being human,  embodiment,  writing

Feel More. Think Less.

“Feel more. Think less.” Sound advice in almost all situations, and if I’m honest, not my first tendency. It’s auspicious, however, that nearly everything I’ve endeavored in my spiritual life also points to this truth.

It’s also interesting how when you see something, you can’t unsee it. Words (the product of thinking) fail the full experience of life. Words are a means to an end. We use words to explain how we feel, to get what we want because of how we feel, and to point to the reality we are making of the world. Words, however, are not reality itself. Words are dualistic in nature. They come from the mind and the mind is better at comparing and contrasting than thinking deeply about wide open concepts that cannot be defined.

It takes time to create the capacity to hold many things as true at once. Certainly I’m no expert but the older I get, the more I see many truths now aligned that I used to hold in direct opposition of each other. Truth is not known from the level of the mind. It is felt at the level of the body.

. . .

All that said, I am a words girl. I am a writer. But the longer I practice embodiment and listen to talks about the non-dual nature of reality, the more clear it becomes that the feeling world holds a lot more truth than the thinking one.

Nothing in life is black and white. Only our minds make it so. We can think about God and consciousness and how the world is held together, but honestly our minds are only made to think in polarities, rules and systems. God and love (the same name for God) are much bigger. We can feel them. We can have a knowing inside of ourselves but as soon as we begin to think about God and the nature of reality, we’ve lost its true essence.

From a contemplative perspective, the path I’m only beginning to walk, it’s said that all knowing must be balanced by unknowing. Every time we think we know something, a situation will change our minds and we’re back to the beginning. This isn’t a bad thing. The less we absolutely know, the more open we are to learning new things, and to feeling our way through life.

“Feel more; think less” is sound advice, perhaps my new mantra.

Photo by Jack Ward on Unsplash