There are all types of knowing that people can and do experience, some valued more than others and some discounted all together. Muscle memory allows your body to know an action or a process through repetition so the brain doesn’t have to focus on performing that action. Muscle knowing helps you know how best to do a thing and how to be the best you physically. It’s an amazing gift and one we don’t utilize half enough. Left brain logical thinking is valued very highly. It’s great at making meaning out of the information we intake, helping us figure out how to get from A-B-….Z and keeping us to look first before stepping off that cliff which would get us killed. Unless you’re base jumping and then it helps you step off the cliff safely so its fun. So it’s a cause and effect manager that is fantastic at problem solving. Which is fabulous for certain things, but not for others. However we’re taught that its primary in our ways of knowing and this can get us into difficulties.
There is also the right brain, which doesn’t see logic in the same way. It sees connectivity and boundriless opportunity. It sees non-linear causality and is very much not into goals and linear anything. It is its own way of knowing most frequently associated with artists, poets, and dreamers. But it also used by entrepreneurs and inventors, and anyone that thinks outside the box. Because the right brain doesn’t care about boxes other than that they are just one more shape in a world full of colors and shapes. This type of knowing, which is experiential and doesn’t seek to make meaning out of input in linear ways is just as valid as left brain knowing, but not as governable in a society that needs order and structure in order to control the populace so we are trained to devalue it. At this point arts and artistic experience and expression of the world has been removed from even our grade schools it is so little valued.
Meanwhile there is also emotional knowing. Or what I like to refer to as heart-felt knowing. This is different from listening to your gut. This is about looking at a situation where you have to make a choice, ignoring the left brain that jumps in to problem solve every input, issue, and variable it can find, ignoring all the opportunities being seen through the right brain, and just listing to what you feel. Because feelings aren’t logical, they are intrinsically you. They are connected to who you truly are aside from all the psychobabble you talk about to others and that runs through your own head in self-talk. Heart felt knowing isn’t some romantic thing, it isn’t impulsive, and it isn’t random. It is the way your soul, your true self, can speak to you about important decisions or issues in your day. Heart felt knowing is also unequivocal. It doesn’t matter how equal two different items or situations are, your heart will point to one over another. Doesn’t matter what the logic mind says, your heart knows what it wants. And once its decided you get that “ah…..” satisfaction, that matter is settled feeling, which the brain can’t give you. Because the right brain will never see anything as better than anything else and the left brain will never stop problem solving so it will never stop finding variables to worry over. That’s one of the reasons it’s call the monkey mind.
So utilize the various ways you can know things, but use them like the team they are. Each has a role, each is good at some things and not at others. And if you rely on one more than the others, think about stretching yourself to start using all of them. Practice can only help and you’ll be surprised at how much you know…