We Need To Stop Demonizing The Mind. What It Actually Means To Live From The Heart

by Joe Martino

What does it look like to live from your heart? What is the mind’s role in our experience? In my 10 years of studying and practicing living from the heart, I’ve discovered an emerging trend: The spiritual community has made a demon out of the mind.

There is no doubt that the mind is the source of suffering — the incessant thoughts and worries, the endless ego stories, the mental tricks we often play — but this doesn’t mean the mind as a whole is the problem, nor does this mean we should avoid the mind.

It seems now that any form of thoughts, ideas, planning, logic, and so forth get put into the category of “not in the flow” or “being in the mind,” and this is simply a misunderstanding. I’ve seen people try to avoid their mind like the plague, to avoid thought, avoid processing, just because “the mind is evil” or other such misconceptions. So, let’s dive into how the mind works so we can better understand its true role.

How Our Mind Works in Our Experience

You are a soul, playing out a physical experience on this planet. Your soul enters a vehicle called the body that allows us to have a physical experience on Earth. The body is made up of a number of essential parts including your brain, which is comprised of many components that ultimately serve to decode this reality into something that isn’t simply an energetic soup. It also allows us to process important aspects of the human experience, using things like logic and calculation so you can understand how to walk, run, jump, communicate, build, create, and so forth. Your consciousness USES the mind as a tool in the human experience.

For example, when you receive information from your higher self, through your heart to your physical experience, the mind processes that information and learns how to use it within this experience. The connection between the heart and brain is quite evident scientifically, and the heart actually sends signals to the brain to communicate. The mind is a key factor in the entire relationship between our mind, body and spirit. One can’t function fully within the human experience without the other.

Where We’ve Become Unbalanced

So now we know that the mind is actually here working in our favour to have the experiences we need. But it’s also important to mention that in some ways, we’ve gone off course a bit.

The mind is layered and also contains a powerful program called the ego. The ego can essentially be broken down into two layers: upper ego and lower ego. The upper ego has the basic understanding that we are separate, in experience, from others and are playing out an individual identity for the purpose of evolution. The lower ego is more about intense and increased separation, strong identity attachment, fear, and incessant stories. The lower ego has served us by showing us what it feels like to be disconnected from our true selves and from others, unable to live harmoniously with the Earth, animals, etc. This has been a tool in many ways, but our challenge is now to overcome the power it has and learn to find our true selves beyond it.

Why is this happening now? Living with it in the driver seat has already taught us what we needed to learn from it, but for quite some time, we’ve been resisting the change that is being presented to us. It’s now time to move forward. This is why we’re seeing such a huge rise in interest in this topic collectively. People are exploring meditation, spirituality, the ego, and so much more as a reflection of a collective evolution. 

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