The Quiet Art of Knowing
On the wisdom of the heart, the intelligence of the body and the space in which clarity emerges
There is a particular kind of knowing that doesn't arrive through thinking. It doesn't announce itself with certainty or insist that we follow. Sometimes it is barely more than a subtle shift in the body, a softening, a sense of something settling into place. At other times, it comes as a quiet but unmistakable recognition that something is no longer true for us.
I've been reflecting on the nature of this knowing and on how easily we can overlook it in our search for answers.
We live in a world that places enormous value on the capacity to analyse, interpret and understand. We learn to gather evidence, weigh possibilities and construct a convincing argument for the decisions we make. There is great intelligence in this - the mind is a remarkable instrument! Yet there are moments when more thinking only takes us further from the clarity we seek, when the endless turning over of possibilities obscures something that, at a deeper level, we may already sense.
What might it mean to allow another kind of intelligence into the conversation?
The heart as a way of seeing
In my exploration of Hakini Yoga, I keep returning to the relationship between Ajna, the centre of insight and perception, and Anahata, the heart centre. I'm interested in the space between them: the meeting of clear seeing and felt knowing, of perception and presence.
We often speak of following the heart as though it were simply a matter of trusting our emotions. But the heart, in this deeper sense, offers something more nuanced than that.
Our feelings are real and they carry information. Yet a feeling is not necessarily a truth, any more than a thought is a fact. Fear can speak with tremendous conviction. Desire can dress itself as intuition. Old wounds can shape what we perceive long before we become conscious of them.
To see through the heart is not to abandon discernment. It is to bring a different quality of attention to it.
Rather than asking only, What do I think about this? we might also ask, What am I actually sensing? What is influencing the way I see? Can I remain present with what is here without immediately needing to resolve it?
This is where the heart becomes less a place of sentiment and more a way of knowing - one that asks for honesty, spaciousness and a willingness to encounter what we find.
The Tantric understanding of awareness
Within the Tantric traditions that inform my practice, consciousness is not something separate from the life we inhabit. It is not confined to the mind, nor is the body merely a vessel that carries us towards some more elevated spiritual experience. The body is part of the field of knowing itself.
This is one of the aspects of Tantra that continues to draw me in: its invitation to meet experience directly, to recognise the sacred not by withdrawing from life, but by becoming more intimately present within it.
In the non-dual Shaiva traditions of Kashmir, awareness is understood not as a detached observer standing outside experience, but as the very ground in which experience arises. Perception, sensation, thought, emotion and the world around us are not necessarily obstacles to awareness. They are the very textures through which it can recognise itself.
When I sit with this understanding, discernment begins to feel less like a mental exercise and more like a quality of presence.
We are not trying to manufacture the right answer. We are learning to meet the moment with enough awareness to perceive it more clearly. There is a subtle but important difference.
When we are caught in reactivity, our experience can narrow. We see through the lens of what we fear, what we want, what we have known before. We may be responding not only to the present moment, but to the accumulated weight of our histories.
Practice offers us the possibility of pausing within that movement.
Not to reject what arises, but to become intimate enough with it that we can begin to distinguish between the experience itself and the stories forming around it.
In that space, something may become clearer.
Listening beneath the noise
I find that the body often reveals the quality of my relationship with a situation before my mind has found the words to describe it.
There may be a tightening around the diaphragm, a subtle bracing in the shoulders, a held breath. Or there may be a sense of expansion, a little more room to breathe, an ease that wasn't there before.
These sensations are worth listening to. But I try not to make them mean too much, too quickly.
A constriction might signal that something is wrong, but it might also arise because something is unfamiliar, vulnerable or important. An expansive feeling might indicate alignment, but it could equally reflect the relief of avoiding something difficult.
The body offers us information, not infallible instructions, so the practice is to stay curious.
Can I remain with a sensation without immediately assigning it a meaning? Can I notice the impulse to move towards or away from something without allowing that impulse to make the decision for me? Can I give experience enough room to reveal its more subtle dimensions?
Sometimes clarity comes through movement. Sometimes through rest. Sometimes it emerges only after we have stopped demanding that it arrive.
This is why I value practices that bring attention into the body without insisting that we change what we find there. Breath, movement, stillness and sensation can all become ways of listening. Not because they hold a secret answer but because they allow us to encounter ourselves with greater intimacy.
The practice is not to become endlessly self-analytical. It is to become more available to experience.
The space before the answer
Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of inner knowing is learning to tolerate the space in which we do not yet know.
We are often so eager to resolve uncertainty that we reach for the first explanation that offers relief. We name the feeling, decide what it means, construct a plan and move on. The discomfort of not knowing can feel like something that needs to be overcome.
Yet there is a quality of intelligence in allowing a question to remain open.
In Tantric practice, the pause between movements, the stillness within the breath, the moment in which attention rests before following its habitual direction, are all mudhya or middle, these places can become invitations to discover a different relationship with time. Not everything needs to be grasped. Not every experience needs to be turned into a conclusion.
There is a kind of receptivity here that I am learning to value more deeply. It’s not passivity, nor is it a refusal to act. It is the willingness to allow perception to mature before rushing towards certainty.
Sometimes this means recognising that we need more information. Sometimes it means acknowledging a truth we have been reluctant to face. Sometimes it means accepting that the answer is not yet available, and that we can still meet ourselves honestly in its absence.
Clarity does not always arrive as a revelation. Sometimes it is the gradual falling away of what is not true.
Returning to the eye of the heart
I return often to the image of the eye of the heart, that meeting of perception and presence where seeing is not separate from the quality of attention we bring to what we see.
For me, this is not about cultivating a special kind of spiritual perception, or becoming someone who always knows what to do. It is about becoming a little less governed by the noise, a little more willing to listen, and a little more honest about what shapes my experience.
It is about allowing the intelligence of the mind and the wisdom of the body to belong to the same conversation.
And perhaps, above all, it’s about remembering that clarity cannot always be forced. There are things we can only perceive when we stop trying so hard to arrive somewhere else.
The next time you find yourself searching for an answer, you might pause for a moment before reaching for one.
Feel the ground beneath you. Notice your breath without needing to change it. Sense what is happening in your body and allow the thoughts and feelings around the question to be present without immediately making them your guide. You do not need to discover anything extraordinary.
Simply notice what becomes possible when you give yourself a little more space to see.
Perhaps this, too, is a practice of the heart: not learning to know everything but becoming more intimate with the conditions in which genuine knowing can emerge.
And trusting that sometimes, in the quiet, something begins to become clear.