Letting Your Heart Do Its Job

Your Heart is Designed to Feel

Just like every part of you, your heart has innate skills and wisdom. Much like your brain is designed to think, your heart is designed to feel. “Feeling” is the way the heart processes and even metabolizes the energies and emotions of living life. Your heart is good at this and you can trust its skills when you give it space to do its job.

Where we get tripped up is that many of the human emotions feel uncomfortable or even downright painful, and we have a strong survival instinct to avoid pain.

Avoiding Pain

As humans, we have a natural instinct to avoid pain. And we are thankful for this instinct, of course. If you were to put your hand on a hot stove, the pain would make you recoil instantly and save you from terrible injury. This is a vital and life-saving instinct.

The survival instinct to avoid pain is so powerful that we often also let it dictate the emotional body. We might even push away emotional pain at the very instant of discomfort. Painful feelings like sadness, anger, regret, jealousy, shame, fear, etc, register as a threat and we avoid them or let them dictate behavior in an effort to find relief.

A Case for Feeling Instead

Consider that your emotions, even the painful ones, show up to help you understand yourself and the world around you. They are information and their messages create inner wisdom and energetic clarity - when they are given space to do so.

It would be terrible if we couldn’t feel sad when someone we love dies; or if we couldn’t feel angry in the face of injustice. Clearly embarrassment serves to course-correct; and jealousy reminds us to take care of ourselves. Each uncomfortable emotion serves a purpose and, just like the pain of a hot stove, each emotion is here to help.

Unlike the pain of a hot stove, however, emotional pain takes time to offer its gift. Enter meditation.

Meditating with the Heart’s Wisdom

When you give your heart space to simply feel in meditation, you are giving it space to receive the gifts of your emotional life. By getting curious to your heart’s sensations, you are practicing many things:

• Resilience:

  You are literally training yourself to get more comfortable with uncomfortable emotions. We don’t want to react to emotions as if they are a hot stove. We want to be able to feel them with grace, rather than recoiling or acting out. So by slowing down and letting your heart feel, you come into a new relationship with your emotional body. Rather than recoiling when strong emotions arise, you have already practiced being able to gracefully feel them.

• Emotional Intelligence:

  You are letting your emotions teach you about themselves and about yourself. You are giving them time and attention to reveal their gifts. You begin to notice that sadness clears the way for something new. And that anger is a fire that can activate change. You notice that being with shame long enough will convert it into self-love, inner-forgiveness and even self-trust.

• Inner Peace:

  By feeling your emotions and letting your emotions take care of you, you are no longer nagged by them. Emotions do not like to be ignored and avoiding them causes agitation, anxiety, depression and even illness.

• Inner Responsibility:

  In meditation, you are activating inner-listening and curiosity so you can feel your emotions through thoroughly. This is a no-stone-left-unturned activity. You want to receive all the gifts of your emotional life and let them integrate and create a sense of fullness within.

Do it for You

There seems to be a misconception that if you open up your heart, you will become a pushover or become weak. And while, yes, you will feel more, you will also become far more capable to handle your emotional world with fortitude, poise and dexterity. You aren’t opening your heart so that it becomes a stomping ground for anyone and anything. Letting your heart feel deeply in meditation actually helps you to create appropriate boundaries because you become oriented to your true self, no longer confused by the chaos of so many un-felt emotions.

If it Hurts, You’re Doing it Right

I don’t teach heart meditations lightly. This is an act of courage and adventure. And if it hurts, you’re doing it right. Trust the process; and trust the infinite power of your heart’s love to handle your life and take care of you.

Photo by Josh Applegate