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Roots, Feelings, Thoughts and Love: Where We Are Headed Today

Your body is full of energy, running through your limbs and organs and life. When you're with people who think and feel similar to you and value what you do you are in your comfort zones. The single biggest common values I see energetically in the modern world fall into three basic categories that for shorthand I'll call roots, feelings and thoughts. There's more, but we'll get to that. If you understand these three things you can make it a long way in the world.

Roots are basically human communities we're heavily committed to and involved with. We've got groups coming out the wazoo, don't we? I and the people I meet identify ourselves by things like last name, the city, state or geographic government we support (or don't, but we'll still notice), clan, company, brand or fashion preference, race, gender, educational institution, military history, social organizations, tax bracket, etc. These things seem pretty common factors. If I understand human history we've had this stuff hardwired for tens of thousands of years or more. We understand roots.

We understand feelings, too. Is there an emotion from the depths of sadness, tragedy or anger to the heights of happiness and joy that has not been effectively encapsulated by soap operas, art, music or theater, understood by an audience and rendered cliche through repetition for 3,000 years? We are aware of our feelings.

Thoughts are super important these days. Modern education requires us to imprint information on our memories and repeat it for use when required, an idea mirrored in our daily life. Our minds are full of letters, numbers, symbols, addresses, pin numbers, phone numbers, passwords, financial amounts, speed limits, public laws and countless pieces of information about how our complex world works. We need to know and manage all of it, or at least enough to function. Industry, architecture and urban living have spread on earth like hotcakes over the past 100 years. If you've managed to turn on a computer and read this you've already succeeded in using your thoughts in myriad ways.

We're able to do more than these three and we know it. The number one new thing we're waking up to - more than anything else right now, and I'll prove it - is...

Love.

The heart. Love is a loaded word, but I've never found a better way to say it in English. Roots, feelings and thoughts are clearly recognized priorities in our collective lives in a way that love isn't. It is simply not valued in the same way, yet. It never enters serious political discussions for more than a passing mention, and isn't even on the radar in education, government, policy, business or finance. Arguments are not often won with, "Because I love it," or, "it's in my heart," where everybody understands and case closed.

And how could we expect otherwise? It's clear that we are absolutely bumbling around in the dark when it comes to our hearts. Love is deeply important to us in a way that transcends race, religion and culture, yet it's only overtly recognized in the arts and entertainment. More than half the top one hundred popular songs in the United States in the past one hundred years - the most popular songs on earth - are about falling into or out of love, a trend that continues in all genres of modern music. It looks like we're ready to love to the point of obsession but, well, it's lacking. What passes for love sounds like a toxic amalgam of addiction and co-dependence, just ask a teenager.

When hippie culture popped up the in the 60's a deeply loving world might well have laughed at them for being overly simplistic, shooed them home and given them better clothes to wear. Some folks did just that, but they were also shouted down and marginalized for the radical idea they were onto: that love is freely available everywhere and well, man, like, really, really important, man. Like, it's gonna change the whole world, man!

Well, love will, that part is inevitable. We can't help it. It's been growing for a long time. The guy we call Jesus was an early adopter 2,000 years ago. He's reported to have put a lasting drop in the world love bucket saying things like (and I'm paraphrasing), "Love everyone all the time, cuz Jesus ya'll, can't you see you're swimming in it!?" It seems like he thought it a universal and tangible sort of thing, and more important perhaps than even life itself. But it sure was hard to describe. After a long dry spell Shakespeare hit us again in the 16th century with his insurmountably romantic plays and linguistic gobbldigook. Still, the widespread notion that everyone might fall in love and from their love choose their mate didn't percolate seriously until the 18th century Romantic period, and still isn't common elsewhere in the world.

Nothing underlines this shift towards love like the so-called 'Recession'. I call it 'the Progression'. Our faith in the bizarre financial arrangements we call an economy is what's receding, and the space is being filled by something clearly more meaningful. Why did interest in surfing double in a single year recently on the Oregon coast? If you're poor and you want to be happy, surfers are excellent role models. Many people who've lost their jobs aren't waiting for the next sugar-daddy to come along. Instead they're starting their own businesses in unprecedented numbers, doing stuff they love! Is there any doubt that love is more important than your bank account? How much money do you need? Would you rather have a leather couch or more time having fun with your family and friends? Is there a sane dying man who on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I'd worked harder and loved my family less"? It is, in fact, the failure of money and material possessions to answer our collective longing that underlies our current economic experiences: our hearts just aren't in it.

Love is a persistent idea - and persistently mysterious - for one simple reason: Love is superior to thought. It is more complex, functions on its own non-linear logic and is therefore less well understood. You can't love with your head, you have to use your heart. Descriptions are mental, love is experiential. When the energies in our limbs, organs and life are full of love everything goes better, everything, and your mind takes a backseat. If it weren't for the intellectual demands of modern life this might be everyone's preferred mode of being. Love is intuitive and beautiful. If you are one of those lucky few people who have experienced a lot of it, you know how wonderful it is!

From what I've seen there is not one thing on this planet that makes a person feel healthy, safe, secure and able to face what's on their plate like love. Except maybe for power, but take it from a healer: when power is used to defend us from feeling pain in our hearts it eventually dissolves into agony and suffering. When love dissolves it turns into peace or grief, the latter which returns to peace anyway. The heart knows things that the mind can only observe and support, but not truly understand. From the perspective of a full heart, life unfolds in a perfect harmony guided by an unseen hand. Know that your heart is important.

Really, really important, man.

For more information on "Why Love Hurts" and "How to Heal a Hurting Heart", visit Lincoln's other articles.

About the Author

Lincoln Crockett is both a professional performing musician and an energy healer.  For Lincoln, music and healing are two extensions of the same thing.  Music listeners know what it feels like to be moved, touched by a piece of music.  In energy healing Lincoln does the same thing, but without the instrument or the singing, for an audience of one.

He has a Psychology, B.A. from Colorado College and a four-year certification from Wakepoint School for Energy Healing, as well as experience with dozens of other styles of healing.  With Lincoln's background as a creative artist and trained healer he has a powerful toolbox to help guide anyone - musician, artist, healer or not - to become more aware of their energies in order to strengthen their work, heal, and live a healthier, happier life.

For more about Lincoln, his workshops and healing work visit www.lincolncrockett.wordpress.com

To hear Lincoln's music visit www.lincolncrockett.com

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