Maybe losing your mind isn’t such a bad thing after all.
In fact, maybe it’s the best thing that could happen to you.
From the time we are small, we are taught to use our minds to operate within the world: to think our way through our schooling, our careers, our relationships. Because if we can think our way though it, if we can just analyze, rationalize, and organize our thoughts about a situation enough, then we can find the answer we’re looking for, gain control of the situation, and come out on top. Right?
Well, maybe. Maybe that was the approach that worked in a world pre Corona-virus, pre George Flyod and the Black Lives matter movement, and pre Trump-era. Maybe the paradigm of using our mind to “solve” our problems got us this far in our evolutionary journey. Maybe it offered us solutions and direction prior to this year, this month, this very minute.
But, in case you haven’t noticed, the world is changing—minute by minute. What once applied as a given in any situation is no longer relevant. The status quo that was once taken for granted is no longer applicable. The software that we had been using for centuries just went through a major upgrade.
In other words, we’re not in Kanas anymore, my dear.
So where are we, then? Where does that leave us? If we are no longer in the territory of the mind—which we have become so attached to as our main compass to guide us in regards to orientation and direction—then where do we find ourselves?
Where we find ourselves now is directly and completely immersed in the territory of the heart.
No longer can we use and rely on the compass of our minds to give us answers and tell us what to do. It is time to tune into the inner knowing of our hearts: the intuitive nudges, the quiet whisperings, the emotional terrain that pulls you out of your comfort zone and into the places and spaces in your life that are asking you to grow. It is time to surrender the mind’s projections, expectations, agendas, attachments, resistances, and protests against moving into a territory it doesn’t understand.
The thing is, you don’t have to understand this foreign territory in order to be safe in it. That’s a story that your mind is telling you.
True security doesn’t come from the mind. It doesn’t come from anywhere or anyone outside of yourself. True security arises from anchoring into a relationship with the inner knowing of your heart.
But how to get there? What means of travel to take to a place that is so foreign to us, both individually and collectively? How do you get to a place you’ve never been, or have been very infrequently?
Your one-way ticket to the terrain of your heart is simple and can be summarized in one word: surrender.
Surrender your need to understand or control what is happening in the world. Surrender all your ideas about what you think should be unfolding. Surrender your need to perform. Surrender your need to be doing anything other than what you are doing right now. Surrender the illusion that you are not worthwhile unless you are doing something “productive.” Surrender all of your attachments to the past. Surrender all of your attachments to the world that was. Surrender to what the world is now becoming, to what you are now becoming.
Surrender, surrender, surrender. When you think you’ve surrendered all you can, surrender more.
It doesn’t have to be hard. Actually, it can be quite easy. As easy as we are willing to make it…or as easy as we are willing to let it be.
While the outside world around us continues to break down, remember that you can unplug from the chaos by unplugging from the mind. The mind is not bad per se, but it is not the mechanism in which we are going to maneuver our way through these uncharted waters. The compass that is going to guide us back to the sanity, the serenity, and the sublime peace that is our true nature is—and always has been—our hearts.