Best Of

@person said:
The way I think of the heart vs mind in practical terms is like the heart jumping right to a math solution which may or may not be correct depending on your level of experience and insight.

In my terminology, I think what you are talking about there is more intuitive thinking, and the extended function of drawing conclusions because of it, which is an uncertain business. The same with associative thinking, which can lead you right off the deep end.

Reason is very much safer, small incremental steps, each verifiably following from the last. Allowing logic and common sense to guide you. But these are still thinking modes as I see things, part of the mind.

The heart, to me, is the seat of the emotions. It is about what you feel, not about what you think. And what I’m trying to do is learn to “feel better”, to pay more attention to what I feel. Like my visit to my mother in hospital the other day. Although I was concerned at how she was looking, I felt happy to be with her and to be able to give her a hug.

It is things like happiness, joy, anger, irritation, compassion, sadness… these things are feelings, and by paying attention to them you become more emotionally literate, more in tune with reading your own heart. Your thoughts can trigger feelings, and some feelings almost seem to be thoughts, like hate and jealousy. You can feed feelings with thoughts too, like by thinking certain thoughts you can increase feelings of anger.

The antidote to negative feelings is just to pause, become mindfully aware and wait for it to pass. It rarely takes more than thirty seconds. And so you can also by guiding what you think change your dominant emotions, spending less time on the negative ones and choosing to feed the positive emotions, becoming a happier and more cheerful person.

@Jeroen said:
“A good way to tell if you love someone is to see if their presence makes you happy.”
— me

I'll challenge that a bit and say that its a good way to see if you like someone. I can think of family that don't make me particularly happy but I want good for them. The inverse, someone who makes me happy that I don't love, seems harder. But I can imagine something like a celebrity you like, or an entertainer who's show you're at. They make you happy, but they're still kind of a stranger to you and not much thought goes into their well being.

@person said:
I think I've come to this position due to past experiences where I wasn't so skeptical and followed them more freely into weird and false beliefs including a psychotic break.

That explains much, I’ve always had a very stable mind, and for me the problem is more finding out what I feel, because my inner emotional voice is so quiet. The predominant emotions I do feel are irritation and more rarely anger. More subtle emotions I have difficulty picking up when they manifest, usually I’m just cheerful all the time.

So I’m trying to find techniques to make it more visible.