When the heart center of our consciousness is not open, when it is contracted or walled off or closed, we suffer. Closing our heart is a self-protective reaction. We do it to protect ourself from pain. It happens in response to fear and to pain. It makes it so we are shielded and therefore less permeable. And yet, like most self-protective measures we take, we pay a heavy price for it. Moving through the world with a closed heart is torture for so many reasons. It blocks love. It causes us to be lonely and isolated rather than connected. It dulls our senses to this world and so it feels like we are not really taking in life. It makes it so energy cannot flow to or from us and because of this, it causes toxic build up and depletion. It causes mental, emotional and physical ailments. It prevents us from expressing our full potential. It makes us defensive, judgmental and cynical. It sabotages our relationships. It causes us to lose our zest in life. It causes us to lose touch with our emotional guidance system and therefore, to become out of alignment and lost in life. And this list goes on and on. Opening your heart is a real challenge when you are facing the threat of hurt. And at the same time, it is the key to living a life that is worth living. It is also so very often the way out of pain.

At the very center of a closed heart, we find the opposite vibration from love. We find separation. The why behind this state of separation is fear. When we fear something in order to protect ourself from it, we push it away from us. We wall ourselves off from it. This is the opposite of opening ourself to something and including it by taking it in. And it is the fear that is causing the heart to close that must be addressed. Therefore, the first thing to do in order to open your heart, is to become conscious of what you are trying to protect yourself from. What you are afraid of. What the hurt is about. From there, your job is to tend to that fear and tend to that hurt. When you tend to fear and hurt (which is the vulnerability beneath it all that the closed heart is trying to protect) your heart will naturally and automatically open again. And the way you tend to the fear or hurt depends entirely upon what the fear or hurt is. That fear and/or hurt must be caretaken. That resistance must be consciously dissolved.  

With that in mind as the absolute root of resolving a closed heart… the choice to recognize, acknowledge, expose and directly consciously caretake the vulnerability that the closedness is trying to protect… Here is a list of things you can do to open your heart. 

1.  Be willing to feel and develop your “feeling muscle”. Underneath the closing of your heart, is an unwillingness to feel emotions that do not feel good. And maybe even an unwillingness to feel emotions that do feel good because we may have learned that these feel-good emotions lead to feel bad ones. It is completely understandable why you would not want to feel things like fear or shame or embarrassment or grief or disappointment. But the more willing we are to feel, the more open our heart will remain, regardless of what other people do and regardless of what happens in our life. Basically, we feel absolutely terrible sometimes, but without paying the heavy price that comes with closing our heart to try to not feel absolutely terrible. The more time you spend really feeling emotions as they arise in the moment, no matter how uncomfortable they are in the body, the more your feeling muscle will build. A good exercise for this, is the emotional experiencing process. You can learn how to do this by watching my video titled: How To Do The Emotional Experiencing Process. Lean into emotions rather than away from them. 
2. Be willing to be vulnerable. What we are essentially saying to the universe and to others when we close our heart is: I am unwilling to be vulnerable. Even when the reality is, we are vulnerable and there is nothing that we can do about it. The antidote to this is to look inwards so as to recognize and admit to our vulnerability. And then, to put it on the table. To do this, we need to be honest with ourself about things within ourself that cause us to not feel good. Especially things that cause us to feel weak, bad about ourselves, powerless, afraid, insecure, embarrassed, emotional, at the mercy of others, feeble, sensitive, susceptible, little, exposed, pathetic, and at risk of being harmed. From there, we need to practice exposing our vulnerability to others. This means revealing the thoughts and feelings, needs and personal truths and maybe even physical things like attributes or actions that cause us to feel vulnerable. This will be very, very uncomfortable. But you will develop a comfort with this discomfort over time and it will become easier and easier. This willingness to be vulnerable is easier to cultivate when you see that the ways you protect yourself do not really work for you. They only bring harm to you in other ways, usually even worse ways. The more done you are with your own ways of protecting yourself, the more willing you will be to be afraid and even risk harm. And this, in turn will make you more willing to be vulnerable. And this, will mean an open heart.    
3. Do parts work to directly access the aspects of your own being that are engaged in this closed heart dynamic. The parts you want to work with are: The part of you that is closing your heart. And the part of you that you are protecting by closing your heart. To learn how to do this, you can watch my video titled: Parts Work (What is Parts Work and How To Do It).
4. Step back from believing what you think. When our heart closes, we are triggered. Our thoughts and emotions are so strong and convincing, we have the tendency to believe them. When we are triggered, we do not perceive the situation at hand, nor the people in it clearly. We are seeing the situation and seeing them through the lens of our own trauma. When it comes to trauma, the brain goes out of whack regarding pattern recognition. It recognizes patterns as being the same, even when they are not. Think of a return veteran from war. A firecracker goes off and they may duck for cover immediately, thinking it is a bomb going off. Their brain recognizes the two things as the same, because it is designed to recognize patterns. But it happens to be wrong. Trauma makes our pattern recognition center flawed. We need to know this and associate the feeling of being triggered with the awareness that we may be wrong about what we are perceiving. From here, we need to stop defending ourself and instead take a step back so as to get curious so as to sort through what is and what isn’t the reality of the person, place, situation and things that we are reacting to. We need to start questioning. Our mentality should be: What is true? What is real? Maybe, just maybe, whatever has caused you to close your heart, is not actually as big of a threat as you think it is.         
5. Consciously Open Your Heart Chakra. This is a practice in and of itself that contains several methods. For this reason, after you watch this video, it would benefit you to watch my video that is quite literally titled: How To Open Your Heart Chakra. You may also benefit by doing a meditation I have designed that is very effective at opening the heart. You can learn how to do this meditation by watching my video titled: Connecting With and Healing Your Heart (Heart Meditation).  
6. Consciously put energy into understanding and consciously culture empathy. The vast majority of the time when we close our hearts, we are doing so in reaction to something or someone else. When we do this, we enter a kind of narcissistic bubble whereby we become absorbed by our own perspective and our own fear and pain. A good way out of this, is to shift your attention towards really deeply trying to understand the other person and/or the situation. Most especially we can consciously put energy into understanding the fear and the pain of the other. Doing so, naturally causes us to open up towards them and also to feel empathy and compassion. If we want to consciously develop empathy, we must look for how we relate to their fear or their pain. If you want to dive into this deeper, watch my video titled: Compassion (And How To Cultivate Compassion).         
7. Do a deliberate appreciative notice exercise. The frequency of gratitude and appreciation is a heart opening one. The key to this one, is to make sure you are not doing it as a way of negating the parts of you that are afraid or hurt. Instead, think of it like a deliberate tonic. Any exercise will do. But one of the easiest exercises is to challenge yourself to simply write a list of anything positive. Anything you like, anything good that happened, anything you appreciate or anything you feel grateful for, any thought that makes you feel better. Though any appreciative focus is a heart opener, it is especially effective if you do this list relative to whatever is closing your heart. For example, if this is a relationship with a specific person, you could do the list about that relationship and that person. When our heart is closed, we are in a state of resistance. This exercise is one that will dissolve that resistance.   
8. Practice kindness deliberately. Kindness opens the heart. It starts an out flow of energy from us towards others. And this opens the channels of our being that receive as well. We can demonstrate kindness in any way. Random acts of kindness is a good practice when we are doing this. There are countless lists on line of suggestions for random acts of kindness. Opportunities to demonstrate kindness arise all the time. Notice and take those opportunities. What would it look like to be loving?      

When we encounter pain or fear, we have the choice to close or to open. At the end of the day, you will arrive at a point where you truly understand deep in your soul that to live with a closed heart is literally an unsustainable state of being. You will not be able to do it anymore. And when this happens, you will choose to open, even when you are hurt and even when you are afraid. After all, keeping your heart open has very little to do with other people. It has to do with the type of life experience you want to have. It has to do with choosing to be in a state of being that guarantees your life experience will be fulfilling.