words for this, but we might call it capital C Consciousness or capital A Awareness. Notice that this is not the thinking mind because it can be aware of thoughts. This is that part of us, the Consciousness in which those thoughts, or emotions, or sensations arise, grow, abide awhile, decay and are reabsorbed.

I encourage you to read some previous posts which may help your explorations.

Dealing with negative thoughts and emotions

Reset your defaults

Follow the senses

Carl Sagan