Should we follow the heart or the mind when making decisions in life?
Follow the heart – and keep walking until the heart and the mind speak the same truth.
Rumi says: “If you are a friend of God, fire is your water. You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of moth wings, so you could burn them away, one set a night. The moth sees light and goes into the fire. You should see fire and go towards the light. To these eyes you have now, what looks like water burns. What looks like fire is a greater relief to be inside.”
For most people, “water” is the comfort of the thinking mind – doing what is reasonable, safe, and socially approved.
Something in you may be drawn to a person everyone warns you about. “He’s a narcissist,” they say. Yet, your heart yearns for that experience – it demands it.
You try dating with the mind, but it feels empty, lifeless.
But why would the heart insist on something that may hurt?
The heart is connected to the soul. It doesn’t seek comfort but expansion through truth. There is a reason you feel drawn to certain experiences in life. It is not luck or random. Your soul is seeking those experiences, even if painful, to expand its awareness and break free from the illusion of separation.
The ‘narcissist’ did not come into your life to punish you but to awaken you. There is a lesson you are refusing to see. Maybe you need to learn how to place boundaries, or stop abandoning yourself in the name of love.
Once the lesson is seen, lived, and integrated the magnetism toward that kind of person or experience fades. The soul no longer needs that mirror.
So we shouldn’t feel regret when following our heart, even if it leads to pain?
The moth is a symbol of the soul, and its wings represent all the identities, attachments, and masks we wear. In this case, it was the mask of people pleasing and self-abandonment in the name of love. Each time you walk into the fire of awareness by following your heart, one more false layer burns away.
Allow the burning. Let illusion fall away, layer after layer, until nothing stands between you and the light. Every set of wings that burns is one more piece of the ego released.
A soul surrendered to the heart sees the fire – the pain of letting go, the seeming annihilation of the self – and walks into it knowingly, because it recognizes that within that fire lies the true light.
So, what’s the purpose of the mind then?
The mind is the voice of the world; it is the voice of reason. It tries to keep you safe, following a path that was laid before you. It sees fire and runs toward the water. The mind is the veil that keeps you asleep, and the heart the means to awaken you.
Once, suffering was something to fix. Now it becomes something to listen to. Instead of escaping fear, pain, loss, or separation through logic, you meet them with curiosity, with love, and with a willingness to let them burn away whatever is false.
When everything that needed to be experienced has been lived, the heart settles into wholeness, into loving awareness. Illusions fall. Reality is seen as it is, not as you wanted it to be.
In that seeing, emotion settles and being appears. The mind no longer the ruler – it becomes the clear, compassionate servant of the heart. And that is the state of liberation.
@freedom.from.the.madness
Backstory
Words saved from an Instagram account l came across recently. I love how it was laid out in a discussion, mentor and mentee, this internal battle in decision-making. And I love the moth metaphor. It reminded me of an image I created years ago, so l scrolled back to find it. I wanted to stay with these ideas, so l began to re-edit the old image.
I wrote these words at that time:
There were many stories she told herself about herself. Stories about how she didn’t belong or about how she wasn’t quite good enough. The stories became legend in her mind. Yet something inside her knew them to be untrue. This inner light. She began to place trust in herself, in this light. She went to work peeling back the layers that were concealing her light. The things she did to stay small, the stories she told. In doing so, she was able to take anything that came her way as fuel to transform. As fuel to grow in ways she needed to grow.
The original prompt for this image, as part of a group project, was:
Butterflies are self-propelled flowers. – Robert A. Heinlein
I found it interesting that both this original prompt and the recent passage I came across were so similar in the conceptualization of transformation. Both passages describe a journey of shedding false identities and limiting stories so a deeper, more authentic self can lead the way. Both see suffering and challenge not as punishment but as purification and transformation that reveal inner wholeness.
A new set of moth wings, for this new state of heart and mind I find myself in. A representation of my growth and transformation since creating the original image. And a wish for there to be thousands more sets of wings for me.
