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Surrendering the Clever Mind into the Listening Heart

I find it interesting how in these times of being at home, where plans and future continually evaporate into an amorphous sense of the ever-now that can’t quite get things done, that even without going anywhere, so much is being processed personally and collectively. There’s a reckoning, a sorting, and a realignment we’re continuously invited into. It’s the kind of invitation that can’t really be turned down.

At the same time, the fault lines of our personal and collective lives are being exposed with increased intensity. This means things fall apart. Relationships, commitments, a track we were sure of, suddenly disappears. Perhaps the way we were practicing, to hold everything together, is also fraying at the edge, an edge fast moving out of sight. The definitions of life’s expected boxes have melted. And here we still are, in this strange vague space of a world behind a mask.

Our extraordinarily powerful, brilliant, and very sure of itself civilization isn’t good at surrendering. We want control, to be in charge, to get what we want. Yet an invisible something called a virus has brought us to our knees. Perhaps that’s exactly where we need to be.

Sometimes, the clever mind bouncing off all strategies and running the labyrinth of possibilities needs to vacate its throne. There is another intelligence beyond the cognitive frames that run us and run this world. We might call it the “listening heart” but it really doesn’t like to be captured in a word. What can we say then, about this deeply embodied intuitive knowing that evades fanfare and thrones?

The imperative to listen into life’s own knowing is not an invitation into future grandiosity. Instead it is an invitation into the humble task of coming home in a whole different way. To pick up the reckoning of the time, to let that which needs to fall apart dissolve, and to put our trust, not in the “clever and quick,” but to the quiet love of our own heart.

I hope you can join me as we explore this territory, and the possibilities of remapping our Dharma frame to support the internal shifts needed as we transition from over-reliance on separative consciousness to the wiser ground of embodied intuitive knowing.