Video Summary:

I encourage people to walk with their hearts open. It's a big ask as it can be emotionally painful. We’re living in a world that can break your heart. Just following the news and working in a hospital, my heart gets broken on a daily basis. So how do you walk with your heart open in a world that breaks your heart?

When we stop intellectualizing, medicating, and distracting ourselves from feeling, we begin to feel things at a deep level. The upside is we get to experience empathy, compassion and to be connected with all of life. But the challenge is that it can be painful and overwhelming.

One of the things that happens as we start allowing ourselves to feel more is things can come up from a time in our life when we weren't able to allow ourselves to feel. It could be trauma, loss, or regret- even small traumas, disappointments, and heartbreaks.

When we didn’t allow ourselves to feel those things, the energy of that incomplete experience may have gotten trapped in our bodies. When we allow ourselves to feel again, we start experiencing them so we can feel them and complete the experience. This is very healing. And, it can also be very troubling.

What I've found myself and my clients is that these feelings often cycle. Maybe you've noticed. It seems like every couple of days we go through these cycles. And for me, I feel stages of being really hopeful and feeling really good, and then I can feel really sad and get discouraged.

I've learned if I don't react to the painful feelings, and hopefully get a good night's sleep, the next morning or a day later, a breakthrough comes and I feel good and hopeful again. So we go through these cycles of hope and discouragement, of being agitated and at peace.

It doesn’t mean you doing something wrong. It's a natural by-product of being open. It happens as we heal inside, and grow spiritually and emotionally. I noticed it doing seven-day silent meditation retreats.

I might start the first day of the retreat feeling really frustrated. thinking, “I can't meditate worth a damn. I suck at this.” But as I stayed with it for a day or two, I’d have this breakthrough of feeling amazing and one with life. And then lo and behold, around the third or fourth day I'd be back in my stuff again.

I noticed every two or three days I would cycle. On days two, four, and six, I might feel joyful, peaceful, and connected while days one, three, and five might be sad, painful, and challenging. And each cycle I’d go deeper.

So what I would suggest is to be aware of the cycle and allow yourself to feel, but don’t get embroiled in it. Because what happens is when we're in the painful and challenging part of a cycle, our mind starts creating very believable stories which create even more challenging and painful feelings.

You can feel the feeling that's there (the pure feeling), but you don't have to believe the story about the feeling and feel its associated feeling (the reactionary feeling) which is usually tragic and painful. You only need to feel the pure feeling to heal and grow emotionally and spiritually.

One of the stories and fears of feeling is that the painful feeling is never going to stop- which is not the case. Usually, in the next couple of days, you're probably going to feel differently. So if you just remind yourself that it feels like it's not going to stop, but the reality is that it will.

And how do you know that? Not because Mike said it in his video, but because you notice your own cycle. “I felt rough last week and then I came out of it.” Do your own research. Remind yourself that it feels like it's not going to stop, but it always does. “If I just allow myself to get through this, it's going to feel better.”

And when it does open up, we usually feel even more connected, joyful, and free.