Head vs. Guts

Last week, during a business trip to China, I had the opportunity to experience the great difference between understanding something with your head = intellectually, versus understanding something with your guts, heart and soul = fully, deeply, in all its consequence.

I knew about a certain work issue for more than a year intellectually, but during the conference in China, I realized with soul, gut and heart what this issue really means, and my, what a different level of understanding that is.

I was quite cool intellectually about the issue, yeah, that’s the way it is, but now, seeing and feeling it live, let the understanding settle into the lower parts of the body. Only when something arrives “down there”, have you really understood it.

In this particular case, the understanding was unfavorable to me and triggered a rush of emotions of betrayal and abandonment. Those are strong emotions and I ranted and raved, much to the dismay of my hosts who thought the issue was long settled. I wasn’t alone with that sentiment of betrayal and abandonment by the way, the story affected a bunch of other people too, who were equally upset.

Thinking about it later, I was amazed by the big difference between understanding something intellectually vs. intrinsically.

Only when something arrives in the heart and soul are you able to process such emotion and put it behind you. I think much personal unhappiness results from only intellectually processed emotions that have not, quite literally, been digested. Not always is the digestions triggered from the outside like in the case of that conference. Often, we have to somehow find a trigger to digest something we don’t like within ourselves and that’s a difficult task.

I’m grateful for that outside trigger that made me think about something, I haven’t thought of in a long time. And I hope the ranted at counterpart at the conference, understands what’s been going on