Thinking With an Open Heart

“Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.”

-Pema Chödrön

It is unlikely we are ever going to “think” our way towards wholeness in our lives. It’s not an experience we can “figure out”, as if it were a problem that needs our constant attention. A problem requires a solution, and wholeness is neither a problem that needs solving nor a solution that will fix everything.

Wholeness is something much more expansive, available to us despite the problems that we have in life. Rather than something to resolve, it is an exploration of deep transformation, a challenging and exciting encounter of change and self-discovery. Somehow, it is very mysterious and familiar at the same time, representing what we already know of ourselves and the parts yet to be revealed.

If we approach wholeness with an attitude of problem-solving, we’re going to meet a lot of frustration and difficulty along the way. This is because we will quickly find that we’re not even sure what the problem is, or what the solution might even be. We’re not totally clear on what it is we’re looking for, but still feel that something needs to be sought out and fixed. We may also have a vague sense that once we find that solution, life will irreversibly sort itself out and everything will get better.

This desire to problem-solve our lives can be influenced by the strange reality that, while we don’t enjoy having problems, there’s a part of us that enjoys having problems. The mind is always searching for something to chew on, looking for situations that we can latch onto. It’s not enough to experience something as it is-we feel the need to break things down and inspect them. Problem-solving makes life simpler in some ways: situations are easier to identify, and we don’t have to deal with uncertainty. If there’s a Point A, then all we have to do is figure out how to get to Point B.

Problem-solving is not a bad thing from a practical point of view, but if we’re only engaging that part of ourselves, we’re working with one hand tied behind our back. Especially on the journey of wholeness, we’re never going to be fully satisfied with our experience of life. We’ll find that the fundamental “problem” will always feel unsolved, even if we discover temporary solutions. There will always be the sense that we need something more.

We may also feel that if we think hard enough or long enough about things, we’ll suddenly arrive to a “lightbulb” moment, an event of clarity and full understanding that will never leave our heads. This experience would be life-changing: everything would be figured out, with no more confusion or stress about what to do in life. While it sounds great, it’s unfortunately not so easy. Perhaps fortunately, it’s a lot more interesting than that.

The title of this writing points at a dimension of approaching wholeness beyond problem-solving, relaxing our perpetual need to scrutinize things and figure them out. Wholeness is ultimately something we have to live. It’s not enough to think about it: we have to feel it, taste it, touch it, and so on. It becomes the air we breathe, the stability that supports our bodies and everyday life. It is not the discovery of something that isn’t there to begin with, but a continuous clarification of something naturally present. Instead of something that we gain, wholeness is an experience that we uncover, bit by bit.

“Thinking with an open heart” was a phrase that came up unexpectedly, while I was recently sharing with a friend. While it made sense for our conversation, I spent some time later reflecting on what I meant by it. You may have already noticed that it presents an oxymoron, at least in the English and Western understanding of consciousness. In our usual sense of things, we don’t “think” with our heart. Thinking is for the brain, while the heart is for feeling. What’s more, we tend to prioritize thinking and mental activity for making things happen in the world, getting things done. By comparison, the feeling heart is often treated as weak and unreliable. With this in mind, the idea of thinking with an open heart may seem rather strange and unfamiliar.

From my personal point of view, which comes from many years of meditation and contemplative practice, human life contains an incredible amount of emotional intelligence which can support our experience of wholeness. Unfortunately, Western culture lacks an appreciation and investment in emotional awareness, which is why our feelings can seem foreign and difficult to understand. As a male-identified person, I’ve lived much of my life being told that the wisdom of what I feel needs to be suppressed, in favor of my logical mind and focusing on what’s ‘rational’.

At the present moment, I see no contrast between how my rational and emotional worlds can support me, and rely on both of them to discern what wholeness means in my life. From the perspective of Buddhist psychology, which is a perspective I share, “mind” is a term that includes both intellectual and emotional activity. There is no sense of separation between the brain and heart, as they both represent consciousness itself. Instead of preferring the use of one over the other, we can experience both as a function of our conscious intelligence.

Because there is awareness present in both our emotions and our intellect, a life of wholeness is one that seeks to clarify and refine how we are being shaped by these influences. How we feel about something is very important, just as important as the time we take to think something through. We often refer to having a “good feeling” about a person, or how a situation “just didn’t feel right”. This is the wisdom of our emotional life coming forward.

Using our consciousness in full allows us to appreciate life in a completely different way. Importantly, it takes us beyond the need to be right and the fear of being wrong. To think with an open heart means dropping our habit of using thinking for the purpose of being correct, which is a function of problem-solving. In a culture that prioritizes the intellect, we often use this ability to present ourselves as capable, clever, or confident.

If we rely only on our intellectual intelligence, we shield ourselves from having a direct encounter with our lives. As someone who tends towards an intellectual perspective, I’ve seen myself do this quite often. Rather than face the unknown, or allow myself to feel the texture of something and trust what that exploration can show me, I can cover it up with explanations. I can start creating ‘logical loopholes’ that avoids engaging something scary, overwhelming, or difficult. Proposing solutions, at times, takes away from something that is just demanding to be felt. Sometimes, things don’t need to be figured out: they need to be encountered and experienced in order for a path forward to emerge.

When we’re over-reliant on thinking, we’re really only considering ourselves, even if we’re thinking about other people. It’s engaging our ideas about something or someone, which, unless we’re really trying, isn’t going to go much farther than our own preferences and interpretations. Our thinking becomes a kind of shield, or even a weapon that protects us from being uncomfortable. Why would we want the embarrassment of being wrong, or unsure? There is a fear of vulnerability, and we can use our intellect to explain or justify things away. In doing so, we keep ourselves safe from exploring things we’d rather not look at. We build walls with our thinking, rather than bridges.

Thinking with an open heart is a more balanced way of approaching our life, the world, and other people. It uses our intellect without an underlying need to dominate, control, or manipulate situations in our favor. We stop holding life at arm’s length, and instead discover a willingness to engage life fully, absent of a desire for resolution or for our world to stay the same. It’s stepping into reality with bravery, to say “Here I am! I’m not sure what will happen, but I am here.”

On the path of wholeness, we draw from the well of our full consciousness, which includes feelings and emotions. This doesn’t make life unreliable; it just means we’re willing to be invested in the mystery of the whole situation. Embracing mystery is not about making things unclear on purpose. It’s a choice to be a lifelong learner, to use our ability to think and feel for the benefit of being in deeper relationship with reality. The journey along the way is not one of endless confusion, but a more honest knowledge of oneself and a readiness to open up to greater discovery.

The need to be right, to solve, to be able to explain everything, should be questioned. If anything, it’s a defense mechanism that worries about whether we actually know what to do in life. The Greek philosopher Socrates (according to Plato) has the famous line: “I only know that I know nothing”. Wholeness is not an experience of knowing everything, or being able to solve all problems through the intellect. It is a life in relationship with the sum of reality: the joy, the anger, the fear, the boredom, the uncertainty. If we can do that, we’re not turning any of those things into problems that need fixing.

A great example of thinking with an open heart is the exercise of “putting oneself in another’s shoes”. When you do this, you’re not claiming that you know exactly what the other person is experiencing-you just take the leap of considering someone beyond yourself. This is more than an intellectual act: you have to use your imagination, your creativity, your emotions. You have to lean into what that other person may be feeling, sensing, and experiencing in their life. If we do this well, this changes us. We realize that reality is a much larger experience than our own perspective of things, and this is an invitation to explore and connect with that further.

When we think with an open heart, we allow our thinking to become more invested, more sensitive, more interested in possibilities. It’s an expression of having an open mind. We don’t use our thinking to build walls of opinion that we can hide behind. In fact, it becomes very unsafe for our sense of self-importance. We realize that we don’t have all the answers, and that’s a good thing. We can contribute what we can and feel optimistic about discovering more as we grow in our lives. The people, events, and situations we encounter can all become teachers that have something to offer.

This is something I try to be aware of in my own writing. Writing is not a bad medium to work with, but it involves a lot of thinking and forming concepts out of lived experiences. I’m aware of its limitations, and do not write because I’m trying to be correct about everything. Anything written here is hardly the final say, and never fully represents the “thing” itself. I have no clue if I’m right about any of these ideas- and I don’t feel the need to be “right”, either. I only know what has worked in my experience, and offer that in the hope that it might, in some small way, resonate with someone else.

Thinking with an open heart doesn’t treat being unsure as a problem: it recognizes this experience as a necessary step towards understanding. When we open up to our life in fullness, there is no distress when confronting the unknown. It’s an attitude of “I don’t know! How interesting.” Of course, we can’t stay in being unsure: having no opinions is just as limiting as having too many. The experience of being unsure is an invitation to keep going, to pursue a greater welcoming of life itself.

We have to be unsure in order to learn something. If we think we’re right all of the time, we don’t learn from life nor do we make the effort to do so. Wholeness in its inclusivity makes the experience of being unsure a point of movement, rather than something we get stuck in (like doubt). We get interested and involved in what our life is telling us. From this perspective, we can use the best of our natural intelligence to walk with curiosity, using the territory of thoughts and feelings to connect with a wider world of experience.

In Western culture, we encourage each other to “think for yourself”. I might add that we also need to “think for others”, or, to think beyond just ourselves. Think for possibility, for openness, for the experience of being whole. This is not always an easy thing to do, as it can challenge our personal certainty and desire for easy solutions. However, it is a path to a kind of freedom-not being bound by what we think, but being led forward into greater relationship with life. If we can follow this, all kinds of doors begin to open, and hidden paths reveal themselves.