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Learning to open your heart space is probably the most important thing you will ever do. The reason why I say this is because your heart is the true source of happiness. As long as you live with a big heart, you will have a fulfilling life. Itโs that simple.
Some people chase money, fame, and glory, while others have built empires to achieve this feeling of fulfillment. How silly they would feel if they realized that the only route to genuine happiness is by opening the heart and experiencing all the goodness that comes from it.
Letโs look at how you can connect more deeply with your heart space for a more magical life experience.
What Does It Mean to Open Your Heart Space?
Having an open heart means that you highly value, and experience more feelings that come from the heart such as love, gratitude, and compassion โ Feelings that make us feel good!
As the most wholesome feelings that life has to offer come from the heart, striving to open your heart is a wise move.
An open heart is the gateway to experiencing some of the most desirable feelings possible as humans. As your heart is directly associated with feelings of love, gratitude, joy, forgiveness, and ultimately, happiness, you will be more in touch with these feelings by becoming more heart-centered.
Opening your heart helps you grow as a person and deepens your journey into personal and spiritual growth.
All light is associated with the heart. All darkness strives to corrupt it. The heart is the center of a high-vibrational life, while itโs absent in a low-vibrational life.
Instead of living by the mind, you live with your heart and trust that itโs leading you in the right direction. With that said, you value your heartโs wisdom more than anything else and open yourself up to experiences of love, gratitude, compassion, kindness, joy, and generosity.
But how do you know if your heart is open? Here are some signals:
- You feel it! There is often a warm energy radiating from the heart space
- You tend to listen to your heart over your mind
- You feel love for the people in your life
- You care a lot about other people and animals
- You are generally quite selfless
- You like to be generous
- You are compassionate
- You understand people and their problems
- You have a desire to help others
- You have a soft spot for certain people in your life
The Spirituality of Heart-Centered Living
Thereโs a reason why love has such a strong affiliation with spiritualityโฆ
Love is more than an emotional state caused by your brain secreting funky chemicals. Dopamine, endorphins, and oxytoxin are great and all, but theyโre not love. Love is an energy, and the heart is the physical portal to connect with that energy.
Love isnโt something you create, itโs something you tap into. Itโs the most powerful energy in the universe. God is love, and you are a part of god. When you connect with spirit, youโre tapping into the divine love that weโre all a part of.
Love is a spiritual phenomenon, as itโs not a matter of creating this feeling. Itโs a matter of connecting to a deeper part of ourselves where this love is already there.
Heaven is not a physical place, itโs a metaphor for this state of divine love that we connect to with the god within. Hell is a metaphor for the state of ego and hatred which only exists in lack of love. As every genuine spiritual leader, whether it be a shaman, priest, or a mystic believes in the power of love, thatโs got to tell you somethingโฆ
Why the Heart Chakra Needs to Be Opened
Heart-centered energies such as love, gratitude, and compassion feel like they come from the heart, but these energies come from the heart chakra.
When you open your heart, youโre opening the heart chakra and allowing more of this blissful energy to channel through you.
This is what creates that expansive feeling and raises your vibration. Opening your heart and feeling more love has a lot of spiritual significance, as being heart-centered corresponds with the higher self.
We live with unconditional love when we align with our higher selves. This feeling of love resonates with other high vibrational states such as abundance, benevolence, peace, gratitude, and compassion.
Itโs the little things that count when raising your vibration. Organically push yourself to experience more heart-centered emotions that will raise your vibration, and naturally, youโll start connecting to that feeling of love because itโs in the same basket.
To activate your heart chakra, use virtues as guidelines. Think about what emotions spark that deeper joy. Work on experiencing more high vibrational emotions by cultivating the desire to feel them.
Loving unconditionally is the ultimate goal of opening your heart space. Unconditional love is to love everyone and everything without any strings attached. Instead of basing your love for your partner on their appearance, personality, or success (a condition for your love), nothing will change how you feel about them.
Imagine the way you feel about your dog, your kids, or perhaps the love of your life. Do you love them because of something or just because it feels good? Of course, you just love them because it makes you feel good. This is unconditional love, a deeper sense of fulfillment than romantic love, which is often short-lived.
Learning to love unconditionally is the act of extending that feeling to everything. As with humanity, every creature, and every living thing that inhabits this planet and others. Love the water you drink, the food you have, and the beautiful nature youโre always surrounded by. Love the life you were given and the creator who facilitated it.
Unconditional love is the path to true mastery.
Why Do People Close Their Hearts?
People close their hearts because they are afraid of getting hurt, or they have been hurt. Look at a closed heart as the manifestation of a wound that never healed. An open heart can make you feel vulnerable and exposed.
People with a closed heart block everything out as a way to protect themselves from feeling hurt. A closed heart is more controlled, but it severely restricts your life experience in every way imaginable.
Sometimes, people put up walls in an attempt to prevent themselves from being hurt again, which comes at the expense of being heart-centered. This often happens during heartbreak.
These walls can create blockages that make it difficult for people to move back into their heart space. Because youโre cutting off the heart-chakra energy, a closed heart tapers all energies that pass through it, including compassion and gratitude.
People who have blockages in their heart chakras create the archetype of the cold-hearted Scrooge. Iโm sure youโve met people in your life who are bitter and disconnected from their heart space. As a heart chakra blockage distances people from their heart space, they also unknowingly separate themselves from happiness.
Some signs of a blockage in the heart chakra include:
- Bitterness
- A lack of gratitude
- A lack of sensitivity to other people and their problems
- A lack of empathy or compassion
- Selfishness or self-centered demeanor
- Avoidance of intimacy
- Resentment
- Misery
- Inability to properly express oneself
How to Open Your Heart Space
Because an open heart corresponds with generosity and giving, someone stuck in a scarcity mindset might close their heart to avoid giving. Itโs not that theyโre a bad person; theyโre just caught in a state of survival and feel that helping others comes at their own expense.
Itโs sad, as most people arenโt aware that theyโre robbing themselves of the biggest gift in life โ an open heart. So make sure youโre aware if youโre closed off. Set your intentions toward opening your heart and getting out of this survival state, as that fear of opening up is in your head, not your body.
Opening your heart can be scary because you feel vulnerable. As the heart is so pure, thereโs an instinct to protect it. That feeling of love is so powerful, that we commit our entire lives to avoid feeling it. This speaks measures, but itโs not because itโs bad. Itโs because the experience of love is intense.
Donโt live your life closed off because you fear getting hurt. Heartbreak can be painful, but anyone who has been through it will agree that it is always better to love fully and to get hurt rather than not to experience it at all.
With that said, thereโs a reason why the phenomenon is called heartbreak. It breaks your heart wide open. Yes, it may take some healing, but once you heal, your heart is more open than it previously was. Unless you close it off instead of feeling it and healing it, heartbreak is one of the most beautiful, soul-expanding experiences that we can undergo.
Allow Yourself to Cry
Allowing yourself to truly feel the emotions that arise is a key component in opening your heart space. If you block anything out, youโre limiting the expression of self and the expression of love.
Therefore, if you feel sad about something, let yourself feel it fully. Donโt hold it back. Cry, and do it with intent. Donโt stop yourself from crying because crying helps to get you out of your shell.
As someone once described to me, crying is like a shower for the soul. It cleans out the junk and helps you get more in touch with the heart. It should not be shunned but embraced.
Donโt Desensitize Yourself
Many people desensitize themselves from feeling heart-centered emotions in an attempt to maintain an image that they are tough. Therefore, they scoff at heart-felt conversations and suck up tears when witnessing something sad. People who have been desensitized avoid heart-centered feelings because it makes them feel vulnerable.
This issue is rooted in a personโs conditioning which is a whole other beast to tackle. Regardless, if you want to move into your heart space, itโs important to identify whether you have these tendencies. Allow yourself feel vulnerable, and youโre going to move more into your heart space.
Be Present With Your Feelings
To enter your heart space, itโs important to understand that painful emotions are not your enemy.
Yes, they suck to experience, they can hurt. But those emotions are also very wise teachers as they humble you. So be present with them. Even unpleasant emotions help you calibrate with the heart space, as they show you what you donโt want to experience (and whatโs a better alternative).
By escaping particular emotions or sensations, youโre also refusing to learn from them. They arenโt serving their purpose if youโre refusing to experience them. Therefore, be present with every experience that you have, desirable or not, because at the very least, theyโre going to point you in the right direction.
Practice Forgiveness
Blockages of the heart chakra often result in emotional states like resentment and hatred. These emotions occur when you are separated from the heart space and disconnected from your loving soul nature. Notice how when you let go of these negative feelings, you feel a little happier and open up a little more.
Itโs important to recognize if thereโs any bad energy lingering. Is there anyone who you feel resentment towards? Because if there is, this is going to act as a barrier to opening your heart.
Learning to let go of these painful feelings towards someone else can be difficult, but itโs necessary to identify this lingering energy and practice forgiveness until the blockage is removed. By mopping out all the negativity that you hold onto, you create space for love to fill.
Wish People Well
You want to reach a place where you wish pretty much everyone that you think about well. Imagine your dad is going through a really difficult time, or heโs lonely or sad. How does that make you feel? It makes you sad, right? You genuinely wish him the best because seeing him suffering makes you sad, too.
So when you think about people, try to jog the heart by wishing them well too. If I know someone is in a bad position, I naturally feel for them and send them loving energy. Sometimes Iโll imagine them in a bad position to jog my heart, so I can achieve that feeling and send them loving energy anyway.
Work on Healing Your Emotional Wounds
If you have issues opening your heart, it could be the result of emotional wounds. These wounds come in different forms, from childhood trauma, abandonment, heartbreak, negative experiences with people in the past, and so forth.
When these wounds arenโt properly processed (as often, weโre too young to know how to process them), sometimes we find the only way to stop experiencing that pain is to close off, which can be either conscious or unconscious.
Therefore, itโs important to sit with your experiences and see if thereโs any hidden trauma that has blocked your heart chakra. If you recall any painful experiences related to the heart space or can recognize that you closed yourself off, itโs important to resurrect that trauma and heal it.
Get Out of Your Ego
The ego blocks the heart and has no problem doing so. The egoic self is associated with the lower self as itโs the self-serving part of you. When youโre centered around the ego, the sense of me, you lose that connection to love. Thatโs why you need to realize when youโre coming from a place of ego rather than heart.
Spiritual practices such as meditating can help you get out of your ego and into your heart. Aiming to be more mindful, and recognizing when your ego is in charge will help too.
Step by step as your ego loses power and you cultivate a higher awareness, you will start connecting to that deeper and more wholesome part of self.
Live From a Place of Service
Possibly, the most important thing you can do to open your heart is to live in a place of service. Service is the key to god, and living from your heart is the best way to be at service. They directly correspond with one another.
Being at service is to dedicate your life to the betterment and evolution of all living things. Think about how you can better humanity in some form, even if itโs by touching a few hearts or helping a few people. How can you positively contribute to others, and what forms does this take?
You will find that being at service to god is the ultimate key to an open heart. Service is fulfillment; it gives your life a reason, and it allows you to embody the fullest expression of unconditional love, as your primary motive is to help.
Therefore, think about how your life can make a difference. How can you walk the path of higher fulfillment, and how does that path manifest into your attitudes, decisions, thoughts, and beliefs.