Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about how to begin the process of opening your heart.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so let's talk about opening the heart.

This is one of those phrases that is already a bit complicated because it begs a question of what does that mean?

There's a number of different issues there.

One, how do we define heart?

And then two, what does it mean to open the heart?

Is the heart even something that opens or closes?

And even though those are two complicated things that I think we could dedicate a lot of time to exploring,

I'm not even going to put any attention toward it because the interesting thing about that is even if we could dissect it and go into what is that actually mean?

Most of us already have an intuitive sense of what it means to have a heart that feels closed down and a heart that feels open.

And the territory I want to play in here is in that more felt sense rather than a cognitive sense of what actually is the heart and does the heart actually close or open?

We all, I mean, unless we're deeply disembodied for whatever reason, we have a sense at some point in our life of what it means to feel like our heart is open.

And we have some other point in our life often every day at different points, what it's like to feel like our heart has closed down.

And then you're going to have that felt sense for you that's unique from another person and for me, but I do believe there is a qualitative sense there that we all can resonate with.

And so when I say something like or introduce the idea of opening the heart or suggest that this might be a way we want to live,

and my experience, most people resonate with that invitation and there's a draw to that.

Of course, there may first be some fear or resistance, but there's something about that that we orient to and recognize as important in our life.

Now, when we begin taking that journey or when I'm ushering people through that journey and when I've done it myself over the years,

one of the things that the one of the predicaments that we end up getting in is often first the sense that an open heart is supposed to feel a certain way.

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