Dissolving the Duality of Head and Heart

I came across an anonymous quote online that said – ‘The hardest battle is between what you know in your head and what you feel in your heart.’

So, I reflected on what this quote meant. As far as I can tell, it conveyed the following:

• “What you know in your head” represents logic, reason, and intellect. It’s the analytical part of our mind that processes information, evaluates situations, and makes decisions based on facts, evidence, and rational thinking.

• “What you feel in your heart” represents our emotions, instincts, and intuition. It’s the more emotional and subjective part of us, driven by feelings like love, fear, joy, anger, and empathy.

• “The hardest battle” emphasizes the internal struggle that occurs when these two forces clash. Our head might tell us to make a practical, logical choice, while our heart might yearn for something different, something more emotionally fulfilling.

We are conditioned to think the heart and the mind are two separate forces of ourselves. This is far from the truth. The fact of the matter is that the heart and the mind are one force that manifests differently. In a nutshell, the heart allows us to feel emotions and deal with aspects of our lives from a more deep and meaningful position. On the other hand, the mind propels us to approach situations from different perspectives.

But the heart and the mind are the same element that offers a path forward into clarity. The question is what causes us to treat this force in duality?

Conditioning of the mind and heart

Most often, you hear stories of people talking about how they lack the confidence to take a step forward in life. They attribute their traits to their childhood wounds. They’re not wrong because most of our past trauma and wounds stem from something that happened in the distant past or even the recent.

A 40-year-old adult may say that he or she still fears talking to people because their school teacher once humiliated them in front of the whole class for reading a text incorrectly. Or, they prefer spending more of their time in solitude because they’ve often been finding it challenging to make friends.

A younger adult may say they don’t want to get married because they are afraid that their married life might not work out. Their parents didn’t have a successful marriage so neither will they so why bother trying?

Yet another might reveal their hesitation to try anything new in life because of the time they were punished for exploring things.

We all experience the hardest levels of discomfort in our lives from time to time. The lessons we learn don’t come without their share of harshness and in that experience, we must take both the lessons and the trauma with us. Of course, along the way, we must learn to heal from the heartbreak and wounds, and only take the lessons. However, when we carry these wounds with us and rigid learnings, we apply them to ourselves as layers. These layers are what turn into the conditioning of the mind.

In the process of being conditioned, we split our heads and hearts until they look like two separate entities.

It’s like having our attention divided but this is not the way.

Deconditioning of the mind and heart

It is when we learn to decondition, we learn to follow a path that is more fluid and in alignment with our highest selves.

We must decondition ourselves so that we can learn to live in the moment rather than carry the baggage of conditioning. Imagine passing your conditioned mind through an X-ray baggage scanner. What baggage and past conditioning would show up? The extent of our deconditioned minds would show up and we would identify the level of deconditioning that’s required.

• So, our first step is to identify that we have layers.
• These conditions compel us to think and feel a certain way.
• This form of conditioning percolates through all the aspects of our lives.
• We act according to it and let our inner judge get influenced by it.
• Our inner judge forms conditioned impressions, neglecting the natural impressions.

Once we take the first step of realization, we have to minimize the impact of our expectations, assumptions, and desires. It’s all about the inner work we do in trying to either heal ourselves or unlearn the lessons that were so rigidly fixed within us. I must warn you, this is one of the hardest lessons but the most rewarding at the same time.