The reward that comes from fully feeling our emotions: a heart full of love and compassion
I used to think an open heart was something you arrived at. A state. A place you finally reached after enough meditation and therapy, enough insight, enough good days in a row.
That’s not what I’ve found.
The heart opens through feeling itself, actually felt in the body, as it happens.
I see this with clients all the time. A man will describe his sadness perfectly. He’ll use the right words. He’ll trace it back to his father, his divorce, the year everything fell apart. And none of it moves. The heart stays closed because the feeling never actually arrived. It stayed up in the head, as a story about a feeling.
Then something shifts. He stops narrating and starts noticing. A tightness in the chest. A heat behind the eyes. A weight low in the belly. He stays with it instead of explaining it. And the heart opens, because he let something move through him that had been waiting a long time to move.
I think this is what people miss about spiritual growth too. We reach for presence, for witnessing, for the peace that’s supposed to come from stepping back. And sometimes that stepping back becomes another way to avoid feeling.
A more sophisticated bypass. I can watch my anger with great equanimity and still never let it touch me.
Real opening means coming closer instead. Feeling the grief instead of observing it from a hilltop. Letting the anger be hot in your hands instead of describing its temperature.
This is hard for a lot of men. We’re trained to manage feeling. Manage it well and you look strong and avoid judgement or punishment. Feel it openly and you risk looking like you’re falling apart. But I haven’t met a man yet who became more himself by staying managed.
The men who soften are the ones who let themselves feel the thing they’d been holding at arm’s length.
The heart opens through contact. Contact with what’s actually here. The sadness that’s actually sad. The fear that’s actually afraid. The love that’s actually love, felt in the chest and not just believed in the mind.
I don’t think this makes life easier. Some days it makes it harder. Feeling fully means feeling loss fully too. But there’s a fullness on the other side of it that managing never gives you. A heart that’s been allowed to feel is a heart that can also love without holding back. For more, please visit my Substack “Beyond Words” https://substack.com/@davilahealing