What Does It Mean To Open Your Heart? (A Quick, Practical Guide)
For many years, phrases like “Just open your heart,” or “You need to listen to your heart,” felt like little more than empty motivational platitudes to me. They sounded nice but fluffy and insubstantial. Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of learning that the difference between what is often referred to as an open heart, and a closed heart, is actually an incredibly tangible, palpable, practical phenomenon. When one understands what having an open or closed heart means, it’s as noticeable and real as the shifting temperature of a room. Rather than an esoteric, spiritual concept, it’s as tangible as the difference between an open hand and a closed fist.
Today, I’m going to take on the rather audacious challenge of quickly distilling what I’ve learned about the nature of an open heart into a simple, succinct post.
Open Heart As Empathy, Compassion, And More
From all I have learned, my understanding is that what we mean when we say ‘open heart’ is a state of awareness where our compassion, empathy, humility, courage, and a whole host of other associated qualities are fully online. We are looking at our experience through the filter of these aspects of our awareness. And, conversely, when the heart is closed, our empathy, compassion, etc, are offline. In their absence, there will often be a sense of insecurity, comparison, scarcity, or needing to prove oneself. If one has the choice, going through life with an open heart appears to have some pretty massive, obvious advantages. And though it can take some playing around, we often have much more choice in this matter than we may realize.
Where The Heart Naturally Opens
When I was a teenager, I discovered an extraordinary sanctuary in the forests near my family’s home. When I went into the woods, there was a dramatic and sudden shift in my emotional state. I felt a fear of judgment dissolve, I felt my body relax, a certain kind of protection or defensiveness softened. Alone in nature, I was surrounded by living things but judged by none. There were just trees, mosses, and ferns silently going about their business. When I was alone in the beauty of nature, I could open my heart, and it felt wonderful.
Most of us have some type of sanctuary like this — a special place in our lives where we can feel a sense of empathy, naturalness, vulnerability, or ease. For some people, that might be through listening to beautiful music or creating their own art. For many, the clearest window into this is through romantic love — that one place where we can stretch our empathy open and let our guard down like no other.
Sometimes, when romantic love goes awry, it becomes a place where the heart is slammed firmly shut — where empathy, understanding, and support are replaced with resentment, frustration, and disdain.
Where The Heart Naturally Closes
In the same way that many of us have places where our heart naturally opens, we usually have places where it habitually closes. Strained family relationships, ex-lovers we feel burned by, people who have strong opinions we don’t agree with, things we are ashamed of in ourselves, etc. Anywhere that our empathy, compassion, and understanding vanish from our awareness is a possible case study in a closed heart.
For many years now, I’ve made it a kind of personal sport to study how my heart fluctuates between these two polarities in my daily life, playing around with the intention of bridging the gap between them.
What this looks like on a practical level is very mundane on the outside, but extraordinary on the inside. A simple example would be my morning walk. Every morning, I go for a long walk in a park near my apartment. During my morning walk, I generally get into an extremely positive state, mentally and emotionally. It’s a kind of meditation. Even if I’m carrying a lot of heavier emotions, like loneliness, confusion, grief, or sadness (and I usually am), during my walk I get to simply be with these feelings. I let myself be present to them, study them, process them, and more than anything, appreciate them.
As I’m on this meditative walk, my heart is generally very open. Often when I cross paths with others, I beam a wide, natural smile at them without even noticing, and see how they are affected by that.
Sometimes, when I cross paths with a very closed, withdrawn person (or someone I find intimidating because of their beauty, for example), I notice my self-consciousness and shame kick in. My gait tightens — my loose, natural physiological state turns to tension. I wonder if I should look at my feet, or the sky, or make eye contact. My insecurity has caused me to close my heart (or empathy/naturalness/compassion) and jump into a more self-absorbed state of shame and discomfort.
This is the best part, though. Because when I notice it, I can pause myself and play with the variables at hand. Instead of reflexively closing my heart and jumping to insecurity, I can remind the part of me that’s freaking out how the person before us is just a person. We can stay present. This is our job in life. If we need to have a wall up, we can put one up, but we are safe right now. I will challenge my tendency to close by using a myriad of approaches — I probably do something different every time that I practice this. And when I can notice myself closing down and effectively navigate back towards an open heart, even if the person I am open to isn’t open in return, I’m benefitting by developing my muscles of empathy and maturity.
This conscious dance of awareness, bouncing between the open and closed heart, is an incredibly exhilarating art. Learning to recognize the physiological and mental cues that accompany these divergent states, and then develop the ability to play with them, is a truly humbling and wonderful thing.
In the spirit of keeping this post brief, I’m going to leave this here today, although there is much more that could be said on it (I did write a book that dives very deep into this subject — in the form of a highly personal, relatable story).
I hope you enjoyed this post, and am excited for all of us to be studying the extraordinary process of opening the heart in each of our lives.
