Mr. Brain, Meet Mrs. Heart.

I have alluded to this marriage in other writings, and I truly feel it deserves its due diligence. My highly advanced drawing skills depict the fundamental schism we can experience within ourselves. We have a heart that is always speaking to us, in the language of intuition, quiet inspiration, and subtle feelings that are meant to guide our lives. We have a brain that is subject to the conditioning of the world and our particular culture. While the heart remains true and open at all times, we can be susceptible to listening to and believing the brain's automatic thinking.

The mind/brain is susceptible to distractions of all kinds and it can easily go off on tangents, even when it comes to the important stuff like life purpose, true love, a fulfilling career, and so on. To use a personal example, I have had the heartfelt inspiration many times to start my own business providing counseling services to people as well as writing about topics that inspire me. Over the past 10 years, I have experienced what it is like to listen to my conditioned mind rather than my heart.

This has led me to taking jobs I didn't really want, agreeing to things that were not in line with my real values, and valuing money more highly than personal fulfillment and satisfaction. My heart, in its soft wisdom and patient compassion, simply kept sending pangs of inspiration to adjust my course. Meditating on this dilemma, I started looking at the content of my mind and came up against some pretty challenging material.

My father's voice was often heard in my head speaking to me of practicality, getting a "real" job, how important it is to save money, and how our true creativity can wait until we are financially secure. Different fears and anxieties seemed to wall me off from being able to simply act on my joy, and at times I found myself tempted to simply "settle" for some type of comfort zone, rather than working through the marital discord within my soul.

It took many hours and days of meditating and deconstructing a lot of these beliefs until I was able to commit myself to the message of my heart and begin acting upon it in a tangible way. This is the metaphor of the marriage inside each of us. The mind/brain has the sacred duty to listen to and commit to the inspiration of the heart, and come up with ways of acting upon it, bringing it into the world.

When the brain feels detached from the heart, as depicted above, we are lead into the labyrinth of distraction. Rather than manifesting our heart's deepest desires, we follow one thought after another and get lost within the content that is as divorced from heart-based inspiration as we are.

It has gotten to the point where being heart-centered can be considered strange or taboo by those who are the most disconnected from their own hearts. Without getting too locked into gender metaphors, we can consider the rational mind as the male aspect of our consciousness, and the heart as the female, the divine feminine. The spiritual awakening humanity is undertaking involves becoming receptive to this divine feminine energy and integrating it with the over-developed masculine energy.

Meditation and creative self-expression have been the main things that have helped me on this inward journey. Gardening and being in nature are also very effective ways to gradually integrate the heart and mind together. Conversely, being overly involved with technology can widen the gap within ourselves since our minds can get lost in endless content and leave the innocent heart to fend for itself.

I don't want this to just be another interesting thing to read about. The exploration of our consciousness and integration of our being is actually of such vital importance that mere words can only hint at it. This truly is a participatory journey that calls each of us deeper into ourselves, and ultimately out into the world to bring forth our own powerful and creative uniqueness. The apathy and disconnection that is running rampant right now cannot go on much longer. More and more of us are waking up to the creative divinity that lies within our hearts and minds and are cultivating the inner marriage that can no longer be neglected.

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