“A good head and a good heart are always
a formidable combination.”
– Nelson Mandela
I spend a lot of
time reading, thinking and being pensive. Part of this is just in my nature,
but part of it is also a deliberate quest to educate my heart and my mind for
the very reasons stated above. What do I mean by educating heart and mind?
Well, the heart
is the means by which we sense the qualities of our direct experience of life—we
feel stuff. The mind, wrapped up in the brain, helps us to organize and
understand that material. And when the heart and the mind are in productive,
internal dialogue with each other, depth of understanding and meaning are made.
At least in some simplified, basic sense.
Educating the
heart and mind are therefore very important, as productive dialogues only occur
between the well-informed heart and
the well-informed mind.
As I say, I read
a lot and am choosy about what I read. I try to be equally discerning when it
comes to films, stuff from the web, people, places and even things,
understanding that these impact my heart and mind in much the same way as the
food I choose to eat impacts my body.
Essentially, I
am aiming to nourish my system with experiences based in a reverence for life.
Then there is the essential dialogue
between the heart and mind, facilitated best, in my experience, by way of the contemplative
arts. Things like meditation, journaling, long distance running, open-water
swimming, knitting—basically anything that takes me into a quieter, more
spacious sense of internal awareness.
Somewhere in the soft, focused awareness that those experiences provide, arises an organic
processing that leads to authentic transformation—something I don’t need to
will into being or force into existence, just make room for feeling, noticing
and observing without my usual tendency to judge it. This is the heart of any
contemplative practice, as I’ve come to know them and is a powerful medium for
lasting change.
A good head and
a good heart are what get us through life in tact. Together they make possible
intelligent acts of courage and compassion that help re-shape the world in
favourable and badly needed ways.
Their education
is basic and necessary.
