The Heart Controls The Military Of The Mind

Each day is a series of one-second battles - short battles in the mind that determine which way we go when confronted with a decision. What we truly want in our heart ends up dictating the outcome of those battles.

Your mind has a military, and your heart controls that military. Imagine you have an objective you would like to achieve - whether it’s related to fitness, weight, career, or finance. A decision point comes up that could be ‘Am I going to go for this run?’, or, ‘Am I going to eat this?’, or, ‘Am I going to send this message?’.

One thought - the military of your mind - says: ‘You need to do this, because you want to get fit, lose weight, and run 10km’. The other thought - the invader - says: ‘This is going to suck. It’s going to hurt. Watch TV and have a drink instead’.

Whenever there is a battle, the military of your mind turns to the heart for marching orders. Depending on what is in our heart, the heart either says ‘Crush this damn thought, it doesn’t belong here’ or ‘Stand down, he doesn’t really want this in his heart of hearts’.

It could be something as simple as getting out of bed in the morning. The invader says ‘Just snooze the alarm, it will be glorious going back to sleep’. Your heart - your ‘why’ - can override that and get you out of bed to do that exercise.

Or maybe you want to end a particular relationship or theme of relationships. For some reason you keep getting sucked back to it. You cannot break it, and it just doesn’t end. It will not end until it is terminated or displaced in your heart.

The mind ultimately follows the heart.

Sometimes the desires in our heart are not in our best long-term interest, and the only way for them to be dislodged is by tasting them - in the same way that a 2 year old learns the harmful potential of fire by touching it.

A dangerous fantasy or desire may lodge so deeply that simply ‘touching a hot stove’ is not enough to teach us that ‘heat hurts’. Life, then, may lead you to a position where a house burns down around you to teach you the horror of fire in such a searing way that you learn that what has captured your heart will only ever end in destruction.

The most extreme depiction of the house in this analogy is life itself. Sometimes the only way to learn the destructiveness of something in our heart is for our life to burn to ashes around us. We lose everything we’ve ever built or invested in, and we’re reduced to nothing.

The heart is always fixed on something. We can either be purposeful about what that thing is, or we can lurch from one shiny thing to the next. This manifests as someone who never sticks at anything, and is constantly drifting.

Maybe you realise that you’ve fixed your heart on something destructive, and you’re terrified of the consequences looming ahead. It’s been in your heart for so long that you cannot see any path to dislodging it and you feel helpless to change anything.

Radical fantasies in our heart can be displaced by the expulsive power of a new passion.

How does a new passion overtake the heart? Imagine an ambitious goal you'd like to achieve. Dream about it. Then write it down, come back to it often and refine it. Visualise it vividly every day. As you focus on it, the heart absorbs it deeper and deeper and begins to displace other things to make room.

Whether it’s from the universe, God, or whatever higher power you believe in, we’re unfailingly served up with the things that dominate our hearts. It’s basically a law of life.

That's not to say that the life we dream up today will magically appear tomorrow. The bigger the dream the more we'll need to work for it, but the heart contains an awesome power to attract the things we desire into our lives.

Much of the difficulty of harnessing the power of our heart comes down to not having clarity about what we really want. Until we figure that out, we’re at the mercy of unwanted thoughts as they invade, and we only ever win the one-second battles by chance.

Do you want to be able to nuke unwanted thoughts that invade your mind? The heart controls a whole nuclear arsenal. Get clear about what you want, and that nuclear arsenal will be at your disposal.

There is scarcely anything more important or impactful you could do today than to start getting clarity on what you really want. Embed it deep in your heart, go to battle with your mind, and you’ll start achieving things you never dreamed were possible.

We can each win the game of life - one one-second battle at a time.

Dream it, believe it, then do it.