The quietest voice in the room
Richard writes a regular column for Yoga Magazine, and this piece explores an idea that's shaped his own practice for years: in Chinese medicine, the heart is described as the quietest voice among all the streams of thought running through the mind. It's easy to miss entirely, buried under louder, more insistent layers of thinking, but Richard has found it consistently more trustworthy than any of them.
Why deep relaxation matters
The clearest way to hear it, he's found, is through the stillness that builds during meditation and deep relaxation, the point in a yoga class where the mental noise thins out, sometimes down to a single, quieter voice underneath everything else. That voice tends to make more sense over time than the louder, more reactive layers of thought that dominate waking life, which Richard describes as full of cultural judgement, rationalisation and inherited belief.
Two ways of deciding
Richard draws a distinction between what he calls external navigation, making decisions from those inherited judgements and assumptions, and internal navigation, making decisions from a quieter, more creative prompting from within. He shares a personal example: choosing between several house moves, where his conscious mind had built an entire case for one option, only to be overridden by a much clearer sense of the right choice once he actually sat with it.
The practical takeaway
None of this is a call to abandon good judgement, it's an invitation to actually listen, properly, to what surfaces during meditation or deep relaxation, rather than dismissing it as irrelevant noise. As the nervous system settles during a class, the mind tends to quieten too, and the version of you making decisions from that place is, in Richard's experience, a considerably wiser one.
Richard is a facilitator here at Moinhos Velhos and the founder of Creative Wellness.
