Synchronizing the Heart and the Mind Pathway

There is a Native American saying that the farthest distance in the world is the 18 inches from the human head to the human heart. If we could distill our work down to a sentence, it would be that we are trying to assist people in traversing this distance. When people are not centered in their hearts, the mind is telling the heart what to do. There is a consilience here between Indigenous Lifeways, and Polyvagal Theory, for both teach us that when we are in defensive states the mind tells the heart what to do. This creates what many Indigenous people call the 'Upside Down Society.' Human thriving, and the thriving of Life itself, happens when the heart tells the mind what to do. Both Polyvagally and spiritually speaking, this requires us to be able to feel: to be able to clean and open our hearts, and to be able to center them as the heart of our knowing: the place from which we feel ourselves and one another. This pathway is designed to offer you focalized training on the practical steps involved in centering yourself in your heart. Please note that the preparatory work for this pathway is healing work, as trauma is a large part of what exiles us from our hearts. So working on the trauma healing pathways is a pre-requisite to this pathway. Yet even when that is done, most modern people have not had good modeling around what it feels like to be centered in and lead with your heart: to maintain stable, open, moment-to-moment contact with our felt sense and relate in the world from a place of connection.

Your instructors: Kuuyux Ilarion Merculieff is an Unangan Elder who was raised in a traditional manner on the Pribiloff Islands in the Bering Sea. At 4 years of age, he was identified as the Kuuyux of his tribe- an arm reaching out the world; a bringer of traditional knowledge into the modern world. He has been following the responsibility in his name for the past five decades. Natureza Gabriel Kram is the Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance, a connection phenomenologist, and a pioneer in the clinical application of Polyvagal Theory. He has led over 1,200 polyvagally-informed mindfulness trainings globally. John Stokes is Founder of the Tracking Project. Trained by aboriginal trackers in Australia, and in the ways of the Great Peacemaker of the Haudenosaunee, for forty five years he has been bringing people's attention to the tracks on the ground so that they come close to the Earth and realize that she is alive (and they are too). Lee Mun Wah is a master mindfulness and diversity teacher and the award-winning film-maker of The Color of Fear. His mindful anti-racism work has reached millions of people.

Setting Down Thinking: Teachings of the Birds

6 minutes

We, in the modern world, have been taught to identify with our thought stream. We seek to know ourselves, as selves, through the continuous burble and hum of thoughts moving through the mind. Gentle reader, there is no self here. The Self we are looking for–the core neurobiological self– it does not reside in cognition. I realize that some of you reading this are not going to know what I’m talking about, and others of you, perhaps of a more analytical bent, are going to find yourself understanding what I’m saying in a way that seems threatening, or makes you deeply uncomfortable. At this website you’ve come to, we say - We are here to change your mind. And in this statement we mean, at the same time, at least two things. Can your mind hold the simultaneous duality inherent in that statement, which is actually a unity, at a higher level of comprehension? We mean, of course, that we are going to change your mind, your opinions, how and what you think. And we mean, of course, that we are going to change the biological structure of your brain, of all your brains, which also include the brain in your heart, and the brain in your gut, and the brain in your neuro-fascia, which, as it turns out, is shorthand for saying the brain in your body, which, as it turns out, is shorthand for saying your body, which as it turns out, is because you’ve been lied to. Your brain is not your mind. Your brain is in fact only a tiny part of your mind, which is, in fact, localized in your entire body, which is, in fact, not even then your mind, but merely the machinery running it. We’re here to teach you that what you’ve been running identity through, the thought box on top of your shoulders, is only a tiny part of your real intelligence, not the best part even, not the part most capable of being in contact with reality anyway. Can your mind, your thinking mind, hold onto the reality that when we say we are here to change your mind we mean two things simultaneously? Not, like the wave/ particle duality, that it means one thing or the other, depending on how you are looking at it, but that it always means both things. That it always means we are here to change your thoughts AND the biological structure of your mind, which you have been taught is localized in your thinking, but is not. If you are still with me, you are beginning to feel what I mean, because you can’t process what I’m saying only mentally. If you are getting nervous, you are beginning to feel it, and now you are beginning to understand viscerally what I’m saying, and here is the doorway. Here is the doorway because the moment you begin to have a visceral feeling, the moment you begin to feel it in your body, your experience itself belies the lie you have been told, because the moment you feel it in your body, you come into the present moment.

Quiet Your Mind

24 minutes

Once we are in the heart, feeling, one of the most powerful ways we can open the heart is by experiencing gratitude.

Gratitude Practice

7 minutes

Let's go deeper now in exploring the development of non-cognitive ways of knowing.

Ways of Knowing

23 minutes

Now we'll go deeper into the training of feeling attention relationally.

Relational Mindfulness

1 hour and 49 minutes