The Courage to Keep Your Heart Open

It’s interesting how many traditions, therapies, and bits of good advice come back to this:

Keep your heart open.

Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it.

— Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

But what does that even mean?

I get the idea. The heart is an energy center—(whatever that means!)—and you want that energy to be free. You want it flowing. Alive. You want to live from that deep place.

But it’s easy to walk around with a closed heart.

Defenses up. Energy stuck. A kind of silent, quiet shutdown.

Have you noticed that feeling?

When something small—an annoyance, a look, a memory—covers your heart like a cloud. You suddenly can’t feel joy. You’re numb. Angry, maybe. But mostly frozen.

It’s like something from the past rises up and locks your heart away.

Screaming to be heard. Screaming to be felt.

But you can’t get to it.

The pain, the tension, the sorrow—it’s all there, but the door is bolted. The heart is in chains, in the dungeon.

And you freeze.

You feel stuck.

You lose your center.

You lose direction.

Because out of the heart comes life.

“…the source of your life flows from it.” — Proverbs 4:23

When the heart is shut down, so is your life—your spontaneity, your vibrancy, your play, your dreams.

Your sense of connection with the world.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

— Rumi

 

The Heart Is You

The heart is you.

The real you.

And so you don’t just want to guard it.

You need to protect it so that it can stay open.

There’s a massive difference.

You don’t need to be guarded from your heart.

You need to guard for it.

Because here’s the thing:

• Trauma teaches us to close.
• Shame locks the heart away.
• Grief tempts us to never feel again.
• Fear says: Never again.

And for a time, that closing protects us.

We lose ourselves.

The body holds the story.

We get sick. The immune system slows.

The psyche curls in on itself.

But wholeness—wholeness is staying soft while walking through fire.

 

A Heart of Flesh

A heart of flesh—that’s the goal.

Not a heart of stone.

“I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

— Ezekiel 36:26

And yes, it’s tempting to go the other way.

Because who can damage a stone?

But a stone is heavy. Lifeless.

It doesn’t beat. It doesn’t live.

It just protects by freezing.

Flesh is different.

Flesh is real. It hurts. Because it’s full of nerves.

It feels everything.

But better to feel pain than to feel nothing.

Better to ache than to go numb and forget what being alive even means.

Yes, there’s morphine. There’s distraction.

There’s novocaine for the soul. And sometimes, honestly, we need it.

We’ll do whatever we can to make the pain stop—even if it means selling off parts of our soul.

But often the pain passes quickly if we face it.

If we just let it burn through,

We can process it—courageously.

We can move through it—not around it.

 

Becoming Like a Child (again)

And maybe then the question becomes:

Dare I allow my heart to melt again?

To become flesh again.

Like it was before the layers came.

Like it was when I was a child.

Before all this hardness. Before it got complicated.

Before all the masks.

When life was simple. When beauty didn’t need an explanation.

“Become like little children.”

— Matthew 18:3

Ok. I’ll try.

But I don’t fully know how.

I feel lost sometimes—lost in my rational mind, in my defensiveness, in the numbness that’s easier than pain.

But the truth is,

I am safe now.

“Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.”

— Proverbs 4:23 (CSB)

I can protect my heart without locking it up.

I can stand guard over my soul—not to keep it in, but to keep it soft.

Protecting also means opening, and airing, and loving.

Because a closed heart?

That’s a danger to itself.

That’s what allows it to stay open.

Not reckless. Not exposed to everything and everyone.

But guarded in the way that makes openness possible.

 

Try Again

So, I’ll try again.

I’ll feel the ache.

I’ll breathe.

I’ll soften.

And I’ll let my heart come back online.

Because life only really flows from the heart that stays open.

And mine still wants to live.

May your heart stay soft, even when it hurts.

May you find strength not in the wall, but in the gate.

Protect your heart. Because without it you have no life. 

And you guard your heart, not by shutting it down—

but by choosing, again and again, to keep it open.