Kerry Jehanne-Guadalupe
As the source of compassion, love, and higher consciousness, our hearts are powerful gateways to transformation and well-being, shaping how we experience life and interact with the world. Our hearts can be more than just the center of our energy—they can also become the center of our lives if we choose. When we intentionally activate our heart centers, we can shift from heavily relying on intellectual approaches to embracing a more intuitive, connected way of being. By embracing the heart’s innate power and wisdom, we can transcend limiting beliefs, facilitate personal and collective healing, and cultivate a profound sense of love and authenticity in our lives.
Activating Our Hearts
Activating our heart centers so they may play a more influential role in our lives involves bringing our attention to the center of our chest and feeling positive emotions such as joy. Because our hearts and minds are connected, simply thinking of a person or place that brings us joy can ignite a feeling of joy in our hearts. The same is true for any positive emotion we wish to feel, like love or gratitude. We can continue to think our way into our hearts until it becomes more natural to feel our way into our hearts. Using descriptive words can sometimes help deepen this connection with our hearts. By engaging the mind to focus on the heart and naming the sensations we experience, we can enhance those feelings—whether it's a sense of lightness, openness, or freedom.
The Potential Challenge
Activating our hearts can be easier said than done. Getting into our hearts and accessing positive emotions might first start with addressing past emotional wounds or limiting beliefs that block our ability to feel love, joy, or compassion on a deeper level. It may even feel weird and uncomfortable to feel positive emotions because they feel foreign at first.
A natural state of joy and ease may not automatically emerge after healing from deep trauma. This doesn't necessarily indicate that more trauma needs to be processed; rather, it might mean we need to establish a new emotional baseline consciously. It can take time and consistent effort to establish a new baseline in ourselves, especially after years or even decades of regularly feeling more challenging emotions like anger, resentment, or shame, to the degree that they have become our go-to emotions.
Creating a new emotional baseline means establishing a more stable and positive default emotional state that we consistently return to, even after facing stress, challenges, or intense emotions. This involves shifting our habitual emotional responses and raising the general level of emotional well-being we experience on a daily basis.
When we create a new emotional baseline, we're essentially rewiring our hearts, brains, and nervous systems through practices like mindfulness, gratitude, self-compassion, or any activity that generates positive emotions. Over time, this creates a stronger foundation of emotional resilience, allowing us to handle difficulties with more ease and maintain a more balanced, uplifting emotional state as our norm. A new baseline helps us connect more easily to the power of our hearts, shaping our daily experiences through more positive emotions. With a new emotional baseline, we can design our inner worlds based more on stillness and peace or anything that our hearts truly want more of.
Any challenges we are willing to face and overcome in establishing a new emotional baseline return to us in enormity. Moving through this process can be an essential part of the journey of activating our hearts. We cannot force our way into our hearts, yet embracing resistance or examining any limiting beliefs about feeling positive emotions can be a rich part of our journeys into our heart centers. If we feel stuck or come up against any wall or even fears, we can ask our hearts to show us the way and guide us in learning how to open our hearts to more love and joy. A part of our heart is always open to us, even if not open to others. That part will provide guidance if called upon.
Our hearts can help us to ground love into our lives that is free of wondering if it is appropriate to do so, as we can alchemize any resistance with the power of our hearts. Our own hearts can help us learn to trust ourselves and our relationship with our hearts, to know when to open to others, how to cleanse what is not ours, as well as alchemize the fear of being in our power that emanates from our hearts and souls. Our hearts can also guide us in realigning with love in its purest form. This may require us to release old beliefs or patterns related to love. As we connect more deeply with love, anything that doesn’t resonate with that frequency may surface to be let go. Yet, our hearts have the ability to heal what is being released from our hearts.
Daily Practice
Establishing a 15 to 20-minute daily practice of feeling positive emotions can help establish a new emotional baseline. Such a practice can be extraordinarily transformative, yet this practice can take time to establish. Being kind and patient with ourselves in the process will only add to our ability to ground this practice in our daily lives. Paying attention to our breath, playing music, or listening to a meditation that is specifically geared not only to get into our hearts but also to feel positive emotions can significantly support us in establishing a new emotional baseline. Additionally, setting clear intentions can be beneficial when we struggle to cultivate the habit of experiencing more positive emotions. Intentions like inviting a sense of lightness, fostering emotional openness, rewiring our thought patterns, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and embracing more joy can help us stay aligned with our goals.
Cultivating positive emotions for at least 15 minutes is often recommended to have a transformative effect on our overall health and access to lasting transformation. The 15-minute threshold provides the necessary time for the mind and body to relax and activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This activation of the relaxation response is an essential physiological shift for emotional healing, mental clarity, a shift into deeper states of awareness, and a more profound connection to inner wisdom, all of which contribute to the transformative effects of positive emotions on overall health. This duration also allows for neural rewiring. Creating new neural pathways allows the brain to rewire for greater emotional resilience, focus, and positive thinking.
Benefits of Activating Our Hearts
The benefits of entering into our hearts can emerge in a short time, a few weeks of practicing daily. The more we nurture our heart centers, the more we are nurtured by our heart centers. The more we do this, the more significant the change we will see in our inner and outer life experiences. This practice, regardless of how simple and basic it might appear (feel positive emotions), can profoundly impact our lives.
This daily practice can have a ripple effect in our daily lives in many ways, including more experiences of being vulnerable and open to both giving and receiving love; making choices and decisions based on compassion, kindness, and intuition rather than logic alone; prioritizing empathy, and connection in our interactions; feeling more emotional balance; consciously knowing how to sense and regulate how open our heart energy can be at any given moment; and bringing our hearts and minds into coherence which can provide a wealth of information about ourselves, our environments, and the people and circumstances around us by allowing us to better tap into our intuition to guide our minds.
Resting in the awareness of our hearts provides steadiness, as our heart centers can serve as multidimensional anchors. When we connect deeply to our hearts and ground ourselves in this inner center, it can be easier to open to the outside world without losing our sense of self—our emotions, truth, resilience, intuition, and awareness. The more this inner connection is established, strong, and active, the less we are influenced by external forces, and the more freely we can open to the world. An activated heart serves as an anchor, rooting us in ourselves even as we embrace the world around us.
When we cultivate a deep connection within and feel supported and nurtured by our hearts, it becomes easier to feel safe in our external surroundings. Rooted in our essence through the heart, we can tap into a sense of oneness with all that exists. The more grounded we are in this heart-centered connection, the more secure, safe, and joyful our experience of interconnectedness becomes.
A daily practice of feeling positive feelings allows our hearts to grow and radiate, as well as enhances our inward presence. This enhanced inward presence enriches our life experience as a heightened heart-based identity can help us align more with our presence and less with our personality structures, enhancing our authenticity. The deeper we go into our hearts, the easier it is to release old attachments—habits, preferences, and values that once seemed important but gradually lose their significance as we shift into a more profound sense of what truly matters. This can help us live a more fulfilling and connected life.
Our hearts know the precise medicine needed and have the power to bring forth internal transformation. Our hearts are healers, transmuters, and the source of alchemy. Our older versions of ourselves are sacred, even if they are the versions that once held us back. Through the alchemy of our hearts, these can be the very counterpoints, the essential fuel needed for an alchemical process to access the next versions of ourselves.
The love that is in our hearts is the love of creation. This love is accessible to us and can help us heal and transform. The frequency of love cannot be broken; it is a strong, unyielding force that can transmute darkness into light. It can not only alchemize the old versions of us but also burn through anything that is not ours.
Our heart’s energy is a transformative power like nothing else. By activating the power of our hearts, we allow its light, its wisdom, to illuminate every part of our lives. When we are filled with love, rooted in our hearts, and in love with life itself, we unlock a sense of limitless possibility, access the alchemical power of change, and connect more deeply with our souls.
The Role of Heart Energy in Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
Our hearts communicate with our brains through our nervous systems, hormonal signals, and electromagnetic interactions. Therefore, our hearts play a crucial role in influencing our thoughts, as well as our overall mental well-being.
Heart energy plays a profound role in overcoming limiting beliefs and transformation. Our hearts have their own neural network (often called the "heart-brain") that communicates with the brain in a bi-directional manner. When we intentionally cultivate positive emotions such as gratitude, love, and compassion, we create heart-brain coherence, a harmonious state where the heart and brain work in sync. This state helps us regulate our nervous system, reduce stress, and access higher cognitive functions.
When we focus on heart energy, we access deeper intuitive insights that help reveal the root of limiting beliefs. Identifying and shifting limiting beliefs becomes easier because we're thinking from a place of clarity and emotional balance. When we consciously focus on generating heart-centered emotions, it weakens the grip of limiting beliefs, as well as strengthens our emotional field, creating a sense of inner expansion. This expansion supports us in shifting away from limiting beliefs, helping us feel more connected, expansive, and capable of embracing new perspectives.
Positive heart-centered emotions such as love, compassion, and joy help rewire the brain. Through practices like heart-focused meditation, we can retrain your neural pathways, dissolving the reinforcement loops that maintain limiting beliefs. The heart's energy serves as a guide in this process, consistently bringing us back to a more centered and empowered state. By connecting to heart energy, we align with a powerful force that allows for the transformation of deeply held beliefs, facilitating personal growth and a sense of freedom.
Love Radiates Facilitating Collective Healing
A radiating heart is a lighthouse casting its light into the environment, sending out waves of warmth, love, and connection, emitting a beacon to guide others into their hearts. It is a light that can cut through fear, doubt, or isolation, offering an experience of coming home to oneself. A heart that radiates love and compassion offers emotional warmth and security, which can inspire others to open their own hearts, creating a collective glow of connection and support.
Enhancing our inward connection to our heart centers not only enhances our lives but can also significantly impact the lives of those around us and even extend to collective healing. When groups of people come together with heart-centered intentions—whether for meditation, prayer, or acts of compassion—there is measurable evidence that it creates positive effects not just on the participants but also on the surrounding environment. This can be seen in the way collective compassion or love can soothe tensions, resolve conflicts, or even promote peace in communities.
Love is a frequency that can greatly impact the world. When we activate our heart fields and become a vessel of heart energy, we are seeding more heart energy on the planet, naturally spreading more connection and compassion into the world. It is far from selfish to feel good! Our loving hearts can create a more loving world because we are all part of a connected universe. When we practice feeling positive emotions such as love, the energy we nurture within ourselves radiates outward. This is the essence of oneness—energy is both our individual sustenance and the frequency we exchange with the world around us.
Navigating a Challenging World Through an Activated Heart
The sacred space within us can act as an anchor to help us stay connected to ourselves and our steadiness even amid external chaos. If we get knocked off-center, having an established connection to our heart center can help us return to ourselves faster and better navigate hearing about any horrors of the world without needing to close our hearts tightly. The tragedies we witness stem from a profound disconnection from the heart and the absence of love. It makes sense that if horrendous events are the result of deep inner wounds, more heart energy is needed on the planet.
Anchoring into our hearts helps us to anchor in a remedy rather than being swallowed up by our fears or shock from what we are witnessing. If we work to create a baseline of love, peace, and harmony within ourselves, it is easier to return to such states more quickly after hearing about national or global tragedies. A deep connection to our heart can bring forth this unwavering desire to access the unyielding force of pure love. This can not only help us move out of shock but challenge any part of us that doesn’t feel we should feel good when others are suffering, as it contains the wisdom that if we don’t feel good, we are not providing the frequency for others to take into themselves if they want to. No matter how horrific an event might be, there is always light we can access from our hearts.
The Heart as a Gateway to Higher Consciousness
The heart is often regarded as a bridge between the physical and the divine, a center for transcendent love and compassion. Connecting with heart energy helps us to elevate consciousness, opening us to higher levels of awareness and spiritual insight. When we are deeply connected to our hearts, we can experience clearer guidance, intuition, and inner wisdom that may help us navigate life’s challenges. Our hearts can offer a more expansive and compassionate perspective than our logical minds. This intuitive intelligence can allow us to transcend limiting beliefs, make more aligned decisions, and connect with a higher sense of purpose. Additionally, when our hearts are activated, we can gain a greater sense of unity with all life. Our hearts can help dissolve the sense of separateness, offering an experience of wholeness, interconnectedness, and oneness with the cosmos.
Love is the frequency of existence itself, and this love resides within us.
