Body, Heart, Mind, Spirit

Dear Reader,

What is most important to you in life?  What makes you happy, and what do you long for?  These questions, among others, and our attempts to answer them move us forward on our paths.  Such questions – the great questions – help us explore who we are and how we make and find meaning.

In times of profound change, we find ourselves grappling with shifting perceptions of what is real, or important, or true, on both an individual and a universal level, and it is easy to feel dissatisfied.  Or frustrated.  Or confused.  How we answer these questions provides us with a way forward, a way to consider and make the choices we face every day.

As we call into question even our most fundamental perceptions of the world and how we do things, one simple but powerful framework for inquiry is the structure of body, heart, mind and spirit.  I find, on my own path and in my work with clients as an intuitive and a teacher of heart centered living, that we often gravitate to one or a few of these areas. We tend to lack experience, or awareness, or confidence, in one or more of the remaining areas.  We rarely create balance across these areas, but isn’t that balance ultimately the goal of a fulfilling, integrated life?

How we define the very nature of each area is constantly changing.  In truth, of course, they can’t really be separated; we are discovering new ways every day in which heart and mind, body and spirit are deeply connected.  To facilitate our own insight and growth, we can at least talk about them separately.  Indeed, these four aspects of our being are the foundational columns of my work.  Lets take a quick look:

Body – Your physical being, repository of emotional content, sender, receiver and container of energy, partial home for your mind and your spirit.

Heart – A coordinator for many of your most important physical functions, energetic and electromagnetic powerhouse of your being, major communicator with your brain, partial base for your mind, center for your emotions and the doorway to your spirit.

Mind – Regulator of your intellect and ego, powerful coordinator of memory, emotion, imagination, intuition and rational thought.

Spirit – Your essential, unchanging nature, your spark of divinity, your sense of something bigger than your conscious awareness of self.

Pretty simple, right?!  Well yes and no.  But this thumbnail overview is a start – and a way of navigating those big questions at the beginning of my post.

By the way – how would you answer those questions?  What is most important to you in life right now? What delights you?  And in which of the areas above – body, heart, mind and spirit – do you feel most at ease, most at home as who you really are?

Over the next several months I will look closely at each of these areas, at how our perceptions and understanding of each is shifting, and how new ways of seeing and experiencing might help us live more joyful, rich, and balanced lives.  I encourage you to respond, to ask questions of your own, and – as much as you are willing – to help create this dialogue about a new way of being in the world.

I honor your loving heart,

John