Embracing Heart-Led Living Amidst Divisive Influences

It is a significant task to tame our minds and connect with our hearts, especially amid external influences that divide and manipulate. As we navigate complex beliefs and divisive rhetoric, fostering unity and compassion becomes paramount for our shared humanity. Let’s step back from the chaos, find inner harmony, and strive to spread love and peace in our daily interactions.

Heart-led living requires us to tune into the whispers of the heart and invite those messages to be amplified. Easier said than done, no doubt, especially when we’re inundated with thousands of messages everyday triggering us to do the exact opposite.

To be clear, this isn’t about becoming ‘soft’ or weakened, or needing to hop onto the woowoo train. No. Leading and living from the heart invites us to tune in to the root of our confidence, where we are in complete alignment with our soul and becoming wildly strong.

To tune into our hearts, we must first quiet our minds and reflect on our core beliefs, and distinguish between those rooted in love or fear, abundance or lack, unity or division. Failing to do so makes us susceptible to societal chaos and propaganda, disconnecting us from the source of universal love and reality.

We cannot tune into our hearts when we have never taken a moment to try and tame our own minds, to ask the most basic of questions: 

What do I believe?

Why do I believe what I believe? 

Are the core beliefs I have built my life upon based on love or fear? Abundance or lack? ‘Us’ vs. ’Them’?

Without asking big questions of ourselves and sitting quietly to explore the answers honestly, free of ego, we become easy prey. 

When society is in chaos we get swept into the game. We easily become manipulated by the propaganda, the fear, and internal soul conflict that becomes reflected in our day-to-day interactions. 

Our pain points have been tapped and we are lost- further disconnected from the heart, the source of universal love, as our minds become less hinged to what is real.

We all have our inherent biases, but it is only when a foundational truth is challenged that more people wake up and rise up against the new agents of war: manipulative messaging, catch phrases, trending hashtags, and cancel culture, where every mobile device is the weapon. 

The thing about propaganda is that most people can only see it conflict strongly with a pre-established belief, and in most cases, there is a pre-existing social network that is also in agreement.

We think we see it so clearly as we ask:

How is everyone being manipulated by this? it’s so obvious… 

How can you of all people not see?

They’re spreading lies.

Can’t they see how clearly this stance contradicts what they were outraged about last month?

It takes a lot ego-checking to see the persuasive messaging and manipulation when it aligns with our existing beliefs and confirms our own biases.

We especially love when a person who, for all superficial reasons, should be with the ‘other side’ but instead affirms our beliefs and views. We love that. That gives us an I told you so and even one of *yours* says I’m right affirmation.

Challenging this is hard work for the brain. 

We watch the news networks, follow the accounts, and now it seems, keep only the friends that affirm us. 

We share the stories that make us right and call ‘misinformation’ to those that make us wrong. We immediately say the other is lying (and they may very well be), doing whatever it takes to make us feel more and more right. 

With all of this, what we are actually doing is disconnecting further from the heart. Without realizing it, as we feel so empowered and right, we too have become agents of division.

What a thing to witness, watching people shuffle around every other week to work out the new “team” they’re on with whatever issue we are to be outraged about, and working out who from the old team is coming along to this new one. Along with this, we now check in on who we are now disappointed by and must separate ourselves from.  It’s a rapid action of follows and unfollows to remain in our safe, belief affirming echo chamber.

It gets tricky though. 

For when we are persistently swayed by the all mighty external messaging powers, we lose our way, don’t we? 

Many of us can see it. Having complex beliefs around complex topics is complex to reckon with.

When you can see it from the outside, what you are witnessing is a complete loss of self as the heart and mind cannot contend with the ridiculous hypocrisy and most basic impossible conflict of how one stance can’t actually exist in alignment with the last one taken. 

We lose the ability to tame our own minds, to tune into our hearts, and to truly know thyself.

We forget that we are all human, and we are all connected. 

The human species requires deep connection for basic survival, but the ongoing need to align with a side only causes more division- especially when that alignment is based on what was read in memes or trending videos (which are, of course, just more of the aforementioned tools of control). 

To continue creating separation from others only serves our own growing sense of aloneness and separation from our own souls, while feeding the thin veneer of righteousness.

What we are all feeling is our basic sense of humanity:  outrage at the suffering, and a yearning for justice that will never come through aggressive, divisive action. 

Where does it end? 

We choose.

The answer to all of this is easy to speak, but takes a monumental amount of work to accomplish.

It can end when we all find ourselves standing alone, completely divided over the abundance of very real issues we are told to take a side on to the point where we each exist utterly and completely alone, afraid to broach difficult topics and have the necessary difficult conversations. The result of this culture, of course, is that we silence the now nearly inaudible wise whisper of our own heart, and give in to the pull of the tide, the all encompassing, ear splitting roar of the media machine. 

Or it can end when we decide to join hands, tune in and live and lead from the heart, to not allow that external voice to get any louder and instead work to amplify the whisper of the heart. It ends when we choose to love, allowing the infinite tidal wave of compassion that exists within all of our hearts to take the lead. 

It ends when, in our everyday lives, not as keyboard warriors, we are walking embodiments of peace. 

It ends when we look up from our screens and into each others eyes and see that we all want the same thing.

We smile.

We serve.

We love unconditionally.

We aim to be the joy, the delight, and the inspiration in someone else’s day.

We operate from kindness.

What if we extricate ourselves from the nitty gritty horrific details? Yes, you can know the news, but then step back and get centred. Get into coherence, into harmony, and ask, what can I do today to be an agent of love and peace? How can I choose, in this moment and the next, to live and lead from the heart?