🧠💗🦸♂️ Our 3 Intelligences
Today we'll delve into the much overlooked idea that we have more than 1 intelligence. Let's start with the obvious one...
🧠 The Brain
Culturally, Western society values analytical intellect highly. One of the reasons is that it is strongly associated with control.
If we know what something is, and we know all of the trivia about it, then we can predict what it will do. That helps us feel less fearful.
Example: if you know what kind of insect you are looking at, you know if it is likely to bite you.
This concept generalizes into most aspects of our lives.
One issue here is that analytical intelligence is low bandwidth. Analytical intelligence tend to come to us in words. I'm looking at a tree right now; you've read the word tree and probably imagine one, but it's not the same tree I'm looking at.
If I wanted to describe that tree to you so that you could form an accurate image of it in your mind, it would probably take pages, maybe chapters, depending on the level of detail I want to convey. Still, at the end of it, you would have a mental image of the tree which is less accurate than if I had simply sent you a photo.
We know that an image is worth well over 1000 words. Mostly though our analytical intelligence does not communicate to us in images, our other intelligences do.
Analytical intelligence is the dial-up modem of interpreting the world around and inside of us.
Further, it turns out that we can't make decisions without emotions. Yet so often we try to remove emotion from our decision making process.
This brings us to Our Second Intelligence...
💗 The Emotional Center
Unsurprisingly, this one is located roughly in the lower center of our chests.
Frequently we devalue this one, seeing it as a nuisance: For one, we can't control our feelings. As I've written about previously, we so often try to think our way through our feelings and troubleshoot them, which doesn't work well.
We value rational practicality and hate to see parts of ourselves landing outside of that bucket.
The trick though is to sit with those feelings, breathe, and physically feel them.- Where in our bodies do they come from?
- What do they feel like?
We are best to approach this from a place of curiosity and wonder, if we'd like to make the most progress.
You'll notice that we specifically do NOT ask 'why' do I feel this way, or else we will engage our analytical minds, and our defense mechanisms.
'Why' questions are inherently defensive; they come from a place of judgement.
'Why' questions ask the questionee to explain the reasons for which something is the way it is. They are the past and by definition, a form of non-presence.
'Why's engage our brain, and our brains is very focused on what we SHOULD do. SHOULD'S aren't very productive though.
For example, I may know that I should not eat junk food, should exercise, should be nicer at times, and so on. You may have noticed though that all of the should's in the world don't really get us anywhere.
The 'should' voice is actually our 'critical parent' and it inherently engages a form of rebellion or internal resistance. It is self defeating.
👨👦 Our Own Critical Parent
I am horribly undisciplined when it comes to food, but when I have a ball hockey game that evening, I tend to eat well.
Because I should?
No.
Because I have a visceral, emotional memory of the painful times I've eaten heavy meals before playing. I feel a strong aversion to it, much more powerful than any intellectual concept or rational chain of thought.
Again: I get a strong averse feeling when I think about eating heavily before a hockey game. The intellect doesn't move me, the feeling does.
Take note: ANY time that someone, including yourself doesn't do something they SHOULD, it is because they have not connected with that feeling, or they have a stronger internal resistance. It's as simple as that.
Reading that, your brain may be running all sorts of arguments as to why that isn't true. Mine certainly is. Those thoughts are all defense mechanism. Just like mine, they are probably stemming from your frustration as you may be thinking of the many times you've failed to get yourself, your kids, your friends, or your colleagues to SHOULD.
Better to take a moment, and feel where in your body that frustration is coming from.
Presently, mine is in my solar plexus and jaw, and they both feel like a form of tension. Yes even as I write this to you, I find it frustrating. I too wish we could all just do as we should.
This is one of the biggest gaps we experience. We live in our brains but our feelings and gut are driving the ship. We are like a cart being pulled by two elephants: Our brain is the driver, our emotions and intuition are the elephants.
Because we so desperately need to feel in control (least we acknowledge our fears and our fragility),
the brain and ego take on the job of the huge job of convincing us that we are controlling the elephants.
When our elephants go in directions that do not match our rational thoughts, we become the driver pulling helplessly on the elephant's reigns. We spend a ton of energy trying to manage the gap and come to the conclusion we are not good drivers.
Translated back out of metaphor, in order to close the gap between what we do and what we SHOULD, we conclude that we are simply not good enough.
The reality is that we have not truly connected with the feeling of wanting to do this thing. As a result that feeling is weaker than our internal resistance to doing it.
When we become aware of internal resistance, we have an opportunity to listen to it and let it go, then we will be able to accomplish more, with less energy. We are releasing the resistance to moving forward rather than beating on ourselves with our intellects.
Easy right? Not so much. The problem is a bit of a catch-22. If we are not aware of our feelings, how will we feel them?
This is why mindful practices have become so popular: They help us increase our awareness.
😡 Releasing Our Resistance
We have so many distractions that it's easy enough to avoid our feelings for a very long time.
The next time you want to pick up your phone to procrastinate, instead, take a few deep breaths and feel for the feelings that arise. There's an incredible chance that this procrastination stems from some frustration with the task at hand and that this frustration stems from wanting the task to turn out 'perfectly'.
In these situations, our minds get the idea that the conditions are not presently right for this task to turn out as perfectly as we would like it to.
If we just sit with and feel it. We may be surprised at the intensity of the feelings that we are masking by picking up our phones.
We so quickly turn away from our negative feelings that we don't even know they are there. When we have anger we often don't know it. When we have fear we turn away from it.
If you are reading this and thinking "I don't have anger or fear" I would bet you any amount of money that this is incorrect.
That's the trap. We tell this story to rationalize our ways out having to admit our feelings to ourselves. That's our egos running point.
If we stop and grasp this concept, it will probably speed up our development by years. If you'd like to learn more about this, reply or reach out to me and I'll be happy to flesh it out with you.
If you are reading this and thinking "I experience anger and fear, and when they arise I sit with them, experience them, and let them go", there's a far better chance that this is right.
Negative emotions happen. When they do, if we allow and listen to them, we grow.
Negative emotions arise when something happens which defies our mental model of the world. It makes us 'Wrong'. We hate that.
Most of us will fight to near the death to be right, or maybe more accurately, not to be wrong.
After the emotional storm, clarity emerges. We have the choice to update our models; this is how we become life-long learners. The storm only subsides once (you've guessed it) we feel our feelings.
We are not trying to banish them or make them go away but just to feel them.
As we allow our stored negative emotions to come free and as we listen to them, something incredible happens: our intuition becomes much clearer. We stop being afraid to say what we feel. We stop trying to be perfect, we stop finding what's wrong with every situation, we stop focusing on what's wrong with ourselves.
This shifts our mindset from struggle and scarcity to abundance, and unlocks our superpowers.
Our third and most powerful intelligence comes from...
🦸♂️ The Gut
From what I can tell, Our gut is basically the source of our superpowers. Rather than living in our heads or our emotional centers, this is the place to be. Intuition is the place that masters of their crafts operate from.
If our emotions are the images that are worth 1000 words, then our guts are in 3D video.
We know that our culture values someone with a strong connection to their gut or otherwise put, a strong intuition. Still, because it is hard to convince others of our intuition, and because we value control so highly, we feel that we need to deconstruct our intuitions in order to validate them.
Intuition is frightening because it isn't very controlled. It knows things in an instant that it would take days or sometimes years to explain via intellect. Intuition is our deepest connection to the real world.
Intellect is always an abstraction; it's where we cut things up into small pieces so we can make recipes and predictions. What is in our intellect is not the real world, but our model of how we think the real world behaves.
We need analytical knowledge for precision. I would rather be in buildings or airplanes built through careful calculation and not intuition, but only because of the deep complexity of these designs.
You'll notice again that the reason analytical information is important here is for control. I do not want the plane to fall out of the sky or the building to crumble.
For the rest of life, it seems that the secret to happiness and success is to live in our guts. The problem is that in moving our presence from our minds to our stomachs, there is a barrier, and that barrier is all of our un-felt, un-listened to emotions.
It's funny and all too perfect: as we move down from our minds into our guts, we must move it through our emotional centers: our hearts. If those are blocked, then how will our presence be able to pass through them?
This is exactly what creates a separation between what we THINK we SHOULD do and what we WANT to do.
This invisible gap is the difference between knowing something in our head (via thoughts and intellect) and knowing something in our bodily intelligence (via feelings and intuition)
This is the gap between beating ourselves up over our SHOULD's and happily living our best lives in connection with ourselves and others.
This is the difference between living in a world of love, openness, connection, and vulnerability, or living in a world of fear, anger, perfectionism, and scarcity.
Feedback on this post from Joe Hudson:"Your description is perfectly right. The one place your description differs from my experience is that each of these three centers are equally beautiful and valuable.
Much like a book, a movie, or a musical are equally beautiful and valuable. And as each of these centers get clarified they become more powerful. I.E. as the emotional center clarifies it becomes a center of unconditional love. The idea of one above another only makes sense to me if I processing it intellectually."
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