This is how I do it; your mileage may vary.
Bear in mind the systemic model of human nature. We are fighting generations of mythology and social conditioning that deny a separate intelligence in the heart and belly. Not only do we need to learn about them, but we have to start from scratch recovering how to make it all interact as God intended. You cannot fully claim the blessings of God’s revelation without this.
Right away, I’ll tell you the heart is the pinnacle of what you can touch consciously. It reads the signals from your belly brain better than your intellect can. Remember: The intellect organizes and implements. It is not supposed to rule. The heart rules. So while your mind can make some sense of the body signals, it requires the heart to decide what to do about them. The body doesn’t understand divine justice; the body knows only what it knows at the direct level of contact with the physical world around us. If moral necessity demands you deny some particular appetite, the body won’t suddenly quit wanting it.
Then again, there is no clinical descriptive language for any of this, so we are forced to use the indicative language of parables. On top of this, some folks are more naturally inclined to the meaningful interaction within their own system than others are. That’s why we always have to remind folks not to ape each other, but take each narrative as advisory and indicative. This business of factual accuracy is a construct of the intellect. It is not the nature of reality itself.
So I struggle with making sense of my heart’s superior understanding the same as most of you do. It is meant to be time-consuming. That’s another of those paradoxical things natural to divine revelation. We need lots of time “wasted” pursuing our internal changes so that we can make the best use of time when it comes the moment to act. That’s a sort of, “more sweat in training, less blood in combat” sort of thing on the moral plane of understanding. I spend years training my body for fitness and only a few moments here and there taking full advantage of it. In moral terms, it is the surrender and willingness that matters most, not what we can accomplish with it.
As part of that same paradox, the actual HOWTO part would make little sense without that explanation. Two things I do to bring my system into balance, but both are actually variations of the same principle — get your ego out of the way.
One: As part of my fitness activities, I love to walk in quiet places. But my legs aren’t what they used to be, so cycling is my outlet. Around here that means very hilly, narrow paved roads, mostly laid out in a grid across the Oklahoma countryside. It’s not just safety that leads me to seek low traffic routes that keep me out for two or more hours at a time. The Lord alone knows what I might do to occupy my brain, but I typically talk aloud to God about whatever comes to mind. Engaging the body and brain in this fashion allows my heart to speak. I’m not sure I can explain how I know something is from the heart and not my mind, but I am learning to discern the difference between intellectual-emotional obsessions and something persistent on a much higher level.
Two: I play simple computer games while listening to worship music. The games are things like card- or tile-based puzzle stuff. The music is a collection of albums from the Hosanna series (now owned by Integrity Music) that suit my personal tastes. I’ve posted in the past about using a script that downloads from YouTube and converts the video to a fat MP3 audio file (the script relies on a properly installed FFMpeg or similar conversion library; see script documentation). Integrity already got my money for the albums long ago, but the original media wore out. Someone uploaded them to YouTube and Integrity never bothered to complain. I rotate through the albums and listen for as long as one or two lasts.
In both instances, you’ll notice that worship is a central element. Distracting the ego is not an issue for everyone, but the worship is critical to ensuring that the Holy Spirit maintains authority over the process. Any music that brings you to worship is fine, or any other environmental element that allows you to leave yourself behind and be drawn up into the Spirit Realm. The idea is that Jehovah gets the glory and focus of attention.
What makes this different from simply going to church is that it is necessarily private. You come alone before God on the terms He gives uniquely to you. You come with the background awareness of your need to come under the rule of your heart. You come aware of the danger of letting mere emotion rule, and that you need not experience much of that at all. I’ve warned often enough that it’s too easy today to stir up an emotional experience and claim it was the Spirit of God. Emotions aren’t forbidden, but if you can’t tell the difference, you are a threat to God’s message.
If you don’t have time for this kind of thing, you don’t have time to walk in holiness.
