Your Heart is the Knower
The Mind is not the Knower
So often we move about our lives trying to figure out what things means, preparing and plotting our next action steps and attempting to find answers to all of our questions about this mysterious universe. We have a tendency to feel safer if we can make meaningful sense of things, find answers to our questions or have some type of clear direction that we can comfortably take. Being in uncertainty, the unknown or the ever present present moment tends to feel too unstable for us and we seek for solidity in our thoughts or the physical universe.
Why is it that we attempt to create safety through our minds perceived sense of knowing? The most direct answer is because we think that we are our thoughts. We are identified as our thoughts and believe that we are separate distinct entities disconnected from a larger knowingness. If we were connected to a larger knowingness of ourselves we would never for even one second attempt to use our minds to create certainty, stability and a sense of knowing. Due to the fact that being veiled from the larger truth of ourselves is part of this human experience and learning, we seek for some solid ground through our thoughts because that is what is most accessible to us.
Despite what you may think your mind is not the knower. Your mind is simply a thinker. It produces thoughts but does not know from where they come. The knower is larger than or beyond the level or your mind. If we step back and look at this from the perspective of levels of development we will see that development evolves from physical body (the survivor), to emotional body (the reactor), to mental body (the thinker) and then into soul (the heart). Many humans right now are waking up, if you will, to level of soul, but it is not the natural default for most. Rather mind and thoughts is the default and hence why we seem to perpetually come back to trying to figure things out as if we are separate object in a universe of separate objects that all act independent of each other and don’t share information or energy between them.
When the mind is in charge it tries very hard to do, to figure out, to know and to make happen. The mind also likes to make things difficult and complex where there isn’t difficulty or complexity. It is the great confuser. Yet the more confused we feel the more we try to think our way through it and end up in the vicious loop of which there is no way out. The only way to find our way through is make contact with that which knows. The gateway to the knower is through the heart. The language with which the heart speaks is not with thoughts but instead with the energy vibration of love. Leaning into this language is the clearer of all confusion and recognition of non-separateness.
Getting to Know the Knower
Language of Love
Why is it seem so hard to lean into the heart? Why do we look for something other than the language of love? First things first. Many of us have layers of protection around our heart-soul body making it difficult to even make contact with it. These layers exist due to pains that we experience in our lives. Most of us don’t consciously close ourselves off, it is simply the defensive nature of our nervous systems to protect us when we feel any type of pain, which is quite common on this human journey. When this protective response gets activated its puts us in our more primitive bodies which are the physical, emotional and mental bodies. Even though the mind is more complex in organization then the physical or emotional body it is still a more primitive body than that of the soul/heart body.
Many people live their entire life in a mostly protected, defended state and are very functional and contribute great things to the world. They have friends and families, successful careers or businesses and belong to communities. Most people have no idea that they are living in a state of protection, that is until life brings them a situation which seems outside of what they can handle. This is often loss in any of it forms. Loss of loved one, loss of a relationship, loss of purpose, loss of health, loss of function of some part of the body, loss of resources, etc. These experiences of loss are the biggest catalyst/activator that we have to evolve, wake up to more of ourselves and become undefended, and yet we tend to see them as catastrophic. Many people don’t see how these situations are pushing them into growth and they stay focused solely on the loss.
This brings me to language of the heart which is love and why we tend to not listen to it or see it as the knower. When the mind is running the show of our lives we want linear, logical and mentally sound answers. To the mind love seems too fluffy or like its not enough. We often feel like we need more than just love. We need hard, concrete, physical answers and quite frankly love doesn’t seem to be powerful enough for all of that. So we seek and search for an answer that we can make sense out of rather than directly experiencing the all knowingness that comes with love. We choose effort, fight and resistance over ease, grace and acceptance. Why make it easy when we can make it hard and treacherous instead.
The reason why most people have this perception of love as not quite powerful enough, or simply not enough, is because they have only experienced love for fleeting moments at a time. Their baseline experience has not been such where love has been the primary experience day in and out for years or decades at a time. In fact people rarely experience nothing but love all day long for even a single day at at time. That which we experience more often tends to speak louder and we tend to place more belief and value in it. Hence why our thoughts dominate and we tend to rely on them as that which knows best.
Our heart is the knower. Its doesn’t think, it knows. When we lean into the heart, doubt dissolves and clear seeing is revealed. There is no longer anything to figure out. We realize that love is not only enough, but it is the organizer of everything and essence of our very nature. Here is where the mysteries resolve themselves and the present moment comes alive as our direct experience. There are no problems in love, nothing to fix or solve, there is only the pure knowing of the perfection that is and the playing out of that in all the myriad of forms.
Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado