For a long time, “living from the heart” can sound like a slogan—beautiful, maybe, but vague. Or worse: a concept you’re supposed to agree with.
The speaker starts from that exact place. When he was younger, heart talk sounded hokey, almost unreal. And then something changed—not as an idea, but as a lived, bodily experience.
This teaching makes one thing plain: if heart opening happens, you know it’s not a thought. It’s a felt shift in the chest—love, care, compassion, interconnectedness—often so abundant it can’t stay contained.
And if trauma is present, the first thing the heart touches may not be sweetness. It may be shame or sorrow. Not as a detour, but as the heart turning toward what needs it most.
When “Heart Opening” Used to Sound Hokey
When I was younger, when people would talk about living out of the heart or having a heart opening or getting in touch with the heart, it sounded kind of hokey.
I couldn’t relate to it. I wasn’t really sure if it was something actual people were referring to or if it was like a thought they were having. Whatever it was, I didn’t really get it.
Or if I did, it was very conceptual.
But compared to my experience now, I can see that I really didn’t get it at all.
When People Talk About the Heart Conceptually
Sometimes when people talk about heart opening or self-love or living from the heart, they may be talking conceptually. I’m sure some people are.
The motivations around that are varied.
Some of it could be: it just feels good to talk that way. In the world of mind identification or thought identification, some thoughts feel better than others, and that’s kind of one of them. Nothing wrong with that, but it probably happens a lot.
Other times it could be almost manipulative—maybe a bit of a strong word—but something like that, used for a purpose: to have an effect on people or to convince them of something about you.
And then certainly with some people, they’re pointing to something very felt. A real lived experience. A real kind of shift to a heart-open experience.
Heart Opening as the Beginning of the Path
For many people, a genuine heart-opening experience is what gets them on the path to spirituality and awakening.
He gives an example from his own Zen teacher in the 1960s: LSD and a massive heart-opening experience that alerted him to something beyond his usual experience being available. It wasn’t necessarily long-term, but the fact that it happened at all shifted something and led him to Zen and ultimately awakening.
He notes he’s heard of many people having these experiences on plant medicines, and he’s seen it many times at retreats, and experienced it many times at retreats.
The Core Distinction: Heart Opening Is Felt, Not Thought
One distinction he wants to make is how easy it is to talk about anything—even something as deeply felt as heart opening—in terms of thought.
It’s so easy to conceptualize things. That’s what he used to do.
He gives an example from his early twenties: breath-based meditation. He couldn’t do it, because it felt like: “I’m just sitting here thinking about breathing, which I’m always thinking.”
He didn’t realize the point wasn’t the thoughts about it. It was a felt experience. A lived experience.
Heart opening is similar.
When it really happens, you know it’s not a thought. You know it’s not intellectual. You know it’s not a concept.
It’s a very felt experience—deeply felt.
Often overwhelming in a good way.
Vast.
It can feel like an infinite experience of feeling.
It’s like instead of just feeling your body, you’re now feeling every body, every heart.
And more specifically, it’s often very localized to the chest. It is literally in where the heart space is.
What Heart Opening Feels Like in the Body
So what is heart opening, as he experiences it?
A physical core of love, compassion, care, and interconnectedness—felt.
And then it expands outward.
It can feel like such abundance of love and care that you can’t hold it in your chest anymore. It flows outward to others.
It may even feel like it comes in as much as it goes out, like an interconnectedness at the heart level with multiple beings or infinite numbers of beings—and maybe even non-beings, like everything.
That’s heart opening.
He notes there are other ways to talk about heart and compassion and agape and wisdom, and they overlap. But heart opening, in this talk, is the felt heart-space experience itself.
Heart Meditation and Metta Practice
He says he has a couple heart meditations on his channel.
He talks about it in his book as a metta practice (M-E-T-T-A) in one of his chapters, and he has guided meditations.
He emphasizes: it is something you can practice. You can attune to it even if you don’t have a massive heart opening that “delineates” your spiritual journey.
You can practice and feel heart openings in small doses.
Start Simple: Feel the Heart Space
It’s a matter of starting with just feeling your heart space to the degree you can.
Put your attention down into your heart space.
Just feel what’s there, just for a second, for a minute.
Whatever’s there, it’s okay. It’s the right thing.
The heart is simply doing what it does.
If Trauma Is There, You Might Feel Sorrow or Shame First
He gives an important expectation-setter.
If there is significant trauma—or trauma that wants to come up and be felt and processed—understand that when you feel into your heart, you may first feel something uncomfortable.
You may feel shame.
You might think: “Oh, this isn’t it. This is something different.”
But he says it really isn’t different.
It’s the heart turning inward toward your pain.
The heart turning inward toward what wants to be felt for two reasons:
It wants to be felt because it hasn’t been felt. It’s been suppressed, overlooked, repressed—however you want to say that.
And it’s been misunderstood, maybe misappropriated.
So when love starts doing its thing, it attunes to whatever needs support. And if you need its support most, that’s what’s going to be felt.
The Heart Accepts Automatically
He says you’ll notice these things fluctuate.
There may be times you feel sorrow, even for some time.
Other times you feel joy—joy of being alive and joy of total acceptance.
Because the heart is about acceptance.
It’s not the kind of acceptance you have to practice and get better at.
The heart accepts automatically.
[Possible clarification needed: this describes the felt non-volitional openness of heart-space experience, not a behavioral rule about tolerating harm or abandoning boundaries.]
And he points out a tough truth: to remain mind-identified and separate, we often live cut off from our heart.
Because the moment you’re not cut off from your heart, you can’t really feel separate very well—and you also feel a lot of pain. You feel my pain, you feel your pain.
So heart opening is powerful, transformative, and not always comfortable.
Sometimes it will feel like repressed emotion coming to the surface—and that’s okay.
Resistance Can Feel Intense at First, Then Softens
He adds another practical note: when the really heavy, repressed stuff comes up, and there’s a lot of resistance, it can feel very intense at first.
But with time, that intensity will go down as resistance goes down.
That’s the beautiful thing about the heart: it melts resistance by nature.
Just trust it.
What slows the process down isn’t the heart, and it isn’t the sensation itself.
It’s the mind distracting from feeling all of it.
So to the degree you can drop in and feel: “Whoa, this is intense,” and allow grief, resistance, love, joy—whatever is present—this can transform things profoundly.
Give it time.
Give it patience.
And then he gives a phrase that flips the usual effort model:
Let the heart practice you.
Let the heart practice the heart.
And it will grow and become more nuanced in its felt understanding, experience, and acceptance. It does it naturally, but the resistance is there—often unconsciously.
So give it time, and it will show you everything you need to know.
A Final Pointer: Feel What’s There
If nothing else you take away from this:
Put your attention down into your heart space.
Feel what’s there—just for a second, for a minute.
You may notice something unsettling. You may feel something warm, open.
But whatever is there, it’s okay. It’s the right thing.
He says the heart is starting to “heal”—and then he qualifies it. He doesn’t love the word heal because it can imply something needs fixing, but he uses it to name what the heart does:
Everything it touches, it accepts.
Everything it accepts, it incorporates.
And that incorporation is a shift in experience and identity, and that can be a little uncomfortable.
Let me know how that feels for you.