This video is a part of the Healing the Heart of Democracy Discussion Guide and can be found with more videos and resources in our “Healing the Heart of Democracy Hub.” You can explore the hub, download the guide, and find all of the videos along with additional resources here.
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We live in a culture that is overly confident about rationality and science and objective data, as if everything can be settled at that level. . . . The human self, individually and collectively, is a lot more complex than that simple model would suggest. We operate on so many levels not only intellectual and factual but also emotional and relational, that to try and reduce everything to rational equations just doesn’t work. But there is a way of thinking with the mind descended into the heart. The heart as that core place in us where all of our ways of knowing converge, where rationality and emotional and practical experience all come together to create the kind of knowledge that we actually operate with day in and day out—and that we don’t get access to when we pretend that our solutions are all to be found in rational analyses and collections of facts. (excerpt from video)
Q. Can you think of an example of a time in your personal life (e.g., in relation to a child, a partner, or a friend) when you practiced what Parker calls “thinking with the mind descended into the heart”? How does that differ from thinking with the intellect alone?
