Balancing the Mind, Body, and Spirit

I came across this the other day and I wanted to share it with you because it brought up some interesting ideas. In my comments on social media, somebody indicated that they dropped into their heart space and decided to live a heart-centered life because they were afraid of their mind.

If you've been around me for a while you know I focus on the mind, the emotion, and the behavior. It's my version of my body, mind, and spirit where the body is the behavior and the spirit in this case is the emotion. When you isolate one and block out the other two it creates an imbalance within you. That's where I want to focus for this blog.

As human beings we are logically focused on our external 3D reality. We are focused on our bodies and our human lives. That's as it should be. What that does for most of us, is that it causes us to block out the guidance of our soul or spirit. We've learned to have over-active minds and be so focused on the external world that we don't pay much attention to ourselves at all. That allows one or more of the mind, behavior, and emotion trio to get really out of whack and hard to manage.

Personally it was my emotions that I shut down. I would squish my feelings. I didn't emotionally process much of anything that happened to me for many years. The result was that every few years I would have what was basically a nervous breakdown because I was holding onto too much. The analogy I used to use was that of a cake having too many layers and toppling over because it was unsupported. I wasn't supporting myself emotionally and so I was crashing all the time.

The imbalance created from not processing anything emotionally was that my behavior was out of control and my thoughts were absolutely crazy. I bordered on depression and would frequently end up suicidal if I didn't pay close enough attention to myself. Fortunately I only tried suicide twice in my life as a teenager. Those two attempts were enough to get me to recognize when I was in trouble. I actually got better at stuffing my emotions and holding them for even longer as a result of being suicidal. It was a coping mechanism because I didn't have the capacity to handle my own feelings.

My behavior turned into that of a maniac, particularly when I would have those nervous breakdowns. I had a ton of coping mechanisms. I would avoid everything. I was afraid of my own shadow. Having simple conversations with people was hard because I was always scared they would tell me I needed to change. I avoided confrontations. I did everything I could to stay in my shell and not deal with the world around me.

My last crash was 8 years ago and that was my awakening meltdown as I'm now calling it. I had my awakening and a full on nervous breakdown all at the same time. It was the point where I realized I couldn't continue to live like I had been. It wasn't working. There was so much pain and unprocessed emotion that I was in overwhelm constantly. I was miserable in my own life because one of my coping mechanisms was to not make my own choices. I lived the life that everybody else thought I should live. It wasn't my own and I felt powerless to change it.

The imbalance created by disconnecting emotionally sent everything else of whack too. I couldn't fix one without dealing with the others. I needed to balance all three in order to be fully okay within myself. If I had just dealt with the emotions, let my brain still run wild, and not started working on changing my behavior, I'd still be stuck today.

My behavior even now, is still not in a completely healthy place. I'm much more aware of myself now than ever, but I still have lots of little coping mechanisms (mostly avoidance) that keep me from engaging with people in the way that I need to. I still have a tendency to want to hermit myself and avoid the outside world. That creates a disconnect in my work because obviously I can't avoid people if I'm intending to work with them in a coaching type roll.

My original plan was just to write so that I could be a hermit. That plan was a choice I made based on pain. I didn't want to deal with people but the teacher in me wants to work with other people. I want to be able to impact other people directly and I can't do that just by hiding behind a computer screen writing. This process is forcing me out of my shell to learn to how to connect to others and be okay with doing that.

What happens when you shut down the brain and move towards a fully heart-centered life?

The mind is the thing that navigates the world around you. If the mind is a crazy place to hang out, even if you have gotten a grip on your emotions, you're still going to struggle. The practical world requires you to engage logically and your brain needs guidance as to what to do next. It will continue to keep you in pain now matter how much cry it out you do.

What I see often is that heart-centered people tend to be very "woo-woo". The whole process is ungrounded because it has to be to be able to function without the mind involved. Now the spirit is in charge but it's not in the body. It floats outside the body. The ungrounding creates a disconnect with reality. There is an imbalance in that because if you're disconnected from reality, then you're not able to function in the world around you. You're probably also a hermit because of overwhelm, but for a different reason.

The outside world now stresses you out because you have no ability to process it. That creates anxiety. So now you worry about everything and you're afraid of what the outside world is offering you. The emotional mastery only gets you so far. The mind is now anxious and spinning all the time. That means the only way you have to function is by tuning out your own body and the world around you.

If you're fully behavior focused and you pay no attention to the mind or how you feel, now you're caught in your ego. Your behavior is all about how you show up in the world. You can tell when people haven't done any work on themselves because they throw their pain around. They aren't aware of their own behavior and they don't see how they are impacting their own lives. So if you do no emotional work and you shut down your mind, then you essentially just spend your time worrying about what other people think of you. You do what you think is "right" but it's not necessarily the best for you. It's focused solely on your perception of self and other people. That perception is wonky because you haven't done any work emotionally or mentally.

My process evolved over time. The first step for me was to get control over my mind. I was scared to death all the time and I needed to process that fear before I could do any other work on myself. So I spent literally years sitting in fear trying to show myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. That's why I teach people how to manage fear. My first lived experience of healing was managing fear.

My mind also wanted to understand life. I had a crazy amount of curiosity around how I had ended up where I had and why my life looked like it did. I asked a zillion questions of my tarot cards trying to get answers. Mental clarity showed me how I had created my own reality through my pain. That mental clarity allowed me to let everybody around me off the hook and take responsibility for myself at the same time.

I learned to own my own behavior and my own pain through the process of clarity and understanding. You see it's not that I encourage overthinking. I don't want you to make up a new story about why things are happening that focuses on blame, shame, guilt, or victimization. I want you to find the truth. But the thing with the truth is that it's not about other people and it's not about the world around you. The truth is about you and the pain you hold onto.

The truth is that all the screwed up thinking, crazy emotions, and coping mechanisms cause you to do things you wouldn't do otherwise. There were other choices available to you that you didn't see because of the pain. Those other choices wouldn't have created more pain for you. They wouldn't have kept you stuck. There were a lot of choices that you made that weren't necessarily bad but they were based on pain and so they created more of the same. Those choices kept you stuck but you couldn't see that yet because of the pain.

The level of honesty that I've had to have with myself is kind of intense. I've had to be willing to really accept that I created all this chaos. I had to do that in a way that wasn't beating myself up. It required full acceptance on my part. Most people take out the hammer and beat themselves with it, but in order for me to heal I couldn't do that. I had made a lot of really crazy chocies based on pain. I had made my entire life into a lie and if I had beaten myself up for it, I'd still be living the lie.

I had to simply accept the choices I'd made and the things that I'd done so that I could move forward. Those things had happened and I couldn't change them so I chose to focus on what they taught me instead. By focusing that way I was able to stay out of blaming myself and I found gratitude and acceptance where the blame would have been if I had gone the other way.

The emotions it turns out, weren't much of a thing. I don't go looking for emotions. They are there and I acknowledge them. I don't squish them when they show up. I've learned to allow them and let them come and go in their natural cycle without attaching myself to them. I've realized that emotions are the mind's way of showing you what it thinks about what's going on. Emotions are a perception of sorts and they are a reaction to something. They are not necessarily true because often they are just a projection of the mind.

When you watch a sappy movie and it makes you cry, you're reacting to something that isn't yours. You're reacting to somebody else's experience. Not only is it not yours, half the time it's also fiction because it's not based on a true story. It's somebody else's imagination on a screen.  That in and of itself shows what the mind is capable of. It decides that the thing you're watching is sad and it offers you a matching emotion so you don't think you're crazy. The emotion is real but it's not based on any truth. It's based on perception and stories. It creates a distraction for you that keeps you busy.

The thing with the emotions that come from watching movies is that you don't attach to them. You have enough logical reasoning in your head to see that those emotions aren't yours, they are a projection of fiction and you're able to let them go. The movie ends and you simply stop the emotional response.

But in your real life you don't do that. You attach to the emotion because you see the emotion as truth. The emotion is not true. The emotion is a distraction and a response based on a perception your mind has. The thing is, you haven't consciously decided what your perception is yet. Your reaction at this point is still based on habit, previous experience, and how you think you're supposed to feel.

When you consciously decide how to think and feel then you don't have this problem anymore. You no longer have to be attached to emotion this way. You see it as the distraction it is and then you learn to shift your perception consciously so that you're not just feeling emotions out of habit.

That's not to say that the emotion won't bubble up sometimes, but when it does that you just allow it to flow and you don't bother with it. You just let it go and then you figure out where the screwy perception came from that caused you to react like that. It's a very different way of managing emotion.

Changing my behavior came later because I had to get rid of all the fear, I had to have clear thinking, and I couldn't be caught in responding emotionally all the time. I had to have control over my thinking and my feelings first before I could fix my behavior.

Truth be told, behavior is a little more difficult to find and fix. It's harder to pick up on because it mixes with your personality. It mixes with your sense of identification within yourself. It can be really hard to pick out and then change. Some behaviors are more obvious than others, but certainly the ones that I'm trying to pick out right now are pretty covert and it's requiring a lot of awareness on my part to change them.

Focusing on any one aspect of self in isolation doesn't offer any balance within you. It creates chaos in whatever part of you that you've shut down or shut out. Self-awareness means acknowledging all the bits, not just the ones you can handle. That's hard to read or hear, but that's just the way it works. You have to be okay with all the pieces and you have to be able to manage all the pieces of yourself to be okay. You can't just pick the one you like. You have to focus on all three if you want to be successful in fully healing yourself and finding the balance that's available to all of us when we heal fully.

Love to all.

Della