Soulsong #496 – Head or Heart?
“You’re too much in your head. You need to live more from your heart.”
When giving this advice, spiritual teachers are usually recommending that people judge and analyze less and simply love more. Good advice.
But our thoughts and our feelings are not separate components of us, and neither of them is preferable to the other.
All emotion, without exception, follows some aspect of thought: remembering, observing, contemplating, pondering, ruminating, yes, perhaps analyzing. It’s never an either/or scenario – it’s always thought and THEN emotion.
Confusion results from the fact that there can be a time lag between thought and emotion – a time in which similar thoughts must first accumulate in order to evoke the resulting emotion. At other times, emotion follows so quickly on the heels of a thought that the time lag between them is indiscernible.
My emotions are my utterly precise guidance system designed to alert me to the nature of the thoughts I’ve been thinking. Feeling emotionally bad means I’ve been thinking thoughts that are at-odds with my happy Inner Being and my desires. Feeling emotionally good means that my thoughts are generally in harmony with my Inner Being and my hopes and dreams.
I came here to create the circumstances I want via my habits of thought. My emotional feedback system plays a crucial role in that process.
Head or heart? It’s both: one-after-the-other but hand-in-hand.
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Copyright 2007, Karen Williams
