“The longest journey you’ll ever take is from the head to the heart.” This phrase, often attributed to the Sioux Indian tradition, refers to the shift from a purely intellectual, head-based way of interacting with life—through a mental lens—to a more experiential, feeling-based, and intuitive way of being.
From a head perspective, through a rational lens, the truth can be figured out through empirical data, science, and facts that can be proven. The truth is one universal thing, separate from us and determined by external factors. This is rationalism, the narrative we’ve built our society and bet the farm on. From a heart perspective, however, the truth is subjective, internally based, a wisdom that’s personal and includes our senses, intuition, and emotional knowing. As a culture, we haven’t completed the journey from the head to the heart—in fact, we seem to be walking backward on the path.
Based in the Western intellectual tradition of rationalism, this factual, science-based approach to life, reason, and logic is what’s valued. All truths can be figured out using the deductive and analytical mind. While non-Western traditions value other heart-and-body-based aspects of life, the rational narrative places all its eggs in the intellectual basket. In rationalism, reason is king.
What this rational narrative overlooks, however, is that reason always includes interpretation, which is always influenced, shaped, and transformed by our personal experience, emotions, language, culture, power structures, and social mores. Reasoning and interpretation don’t exist in a vacuum. Logical reasoning has already been subverted by the mind, experience, and cultural conditioning of the person applying that reason.
Simultaneously, the rational narrative assumes there to be one singular truth, which means that when we’re arguing for the validity of our experience or personal truth, we’re arguing for what we believe is the one real truth (which also happens to be our truth). It’s difficult to accept or consider that what we see and experience is relative, a byproduct of our conditioning. That would mean that what other people see and experience could also be true, through their personal lens and conditioning. Realizing that infinite truths exist and can coexist peacefully is precisely what allows us to wear our own stories with more lightness and ease.
When we stop believing that our story is the one universal truth, and that our reality is the one true reality, and furthermore, that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong and must be converted to our version of reality, then we’re free. We no longer have to prove our rightness or get anyone else to agree with our reality for it to be true. We’re free to let other people’s versions of reality exist too, and accept their experience as also real—for them.
Differing realities are no longer a problem or a threat—we get it that there isn’t just one knowable and provable truth, but as many truths as there are people on this earth. Our truth is just one of infinite truths. To know this is to be liberated at our core.
Waking up from the narrative trance comes through this realization that reality is a perception, deeply personal, and always changing, a process filtered through our personal and cultural conditioning and lived experience. Ultimately, when we accept this as a paradigm for living, we open to radically different and more fulfilling connections with other people, and infinitely more peace within ourselves. Our whole system relaxes; at last, the struggle is over—everyone can be right. Everyone is right.
Layered into rationalism is the idea that everything happens for a reason, and not just a reason but a knowable reason. An answer exists for all questions, an answer that we can (and should) figure out. We feel compelled to understand and explain each moment and every experience—why it’s happening, why we feel the way we feel, why people are the way they are, ad infinitum. Why is the question by which we live. Furthermore, the singular source we consult for the answers is our mind. Our personal storylines then serve this purpose, to create an answer for our ever-present why—a reason for each of our experiences and perceptions, and a reasonable meaning to go with it.
The rational narrative has taught us that the unknown is unacceptable. It’s not okay if the mind can’t figure it out—not knowing is not an option. The idea that we could live in the questions, in the not knowing, is contrary to our deepest cultural conditioning. When we don’t know why something is, we can’t control it, or prevent it if need be, we feel vulnerable and unsafe. Not being able to figure it out means we’ve failed. There’s an answer out there; we just can’t find it.
The powerful message layered into the rational narrative is that we should understand everything. If we can’t, there’s a problem. The one thing we can know for sure is that “I don’t know” is not an answer—and not okay.
Our inner narrator is clever. When uncertainty exists, when we can’t know why, she solves the problem by providing a sensible and cohesive narrative for our experience—regardless of how she has to finagle the facts to get there. The story then gives us an explanation for what’s uncertain and unknowable. Even when our answers make us feel worse and make the situation worse, we still choose to believe our why-stories. At the end of the day, a painful explanation is better than no explanation—an unwanted answer better than no answer at all.
The challenge, however, is that so much of our experience is in fact unexplainable and unknowable, particularly when it comes to other people’s behavior! And, furthermore, life is infinitely vaster and more mysterious than just what the intellect can know and decipher. And yet, we hang on to our belief that a rational explanation exists for everything we experience, and that the way to know our experience is through the intellect. It’s precisely this belief that gives our inner narrator her tenure.
Waking up from the narrative trance, and from the stories that keep us stuck, is not just about becoming aware of our personal narratives, or seeing the assumptions we’re making and mental bridges we’re constructing. It’s also about noticing the soil in which our stories formed, the larger paradigms we’ve been fed, and how they became our truth and shape the way we see the world—in short, how we came to know what we know.
Excerpted from my upcoming book, Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck (November 1, 2026).
