Servants

While doing my yoga practice last week the instructor said, "Bow your head, your mind to the intelligence of the body". I immediately thought "Let your mind surrender to the intelligence of the heart." I have been thinking about this, or rather, letting it wash over me fully. We get told our choices should be our logic, our choices should be head over heart decisions. We have built a society where everyone is making choices from logic or hard facts and ignoring that wisdom that can temper. I suggest we are not supposed to come from this place. I think we can not make choices JUST from cold logic, it must be balanced by the wisdom of heart. We must decide to act not just in our best interests but also with compassion and empathy for others. We can not decide to fill our pockets and strip the earth or poison the water harming everyone else. We can not decide to do whatever it takes to get ahead and hurt anyone who is in our way. Logic without emotion is too far removed from our own humanity and makes us shriveled, cold hearted, and separated from everything else.

Choosing head over heart or acting even on emotion only is not wise. We have to be creatures who embrace everything that we are and use it all. So we bow the mind to the heart but we use both. We act out of compassion but we use the mind to do it in a way that is grounded and still logical. We feel empathy for the other but we make choices based on facts and act on those and doing no harm if we can.

The heart without the logic has no grounding in real life. The mind without the heart is brutal and unkind. Let us make the mind a servant to the heart, never ignoring either.