What we feel often conflicts with what we are and how we think, a process known as cognitive dissonance, which Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed in a summary of his theory in1950. If you change a person’s behavior, his thoughts and feeling will change to minimize the dissonance.
What I have begun to discover is this, when someone speaks to us in a way that challenges any of these three - our thoughts, feelings or behaviors is also creates similar dissonance. In order to bring things back into balance within ourselves, we try to make the other person wrong, or attempt to “educate” them regarding our beliefs. Hopefully they get it, otherwise things begin to disintegrate. So by observing the behaviors, we see where the thoughts and feelings are. Hence the saying “actions speak louder than words”
By placing our attention in our heart, we bypass the ego and see and feel things much differently. We work towards connecting and balancing things in our lives versus trying to shake off the dissonance. As the heart is the closest to love, it is as close as we can get to being love and giving love. Therein lies the dynamics of heart, mind, and actions in harmony. The mind (ego) has the capacity to rationalize, and often our feelings are the result of distorted thoughts, which then produces irrational behaviors. OH the vicious cycle begins. So in order to bring in balance and harmony wee have to begin in the heart and move that energy into the mind, as we work to eliminate the dissonance that this produces in our feelings, we have to repeatedly and sometimes continuously go back to the Heart.
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