Living in my heart, leaving the body-mind paradigm behind, feels like insanity.

Is stepping away from the old paradigm even possible in this storybook life? Yes. It seems it is and I’m as surprised as you are. It feels like a choice, but it isn’t, not really.

The protective layers wrapped around this body have suffocated the brilliance of aliveness for eons. They never ever worked. I still felt pain, fear, angst, numbness, regardless of how many layers I put between my experience and life.

Life sucks … and it is beautiful, filled with joy and happiness, the Pièce de Résistance of aliveness. It’s messy, and it’s harmonious, a two-faced dish, with infinite variations, best served with generous helpings of awareness. Bodies, no matter how much minds says differently, aren’t as fond of it as you’d think.  

This body has survived trauma aplenty, personally and collectively. It has collected definitive proof, undeniable evidence that tensing is required, that I should remain attentive and wait for the next shoe to drop. That darn shoe has always dropped and it most likely will again. To a thinking mind, it seems insane to evict the vigilance, vigilance which is of the mind, and yet lives in the body.

Heart’s wisdom is something else altogether. While mind’s knowing is bound up in what came before, the heart’s insight lies in the realm of potential and possibility. The past can never fully release its implanted trauma. It needs it to remain viable, to keep its storylines front and center. The past will not usher us into a transformed future. It can’t. Focusing on fear, consciously or not, will not shift the fear, nor the hate and anger. The past is dead energy and dead energy is well, dead. It can only create ghosts of the past.

But wisdom—alive, heart-centered, revealing itself anew with each breath, can and does perpetually impart original potentialities, the only truly original thoughts and acts available to us.   

Through the lens of the heart, whatever happens is met, is organically moved through, is understood as the grace it truly is, even when it looks like something else entirely. Resting in the heart, the next step effortlessly appears.

Moving fully into the heart triggers a collective fear that doing so will somehow limit the ability to be of good use. Mind is funny like that. It attacks that which will free us, that which frees up unlimited power, that which is the crux of all real solutions, with stories targeting the pathways of freedom: compassion, caring, and love. It flips our understanding around, turns it inside out, stealthily remaking it in fear’s image.

This particular fear comes prepackaged with a software hook that keeps us in the drama … for the good, an offer of recognition to those who suffer, the provision of compassionate respite to those in harm’s way, a way for our storied character to fight for the right, to be of use even when the actuality of life has been seen through.  

It sounds admirable, yes?

Tricky, fear is. Bowed humbly, I am.

So, we are sucked back into the drama, believing that we are doing what is right, trusting ourselves to find solutions, offering ourselves up on the altar of rebellion, not realizing that doing so adds to the drama, making it more solid and unmovable, creates subterfuge around solutions, and undermines the genuine powerhouse we are.

Thinking we are doing what is right, that we are part of the solution, we make ourselves impotent and small … and then wonder why we are so very tired, why our nervous systems are lit up like Santa’s Christmas tree, why we can’t seem to make a dent in the trauma-drama surrounding us. We are caught, firmly in the trap, still in the mind, distanced from our innate intelligence—the wisdom of the heart.

Until we aren’t.

In a way, it feels like a leap of faith. Trusting the netless will always feel that way, but eventually you come to the point where the futility is clearly seen, kind of like that moment when you realized life wasn’t in your control. You tried everything you could, and still you failed, or at the least got less than you were after. Even if you succeeded, right on the heels of your great boon, you immediately reminded yourself that next time you might not. Remember—life sucks even when you are in denial. 

What I am referring to here is more of a body leap than the spiritual leap you may have already taken. The body seems to be the last to get it, and until awareness permeates down to the last cell, the body will act like a magnetic force pulling you back into the fray.

Eventually, though, even the body’s holdouts are brought to the point of futility. You see that bracing never got you anywhere, that holding your breath only battens down your many hatches, that you are so over an inflamed nervous system, and something within you simply knows that it doesn’t have to be this way. That’s when pure willingness arises, when holding on, holding out, just isn’t worth the price anymore. 

It is at this point that pure willingness arises. It is a bridge to carry you beyond reflexive physical constraints that tense for no reason other than embedded expectation, that swell with dread for what the body-mind fears might come, that stop you dead in your tracks, planting doubt, deadening the experience, replacing the ease of harmonic creation with mental sludge and bodily resistance. These limitations, noticed and now abandoned, were necessary at the time, but they have lost all usefulness.

If choice exists, I choose to live in my heart, to leave the body-mind paradigm behind. If there is no choice, I am truly grateful for life’s grace that granted the awareness to see this amazing possibility. Honestly. I tend to think it is both.   

Amaya is the author of 7 books, the latest Actuality: infinity at play. It is available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and IngramSparks and others. Link to B&N https://bit.ly/4bXLFie

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