The heart wants to feel.

It wants to be free through movement. It wants to be fluid. It wants to relieve itself of the prison we lock it in. The prison that feels like: "I feel too much," and "This hurts too much," and "I must drown it in avoidance." The heart wants to hurt, so it may heal. It wants to do its job.

The heart needs love, but we know this. Yet — how often do we take time to tend to our heart with love? How often do we care for our heart as we do, say, a newborn baby: the most fragile, delicate being, in need of nourishment and pure devotion? The heart needs to be nursed. It needs to cry when it's hungry. It needs to cry when it hurts.

Our relationship with our heart has been compromised by fear. Fear will have us thinking that there is something wrong with us. That there is no sense in "going there," for our hearts make no sense, and it will only hurt. But how do we move forward on our quest for liberation, if we've turned our backs on the very source of our life and purpose? Why let fear speak, when fear has never been the one to gift us with joy?

It's the heart that cares for us, and we must develop a practice to care for it in return.

Take a moment each day to quiet your mind and center into your heart. Ask your heart how it feels, and feel its response. Sit with it for a while, and allow it all to rise to the surface. Hold your hands up to your heart center. Validate its feelings. Its pain, grief, frustrations, sadness, anger, tears. Emotions are not wrong. They just are.

After engaging this practice a few times, you can learn to identify the source of discomfort, and release it by accepting it, and letting it go.

It is from this place that healing emerges.