Our minds create narratives to avoid the vulnerability of not knowing or understanding.

Accepting multiple truths allows us to release the need for our story to be the only reality.

“The longest journey you’ll ever take is from the head to the heart.” This phrase, often attributed to the Sioux Indian tradition, refers to the shift from a purely intellectual, head-based way of interacting with life—through a mental lens—to a more experiential, feeling-based, and intuitive way of being.

From a head perspective, through a rational lens, the truth can be figured out through empirical data, science, and facts that can be proven. The truth is one universal thing, separate from us and determined by exter­nal factors. This is rationalism, the narrative we’ve built our society and bet the farm on. From a heart perspective, however, the truth is subjective, internally based, a wisdom that’s personal and includes our senses, intuition, and emotional knowing. As a culture, we haven’t com­pleted the journey from the head to the heart—in fact, we seem to be walking backward on the path.

Based in the Western intellectual tradition of rationalism, this factual, science-based approach to life, reason, and logic is what’s valued. All truths can be figured out using the deductive and analytical mind. While non-Western traditions value other heart-and-body-based aspects of life, the rational narrative places all its eggs in the intellectual basket. In rationalism, reason is king.

What this rational narrative overlooks, however, is that reason always includes interpretation, which is always influenced, shaped, and transformed by our personal experience, emotions, language, culture, power structures, and social mores.........

© Psychology Today