Happy New Moon in Cancer!
I understood something new for the first time this week that I needed to write down and I sensed that it could be useful to share it, so here goes! I am sure that this understanding will keep on unfolding, so I will be brief and hopefully return to this later.
There are so many layers of intelligence alive within our human being-ness. On a physical level alone, every layer of our body has its own mind. Each bone, muscle, joint, organ and cell has its own history, its own sensuous awareness, its own subtle (and sometimes not subtle at all) language, its own capacity and aliveness.
Many of us, myself included, have been socialised to create and cultivate an internal hierarchy that privileges the cognitive, analytical, rational function of the mind over everything else.
We are taught, often by example to make this analytical/rational function of the mind the control centre for every other sense in our being. For most of my life I have run everything through an analytical mental process. It is the primary way I learned to make sense of the world around me and my experiences in it. Sounds reasonable, right?
I have been making work about liberation for years. Practicing liberation is the key concern of my artistic practice and more recently also my sound healing work. However, I have been practicing liberation with a deeply entrenched and overdeveloped analytical mental function running on autopilot.
I often say that in the years directly after graduating from college I was making work about being free without actually feeling free whilst I was making it. It was theory without depth of practice, without embodied practice. I didn’t have the tools or the guidance at the time and thus found that I was performing liberation rather than practicing liberation, and this was a crucial discovery.
I don’t bring this up to criticise my past self, its just an important observation. I know, and the tarot card The Fool certainly shows us that when we are beginners at anything we make lots of mistakes and that’s natural and often useful. How else can we learn?
Anyway, I’ve been developing a much more holistic, embodied and intuitive approach my artistic practice for a few years now. But I have only just realised that the supremacy of the cognitive mind above all other locus of intelligence (heart, gut, bone, muscle, spirit, soul, non-rational mind etc) is an internal system of dominance, driven by fear, that is constricting and oppressing the rest of the being. We cannot experience wholeness and liberation while our minds are ruling over our matter.
I knew I had some thought patterns that needed re-patterning but I hadn’t realised that my mind had become master and overseer over the rest of my being. I hadn’t realised that the rest of my being had become subservient to my mind. Phew, wow, what an incredible revelation.
I’m going to leave you with a few questions that have been with me this past week;
Is your mind controlling and/or interpreting your heart or does your heart speak freely?
Do you use your rational mind to analyse your intuition or do you trust your intuitive knowing enough to let it be your centre?
And… if your mind is in control of your body and being the next question naturally arises… are you in control of your mind? And if not, who is?