Lets talk about heart. Even when I say that, what comes up for you? When I say, “Live with heart?” What’s your immediate knee jerk reaction?

I guarantee it’s two things:

A still, small voice that says: “YES. YES! I was born for that!”
And then quickly after, a competing voice that says, “No. no. no. no. no. no. That’s lame. Unrealistic. Risky even.”

Truth be told, living with heart can feel like it’s for the birds… something women do… maybe more of an emotional state of being but surely not a way of living. UNLESS IT IS.

When I talk about heart, I’m not talking about just any kind of heart. I’m talking about: a whole – heart.

What does it mean to have a whole heart?

Whole by definition is all of; entire. It means an unbroken or undamaged state; in one piece. It’s complete in itself; all of something.

When you look at the synonyms of the word you find words such as; hearty, whole – souled, single minded, fervent, zealous, gung ho, spirited, genuine, unrestrained, sincere, unaffected, absolute!

I mean these are powerful, powerful words and immediately will confirm whether or not you’re in the zone. Do you know what I mean? You can feel it can’t you?

There is a reason the Bible says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Everything flows from it… including your dreams! Your dreams actually come straight from this place, your heart space (your spirit and soul).

Our dreams are connected to our hearts, not our heads. Which is why we are going to spend some time talking about HEART today.

This is the real soulful, intuitive side of who we are. Your dreams actually come straight from your heart space, your spirit and soul. This space within you lives open, untethered, uninhibited, unconditional, never self-seeking, full of life, love, and unending possibilities because it is connected to itself and it is connected to God. This is alignment. (I want you to remember that!)

Your heart is the very seed of imagination and creation. This place within you has no limits and is directly connected to growth, contribution, and of course, manifested purpose. The more you use it, the more you recognize that it doesn’t function at an intellectual level so its words and insights don’t always make “logical sense” and its been known to speak in images, colors and/or this deep-seeded revelation and idea that just kind of “plops in your lap.” It’s a knowing within you. What you see at this level isn’t yet seen with the physical eye so it’s necessary to learn how to feel it and trust it. Einstein once said: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

The intuitive mind he is referencing here is your heart space.

This space is where your dreams are born. It’s where your real power comes from and where all the magic happens. It’s the place where building a better world is built not because of what you see around you or what you’ve experienced, but because of what you know, sense and can feel within you. This is why your dreams are laced in clarity and a greater sense of good because they are outside the mental conditioning and analytics of the mind. It’s how you’re able to go where you’ve never been and do what you’ve never done because your dreams are forgiving, forbearing, unconditional and without limitations. They take you where the mind cannot and will not go.

Your heart doesn’t have timelines and agendas. It has no expectations or attachments, it just simply knows, therefore holding within it infinite truth. Your heart lives without judgment and critical nature, it doesn’t even know how to compare or feel mocked. Your heart lives in the “land of abundance,” which means there is always enough. It’s in this space, the heart space, that your dreams live and no one else holds the insight to unleashing these dreams and no one else holds the keys to unlock them within you, besides you. It’s like a treasure chest waiting to be opened.

That begs the question, if this space is so powerful, magical and insightful, like a treasure chest, why would one choose to not open it? Why are we not living from heart? Why is our knee jerk reaction, “No. no. no. no.”?

It’s oftentimes less about not opening the treasure chest of dreams but rather a blockage that occurs.

How do we become blocked?

We become blocked because of hurt. And that hurt compounds and becomes unprocessed pain. And unprocessed pain wreaks havoc on our lives because we become disconnected and out of alignment.

Consider a wound to the body. Perhaps I acknowledge it for a second but then I just keep going on with my life, ignoring the pain, covering up the wound, I open myself up and am way more susceptible to what? Infection. What started out as a wound becomes a huge issue in my life. The same is true for us in areas of hurt…

How does it do this? Because when we feel hurt, wounded, we close ourselves off. We literally shut ourselves off to the world. The intimacies within ourselves, yea those, we shut them down too. God? Yep, we close ourselves off to him too. Why? Because now even intimacy seems scary. The Bible even says, “God draws near to the brokenhearted,” but if you’re anything like me, after being hurt, that sounds scarier than it can sound relieving. And instead of living with heart, we live with hurt… bottled up hurt.

Lets also look at the antonym, the opposite of whole, which are: apathetic, disinterested, indifferent, spiritless, tentative, doubtful, resistant, unwilling, hesitant, reluctant, lukewarm, halfhearted, grudging.

It’s also words like disconnected and misalignment.

Can you recall events in your life that you bottled up hurt? That you bottled up disappointment? An experience when something happened outside of your control or expectation and created that feeling of lose, trauma or disappointment? I can. 2 experiences to be exact: The first one was when I was 5 years old and my parents told me they were getting a divorce and the second one was when I was 16 years old and my best friend was killed in a car accident.

For me, I admit, I shut down after those experiences. Closed up shop for sure. I made an unconscious decision to never open myself up again. So even when I felt my emotions knocking at the door, I ignored them. Knock, knock, knock they may, but no matter how hard and how many times they knocked, I did not let them in. Maybe you can relate. Emotions felt dangerous to me. I didn’t like them because I couldn’t “control” them and I found them to be a sign of weakness, so I lived much of my life without them, completely avoiding them. I unconsciously felt as though I just couldn’t afford to have them. By doing so, my emotions stacked up on the outside of my door until ultimately, they shattered my doorway. You see, avoidance of our emotions and the things that hurt us or disappoint us doesn’t make them just go away, it only prolongs the inevitable. We’re not supposed to ignore our pain, nor are we to open up the door and let any and every emotion and thought come into our house unchecked. We are designed to hear the knock, open the door, “check” (process) what we see and feel and then ultimately decide if that emotion and thought is worthy enough to enter our home.

Fear, doubt, anxiety will knock on your door and it will become your goal not to ignore them, not to just let them in but to stand with them, to process them, to identify the thought pattern that created them and to consciously decide if it’s worthy of taking a room within your home. You need to “check” them.

(An excerpt from my book DREAM: I Dare You, A WAKE UP Call to Create Greater Alignment in Your Faith, Family, Career, and Community.)

How then do we heal our hurt?

They say “Time heals everything” and I completely disagree. Time doesn’t heal everything. Do you know what heals everything? Healing.

Don’t belittle the healing process by comparing it to a blue pill or a get rich quick scheme. It’s not. The healing process is just that, a process and it deserves all of you. If you’re trying to rush through it, not feel it, not experience all the feels, and letting it run its course, you are not truly healing.

1. The first step towards healing is to hear you. We don’t need to tune in to other people or the circumstance, but rather, ourselves. And the God in us that wants to reveal so much more. You’re not doing this to “fix” you, not to “fix the situation”, not to make it go away, but to really, truly hear yourself. That’s how you heal.

Too often, when we are hurt and disappointed, we unconsciously become externally focused. We are focusing more on what’s going on around us – protecting ourselves – and less focused on what’s going on within us. We shift into avoidance, busy, comparison, doubt, fear, all the things will keep us spinning. We do this to survive, to not be hurt again but the problem is, we are trying to fix everything around us and doing nothing with the pain that’s going on within us. If we want to create a better life, make changes, create change, we can no longer work from the outside in, we have to work from the inside, out. We have to deal with our pain. We have to heal.

That’s why the first step in healing is hearing. What are you trying to say to you?

You need to hear you. You can hang, I promise.

You need to let God hear you. He too can hang, I promise.

Let out your anger. Let out your pain. The resentment. The disappointment. The reasons you feel abandoned, mistreated, overlooked. All of it. Your areas of confusion, delusion, ignorance, fear. All of it. Hear you today.

Often I’ve found in these moments of hearing myself, I don’t want to be “right” cuz it’s only our ego that wants to be right but in these heart felt moments of really hearing myself, it’s my heart that’s speaking and your heart doesn’t want to be right, it just wants to be heard. So don’t judge what you hear, don’t listen to it like it’s fact, don’t shame, blame, guilt yourself. Just hear to heal.

You wanna shine? Let the hurt within you come out of you so your whole heart can shine within you.

2. Let the pain teach you and strengthen you. Once you hear all that you need to hear, than you can start to build strength. Believe it or not, the healing process is teaching you about you and it is building connections within yourself that you didn’t know you even needed. And it’s a good thing because as you go out into this world as a creator and a Dreamer, you are going to need to sustain yourself during your creation phase because creation phase is about building and maintaining what you see within you in the world around you and if you haven’t developed strength in your healing phase, the rest won’t last. You must be healed.

When the pain comes up, when you feel the anger or disappointment arise, because current circumstances will trigger old memories and emotions, ask yourself: What do I still need to learn? What is my pain trying to teach me in order for me to be whole? When you become a student and you’re willing to learn what the pain means, you begin to channel it for good. You recognize that there is an area still left undone, a lie that still needs truth, a desire for something greater and it pings you in the form of anger, fear, resentment, whatever it may be so I am encouraging you to use it as a teaching moment. That means, having the courage to no longer blame someone or something else but to use it to strengthen you by simply teaching you a lesson you need to learn.

I am a firm believer that if we keep experiencing the same thing, we aren’t learning the lesson. If we can look at each place of pain as a way to learn something, we no longer resist it and instead can accept it and it’s in our acceptance and willingness that we begin to move the needle of change in any area of hurt.

3. Use the pain to get re-grounded in truth! Once we’re willing and open to learn the lesson, then we can get re-grounded in truth. Up to this point, your pain has kept you in a lie. It’s familiar but it’s a lie nonetheless. Once we begin to see the beauty of the lesson and the release of the healing process – cuz by now, you’ll feel a literal release within you- you have the ability to lean into Gods truth and as you do, you begin the process of re-thinking, which also means to re-pent, to re-align. In our place of repentance, we are able re-frame the lies and get back in alignment with the actual truth.

There is no 1, 2, 3, step guide to doing this. It’s simply doing it and learning to trust yourself and God again. Too often we want these 1, 2, 3 step guides to tell us exactly what to do but then we miss the essence of a connecting and building a relationship with ourselves and other people. We miss getting to know God for who He is because we are too preoccupied by the 1, 2, 3’s, forgetting that HE is the guide. Here’s what this initial ask might sound like: God, self, forgive me for my wrong thinking. Forgive me for my anger, blaming, shaming and guilt. Forgive me for walking with these lies for too long. Reveal to me your thoughts. Reveal to me your truth. “Know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

4. Give your pain purpose, in word and in deed! Once you know the truth, once you start to feel and see and taste and touch true revelation, you can’t not share it. It becomes the channel for crazy, beautiful, insane purpose! You’ll start to love harder, you see clearer, you find an industry that serves this cause, you create relationships around this beautiful truth, you share your story, and guess what, you give your pain purpose in word and deed. This is where true impact and change is created because now, you’re not a wrecking ball or time bomb waiting to go off, you’re healed and you’re able to feel what others feel, you’re able to lead with an open heart and open mind, and your able to take your pain and give it meaning by serving it to the world. And believe me, we need more leaders leading from this place, from a healed place. There are hurting people out there who need your healing.

5. And then, rinse and repeat. As many times as you need to. We are human, which means, things are going to come up. We are going to trigger. New circumstances can easily bring us back to old habits, patterns and old ways of doing things, which is why the Bible says, “Renew your mind, daily.” Why? Because we’re human and we need a refresher. Do not let your ego get in the way or make believe that “you should be stronger.” Don’t worry about being stronger at the sake of not being real. I’d rather you be real than strong. And the irony is, the realer you become, the stronger you will be! When things come up, go back to Step 1. When people offend you, when circumstances trigger you, when anger arises, rinse and repeat this whole process as soon as you can see it happening. This will keep you healed!!!

Live healed my friend.