The Mystic Heart: Letting It Do What the Head Cannot

I don't know if you all have been feeling a bit extra heavy this week, but I've been feeling pretty murky minded and a bit weighty in the body. It's been a bit of trudging through thick mud as I move through my world, both outer and inner. And, to be fair, there is a large shift I think we are all grappling with, no matter the historical precedent of such world events, that leaves us feeling a touch unmoored.

I want to speak a bit on this, to cast out a line and anchor us in the ground of Presence through it all. And I think it can be summed up in a single sentence:

What the mind cannot hold, the heart has been made for.

What I mean by that is that to make sense of the world right now may be asking too much of ourselves. If we have the complexity of framework to support it, yes, we can bring the mind along with the heart (and this is part of what I teach in the Imaginal Collective). But the heart is the entry point. The heart is the way in to this place without losing ourselves to the mind-traps and quicksand of the sense-making mechanism which might be at a disadvantage when the world goes belly-up and nothing we've known to be true makes sense any longer.

Maria Sibylla Merian botanical illustration

When the mind flails, a lot of assumption fills in the gaps: personal narratives, belief systems, misunderstandings, etc. And they can concretize rather quickly when we feel like they're the only ground upon which we can stand when the quicksand is edging ever closer. It keeps us armored against an unjust world, stiff and reactive, every new sensation an attack. This is how people accept things that seem so outlandish to us. They've solidified them in their mind through this process: they felt destabilized by something unexpected that confronted them, they hastened to fill the cracks with anything they possibly could, and then layered the cement of personal eschatology over it to give them a stable surface (it would seem). This is often the hill people will die on. And it is hard to convince a scared cat to climb down the tree, no matter how much coaxing.

We do the same thing, thinking our rationales are superior to others, that our hill is more sturdy than another's. But the thing is, the ground of belief and conditioned narrative is always shaky ground and, something I taught in the Tower Proof class, is that when this ground gets shaky and things start to collapse, we're being offered a choice: rebuild consciously with better materials, or do the same thing we've always done, hoping it'll hold.

THE MYSTIC HEART IN THE TOPSOIL OF OUR BEING

Here's where the heart offers us something the mind cannot: topsoil.

You may be thinking, "what the hell is she talking about topsoil for?" I'm so glad you've asked, because of course I'll tell you. If you've spent any time in ecologically-minded spaces or with ecologically-minded people, you probably know healthy topsoil is vitally important for a thriving ecosystem. So what does that have to do with our interior world? We often assign the mind to the role of topsoil with disastrous results. But if we instead let our heart act as this membrane of ancient wisdom and collective understanding, we might just find ourselves on stable ground once more.

Think of it this way:

Imagine yourself as soil. You are the ground of Being here, your special little plot of land from which you grow your specialty crops, plants, and house all the multitudinous creatures you love, bugs, snakes, millipedes. You're healthy, vibrant, diverse, and you have an untouched, beautiful layer of topsoil: your heart.

This topsoil of the heart holds moisture without drowning in it; it allows the information to trickle and percolate down, staying fertile and responsive. It has the perfect structure to receive, but does not become overly saturated or swept away by the weight of it. Ah, relief.

Now, let's imagine this same situation, but with the mind as the layer of topsoil that first meets and disseminates the outside world inward. The mind's topsoil is thin and exposed, it's had the influence of others trodding it down, digging it up, just generally being accosted.

When the rains come heavy it doesn't absorb—it erodes, and washes away. It leaves you feeling exposed, vulnerable, and scared. Plants are uprooted, the soil can't be penetrated by the bugs and snakes that once resided there because it has become coarse, rigid, and cracks have appeared throughout it. There is no cohesion. Every bit of sunlight further cracks and damages it. Rains wash it away. Every natural movement of the world becomes destructive, chaotic, and painful. It feels like the ground will wash away at any moment or open a sinkhole below us.

In his essay "Two Economies," Wendell Berry describes how healthy topsoil has "at once the ability to hold water and to drain well" and that the discipline of good soil husbandry "requires acts that are much more complex than industrial acts, for these acts are conditioned by the ability not to act, by forbearance or self-restraint, sympathy or generosity."

He continues: "We cannot make topsoil, and we cannot make any substitute for it; we cannot do what it does."

When we let our mind do the job of being the top soil, we're assuming we can do, with rational thought and activity, what the heart does with innate wisdom and rest. We're left with unimaginable work to just get ourselves feeling cohesive again, but we are doing so with the wrong tools, being left to feel deflated and disempowered. Maybe we begin to believe this is "just the way the world is," not realizing we're just needing to step back from knowing and step into trusting, sympathy, and generosity.

But letting the heart do its job as topsoil lets sensation and information in without being swept away or flooded. This is ancient technology, something the mind cannot even begin to wrap its...mind...around. Our mind was birthed with us, it's only as old as we are, but the technology of the mystic heart is ancestral, passed on from generation to generation, and from spirit to matter. Through it, we can experience the reality of our lives, can acknowledge the emotions and felt sense of it, while not washing away our sense of stability or feeling overburdened by information. 

The powerful thing about the heart is that it isn't trying to make sense of the world; it's the perceptual spiritual organ that can be with what doesn't make sense, without needing to resolve it into narrative. This is where resting in the childlike wisdom of the heart can be a mercy to ourselves. This is where we can say, "this hurts," without needing to point a finger and blame, assess, or know anything about it other than that it is our experience. This is how we see immediate need in ourselves and those around us without turning to the diagnosis of what needs to change, who needs to be punished, and why this is all happening.

This is the path to becoming ungovernable and reclaiming the colonized ground within. We don't turn a blind eye to our world and we let the experience of it all wash over and through us, knowing we are part of this great wave of experience. We do not dissociate, push away, or reject, because to do so is to reject our natural relationality with the whole of reality. We invite, we host, we listen. But we have the wisdom to not react, explain, or even "know." We remain humble and yet wholly confident in our ability to meet the moment with our own unique gifts and skills, offering what we can because we see with the heart's perception exactly what action is needed and what is not needed. We do not exhaust ourselves with unnecessary activity, burning ourselves out because we feel alone and like we must do it all ourselves. We trust.

Your heart can be trusted. Its compass is attuned to your True North and it will never lead you astray. Your mind will do what it is best at, attempt to understand. And when it does a poor job because it has not been given the framework to hold this kind of complexity, it sits by the hearth fire of the heart and it breathes, rests, and trusts.

If you're needing acknowledgement of the pain of it all in this process, reach out to loved ones you trust to unburden yourself to. And if there isn't anyone, feel free to comment and let me know. We're all here together. This is relational work and none of us are truly alone.