Fusing the mind and the heart and how to combat over eating

http://www.1SaleADay.com - Sponsored this. 1SaleADay has amazing gadgets & cutting-edge electronics. 20% of 1SaleADay's proceeds are donated to help fight poverty around the world. By Eli Federman - The disconnect of emotions and intellect...How do we unify them?
Saturday, October 18, 2008 10:37 PM
Battling Your Emotions

One of the major challenges all people face is fighting the torturous dichotomy between the heart and the mind. We see examples of this every day. Our mind tells us that it is a bad idea to overeat junk food but our emotions tell us it feels good. Our mind tells us that smoking cigarettes will harm us but our heart tells us that smoking cigarettes feels good. Our mind tells us that recreational drug use is harmful but our heart tells us it is exciting. Our mind tells us that we should free ourselves from abusive relationship or unhealthy relationships but our heart tells us that we can make it work out (i.e., See Battered Person Syndrome). The list goes on and on...

Can we truly be happy when our emotions rule over our intellect? Completely suppressing our emotions will make us miserable robotic, stoic, uninteresting, inhuman computers. Similarly, being ruled by our emotions will make us miserable, undisciplined, inhuman, unstable and will ultimately be destructive to our health and well being. The solution is to use our intellect to harness and channel our emotions in a positive way.




Maimonides in the first chapter of his philosophical treatise The Guide for the Perplexed symbolically interprets the biblical Adam and Eve story to instruct us on how to harness our emotions with intellect. The serpent is a metaphor for our animal instincts and emotional desire and the divine will represents the intellect. This story is teaching us the importance of training ourselves in such a way that our rational knowledge gains dominion over our unguided emotions. Human were endowed with rational thought in order to guide our unfettered animal instincts.




The Alter Rebbe, founder of Chabad Chasidism explains in Chapter 17 of Tanya how our personal enslavement comes from the dichotomy of our heart and mind. Using the human body as paradigmatic of the heart / mind division, the Alter Rebbe explains that the neck divides the feeling of our heart from the intellect of our mind. The Alter Rebbe explains that by overcoming the constriction of this division and unifying the heart and the mind we can achieve true liberation. One method of achieving the state of our rational desires guiding our passionate desires, the Alter Rebbe explains, is through habituating ourselves to gain mastery over our emotions by behavioral modification via training our thoughts, speech and actions to act in accordance with our true desires.

Using the examples above we can habituate ourselves to eating healthy through constantly eating healthy and in turn the irrational desire to overeat junk food will slowly fade. Similarly, if we refuse to smoke enough times eventually we will kick the habit and smoking cigarettes will no longer feel good. We need to train ourselves to use our intellect in guiding our emotions




Can you think of other methods one can use to train the intellect to guide the emotions? Other thoughts on the mind and emotion dichotomy?

Category:

Education

Tags:

• over eating
• dieting
• mind and heart
• mind controls the heart
• Alter Rebbe
• Rebbe Rashab
• Sigmund Freud
• psychology

[nathalieoso]

um wow your hot

[ronennachman770]

I'm pretty sure the beauty you sense is the beauty that is within you.

The Ba'al Shem Tov taught that when you see a certain quality in someone, you should know that it exists in you!

[alphabetablogger]

Hehehe... totally different perspective than mine, but interestingly similar approach in some ways nonetheless! (Expressed with completely different words of course...)

[MrVirtualCoder]

You're a believer yet you don't follow the most important part of Judaism:

Don't picture any other God than the one and only God.

The Egyptians made dolls and worshiped them, today we have the Media and computers, watching TV or sitting on your PC is equivalent to worshiping it.

I think you're an smart individual, but I'm puzzled over why and what makes you go on the Internet, when these tools are clearly the work of Satan.

[madmum23]

interesting thankyou for creating this video one request though if i may....in any subsequent videos you make could you talk a little slower please? im doing some research and its difficult to take notes :D thankyou once again my friend god bless x

[RamzGT]

neuro linguistic programming is a great way to do this, its cool to see that there are some similarities in your pizza method and what NLP can offer