How Our Mind Works in Our Experience

You are a soul, playing out a physical experience on this planet. Your soul enters a vehicle called the body that allows us to have a physical experience on Earth. The body is made up of several essential parts including your brain, which is comprised of many components that ultimately serve to decode this reality into something that isn’t simply an energetic soup. It also allows us to process important aspects of the human experience, using things like logic and calculation so you can understand how to walk, run, jump, communicate, build, create, and so forth. Your consciousness USES the mind as a tool in the human experience.

For example, when you receive information from your higher self, through your heart to your physical experience, the mind processes that information and learns how to use it within this experience. The connection between the heart and brain is quite evident scientifically, and the heart actually sends signals to the brain to communicate. The mind is a key factor in the entire relationship between our mind, body and spirit. One can’t function fully within the human experience without the other.

Where We’ve Become Unbalanced

We know that the mind is here working in our favor to have the experiences we need. But it’s also important to mention that in some ways, the mind can easily lead us from our desired path.

The mind is layered and also contains a powerful program called the ego. The ego can essentially be broken down into two layers: upper ego and lower ego. The upper ego has the basic understanding that we are separate, in experience, from others and are playing out an individual identity for the purpose of evolution. The lower ego is more about intense and increased separation, strong identity attachment, fear, and incessant stories. The lower ego serves us by showing us what it feels like to be disconnected from our true selves and from others, unable to live harmoniously with the Earth, animals, etc. This has been a tool in many ways, but our challenge is now to overcome the power it has and learn to find our true selves beyond it.  My disincarnate spiritual mentor has told me on numerous occasions, "Human nature, the lower ego, is that force that spiritual must move against in order to create the possibility of spiritual evolution."  We can never eliminate the lower ego, but we can consciously work to override it until we can ultimately influence its effects and incorporate it into the wholeness of our being.

To shift from allowing our ego to dominate or life and create our reality to living from our hearts and simply using ego and mind as tools, we must focus on creating more self-awareness. We must pay attention to our thoughts for a moment and simply observe them. When we observe them, we begin to see that, though they are part of our experience, they are nevertheless separate from us. We do not have to obey our thoughts. We do not even have to agree with our thoughts. Our thoughts are generated from the field of human consciousness and match our state of being every moment of our lives. Be depressed and your mind will flood with thoughts of depression. Be sad and your mind will be flooded with a thousand thoughts about why you should be even more sad. But be grateful and joyous and you mind will be flooded will endless thoughts of joy and gratitude. Throughout this process, you are always the one observing the thoughts, not the one who created them. You can control your thoughts by tuning out the unwanted ones and focusing on the desired ones. Over time you will learn to quiet those thoughts by not giving them so much attention or weight. By using tools such as mindfulness, meditation, and intentional living, you will become the master of your thoughts and your emotions.

This is a journey. It’s a practice, not something that happens overnight, and like building any muscle, it takes time.

How to Live from the Heart

When you begin to identify less with the ego and incessant mind thoughts, you begin to FEEL more. This does not mean having more emotions; this means having a deeper conscious feeling within your heart. Some might call this following your intuition or listening to your gut. It’s about paying attention to the subtleness of each moment, the energy and nature of what exists in the present moment.

Living from the heart does not suddenly mean you don’t think, you don’t do work, you don’t live life, or that you meditate all day. It means you begin experiencing this life with your heart driving your experience. It means doing things from a space of heart-driven consciousness rather than what your ego is telling you to do for reasons you can’t quite describe. It’s doing things because they come naturally versus out of fear or worry. It’s about doing things because you feel it’s what you need to do. 

As you live from the heart, you still use your mind, your body, your logic, your creativity, etc.; your actions are simply guided by something entirely different, and your ego becomes a quiet program that sits off in the background. Your lower ego, sometimes referred to as the monkey mind, doesn’t have the same power it once did because you are now tuned into a very different source.

When we all begin to live from the heart, we no longer need to live based on old beliefs, habits or outside influences. Instead, we live naturally through oneness consciousness, which is what’s already emerging from our hearts. We care for one another, we create systems that work for everyone, we treat each other as equal because we do not judge differences, and we collectively create a world where we can all truly thrive and utilize the gifts and abilities that we each came here with. Living from the heart is where we are headed, but we must do the work to embrace it and embody it.

It’s a Process - Let It Unfold

Practice self-awareness to avoid being hard on yourself during this process but also be aware of the limits we often place on ourselves to justify certain behaviors. We are addicted to our old thoughts and feelings. They are our familiar state of being and moving out of those old thoughts and feelings can be incredibly difficult if we are not ready to change. We often say, “We’re only human,” which is meant to imply that we all make ‘mistakes,’ but it’s a slippery slope to constantly justify the avoidance of evolving beyond old patterns that can be challenging to transcend.  This is probably one of the most limiting statements we can actually make about ourselves, as who we truly are is not human, but an infinite, divine being experiencing a human incarnation that happens to be going through a massive evolutionary shift in consciousness. Remember the old adage, "Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're correct." The habits and beliefs that you have accepted about yourself will absolutely establish the boundaries you will remain in for the rest of your life. This includes your spiritual path and your progress toward achieving a divine inner connection and gnosis. You are the creator of your life. Every thought and emotion you are accepting and allowing are either taking you either closer to or far away from your life objectives.  

Allow the experiences, the knowledge, the wisdom and your natural gifts and abilities to be guide and assist during this ongoing process. And it is going to be an ongoing lifetime.