Blog: Healing Your Mind by Dropping into Your Heart
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Sometimes people come into my office struggling with a problem, and, whenever they try to address it, they find themselves stuck in “mind loops.” Mind loops are characterized by sequences of labyrinthine reasoning containing dead ends and knotted thoughts that fold back on themselves without producing the hoped-for clarity.
People who experience this type of mental confusion are usually viewed as having a high level of intellectual intelligence, and tend to work in professions that require the use of their intellect. These people are able to generate logic sequences that make them valuable contributors at work. This capacity, however, can often send the same people into mental traps when they try to apply these logic sequences to experiences that do not necessarily respond to logic.
Many people who have a highly developed intellectual capacity have developed mental processes at the expense of developing other types of knowing. Often, they will use their mental capacity to avoid emotions or other things that trouble them. When this happens, mental confusion invariably sets in.
The worlds of emotion, intention, and motivation are generally beyond grasping when only the intellect is applied to them. Unfortunately, emotions become even more confusing when people with strong intellectual capacity apply their usual logic sequences to the emotions in an effort to understand them. The effort to do this creates the loops, knots, and dead ends referred to above.
The best remedy for this kind of confusion is for the person who is experiencing it to drop out of the mental realm and try to understand what is bothering them from a more intuitive or feeling place. While the intellect can be seen as being located in the head, this intuitive feeling place is located in the heart. In order to achieve this move from the mental realm to the feeling realm, from the head to the heart, it is important to learn how to listen to experience through your heart.
Meditation and modalities like Depth Hypnosis and emotional intelligence training are both helpful in achieving this heart-centered place. Both offer pathways out of the mental realms and into the intuitive feeling realms.
For many people who are skilled in mental processing, the suggestion that they try to approach life from another angle can be very challenging. When presented with this suggestion, they will often generate highly elegant mental defenses to keep from exiting the sphere of the mind. Depth Hypnosis is particularly useful in these cases because it has many methods for piercing resistance while gently assisting the client past the resistance so that the client can perceive what is at the root of the mental confusion.
In fact, this root cannot be perceived by chasing the loops and knots. It is almost always a mistake to try and follow the loops and knots in hopes of arriving at resolution. Stepping out of the mental sphere and learning how to process information at other levels is the most effective method for alleviating mental confusion and understanding its root cause. To resolve mental confusion, I recommend becoming a student of the heart.
Becoming a student of the heart may sound easy. Do not be surprised or discouraged if it is more challenging than it sounds. Many people have abandoned experience in their hearts, and returning may take time and patience.
All phenomena have their own logic sequences. If you stop trying to put the logic sequences you generate mentally onto your experience and, instead, let it unfold, the experience will reveal its own logic sequences to you. This is how you can begin to let yourself learn to listen with the heart. If you are used to controlling your experience by generating your own mind sequences, it may feel like you are losing control of the world around you. However, in time, you will find you are far more able to use the intelligence of your heart to uncover the causative root of most phenomena, and far more at ease in the world. Mental confusion cannot exist in such an environment.
A version of this article was first published in 2008.
Editors’ note: For training in addressing energetic patterns and imbalances like over-reliance on the mind, you may be interested in the Integrated Energy Medicine training (next happening as an intensive series June 7 – 10, 2018) or the Depth Hypnosis Foundation Course.
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