Are You Conflicted, Stuck, Or Just Simply Evolving?

Most of us have seen the two little characters, one on each shoulder, one sort of like an angel, or voice

of the “good doer”, and the other sort of a devil, or voice of the “bad doer.”

And yet we hear the phrase, “it’s all good” so often these days that there must be “something in the air” that actually knows that it is all good. That something is this: the heart of hearts, the place of unconditional love, the connection with all that is, that is actually antithetical to the workings of the monkey

mind.

The monkey mind is designed to see separation, designed to experience difference. It actually helps us survive: “oh, that tire coming off of the car in front of me as we travel at 65 miles per hour on the highway is different: I notice” [survival brain reacts in a fraction of a second]. But, when we make up a story in our monkey mind [it is actually designed to do that] and say that that different person over there is not as good as me, or not as bad as me, our judgements actually create problems, instead of using our discernment to sort out our next best move and create solutions. It is the pre-frontal cortex of your brain that performs that higher executive function [discernment], also in a fraction of a second, but actually much slower than the very fast survival system.

And it is the capacity of your whole system to connect your inner heart, your unconditional love to your brain that determines how willing you are to begin to witness yourself, that is step “outside of yourself,” and disengage from the stories and the judgements of your monkey mind and instead engage your capacity to find a better way, a way that cognizes what will serve the highest good of the moment. “Cognizes” means recognizing, without even having to think about it, by automatically being hooked in to your heart and your soul and your capacity for unconditional love, recognizing that which serves the highest good. “Highest good” means, for me, that which will help us all to evolve. That is, get past our negativity that creates suffering, separation, and heartbreak for ourselves and others.

This goes way beyond the capacity of your monkey mind to simply believe it knows something. We all have our beliefs, based on each of our unique life experiences. Either those beliefs serve our evolution or not. We have free will. We are here to help each other grow. Either we are serving that collective growth of our evolution in a pro-active positive way or not. Discernment always tells us the truth, judgement simply tells us another story that may have a kernel of truth, but may be laced with negative emotional charges, and may have negative consequences for our evolution, individually and as a species.

You have your knowings, based on your direct experience, reported to you by your five senses and sorted out by your cognitive functioning. It is when those knowings get in the way of your heart trying to inform you of the next steps in your evolution as a divine soul having a human experience that you experience suffering.

The physiology of the connection between your heart and your brain reveals that your heart literally has a direct influence on your brain. “… the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. More recent research shows that the neural interactions between the heart and brain are more complex than previously thought. In addition, the intrinsic cardiac nervous system has both short-term and long-term memory functions and can operate independently of central neuronal command.” https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/heart-brain-communication/

So, not only is your body, your physiology, revealing how your heart is communicating to your brain, but your subtle energy is revealing that as well. To the extent that you experience and exhibit compassion in your life, you will experience less stress and more health. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-it/201211/the-best-kept-secret-happiness-health-compassion

The point is, “conflict,” or differences between what your heart knows and/or what your limbic/emotional brain remembers, and/or what your survival brain is feeding to your emotional brain, all these angles of consciousness have their place. Fear can paralyze and cripple us, keeping us stuck. It will come from the interactions of the emotional/limbic brain and the survival/brainstem part of the brain. The pre-frontal cortex will make more executive sense and make more of a compassionate appraisal of all the data. Compassion will help us evolve. It will be on account of the conflicts that we have our chances to evolve. “Another opportunity for growth” takes on a new and powerful meaning when we learn how, with compassion and wisdom, to move our world-view to embrace those things which cause us fear, cause us to withdraw (mentally and emotionally, if not physically) from the world, and which actually are serving our highest good, once we get past the judgements of our monkey mind.