How to Balance the Head and The Heart

They both have their uses.

Photo by Bart LaRue on Unsplash

The head and the heart: two aspects of our being that are quite confusing.

“Be rational,” someone might say when you’ve been blinded by the love of a new romance.

“Follow your heart,” someone else might say when you’re considering changing careers.

But, do you know when it’s useful to use your head rather than your heart or intuition? People seem to use these words to mean different things. So, what’s the difference?

“The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master”

The words above were written by Robin Sharma, although the idea has been expressed before.

In the book, The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness, Bob Samples interprets Albert Einstein’s perspective in this way:

“…Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.”

Einstein, himself, apparently said,

“All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge, namely, in axioms, from which deductions are then made…Intuition is the necessary condition for the discovery of such axioms.”

What an interesting statement coming from a scientist who revolutionized how we think about the physical world. So, what did he mean?

Einstein didn’t rely solely on intuition — he tried to prove his ideas using logic and mathematics. But what I think he’s saying is that his ideas didn’t originate in either of them; rather, his ideas originated in intuition. His intuition created the framework and then logic and mathematics built upon that framework.

That’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?

In most areas of your life, you’ve likely been encouraged to ignore your intuition and instead rely on your rational mind. Yet, we all understand the problems our rational minds cause us. We ruminate on our mistakes, we anxiously imagine what the future will bring, and we paralyze ourselves with options and…