Teaching the Heart to Stay Open

I was always very sensitive when I was younger. I lived from the heart. I was deeply moved by beauty, easily shaken by sorrow. It made me an emotional teenager—one who felt everything, all at once.

But as life goes on, you face a choice:

How much of your heart can you afford to keep open?

Because in the current structure of the world, emotional depth isn’t rewarded.

If anything, it’s punished. To survive, to succeed, to avoid judgment—you start to shut things down. You numb. You adapt.

And little by little, the desensitization sets in.

Not just to your own pain, but to the pain of others.

Worse still, you start to inflict pain—on yourself and on the people around you. Not because you’re cruel. Not because you want to.

But because you’ve become so numb you can’t feel the harm anymore.

Until one day…

You do feel it again.

And that’s when the healing begins.

But this whole arc—this severing and slow return—can be prevented.

It doesn’t have to unfold this way.

One of the most important things I’ve ever done in my life is try—really try—to stay connected to my heart center. Sometimes that meant I would sit on the floor, alone, just breathing and asking,

“Where is it? Where is my heart?”

There were months… maybe even years… when I couldn’t feel it.

And that broke my heart all over again—because I knew what it felt like to live with it.

I knew what it meant to be with my heart… and what it meant to be without.

I also want to say this clearly:

There are systems in this world—pharmaceutical, societal, institutional—that pull us away from our hearts.

I’ve seen it with things like Adderall. It can disconnect people from their emotional center, from empathy, from the quiet wisdom of the body. And that’s not just sad—it’s dangerous.

So what can we do?

We teach children—early and often—what the heart feels like.

We help them name the sensations of love.

We show them how to sit with their emotions and not fear them.

We give them tools to stay open—so they don’t have to close down just to live here.

Because if a child learns how to live from the heart early on…

They may never have to learn how to return to it.