and still, you are

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Whose limbic system is it anyway? 

The emotional center of your brain does well to take orders from your heart. 85% of the fibers of the vagus nerve running between your heart and brain are afferent, meaning the majority of information conveyed there represents information flowing from your heart to your brain. The heart is a feeling center of great power and competence to inform and reform your brain. The neocortex, or thinking brain, can hijack the heart’s role, if you allow it to do so. 

Right now your heart may know and tell that all is well, right here, right now, in this sweet unfettered moment, and supply the limbic brain with cause for calm. Yet your neocortex, if you subject it to the blaring trumpets of crisis, fear and danger from every quarter, may throw you into a state of panic quite unrelated to your very real and beautiful immediate circumstances, and keep you in that state for the foreseeable future. It is more up to us what we task our limbic system to endure in any given moment than we might have imagined. 

Welcome your heart’s caress of your brain, rhythmically lulling you into a reality on safe ground with open sky far above the information tsunami. You can reclaim your limbic system! It is your domain.

—Gil Hedley 

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You are not your body. That which you are persists like a perpetual wave through which the waters pass. The wave is not the water. And you are neither flesh nor bone, coming and going day by day. 

Whatever the matter is, you are not that! Breathe a sigh of self-welcome. You’ve known yourself to be who you are long before today’s particular aggregate of atoms assembled as that body you see in the mirror. Those atoms pass from you as quick as they came, and still, you are: persistent, beautiful, conscious, safe.


—Gil Hedley

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