If your heart hurts, if you feel full of grief or compassion or fury or love, an option is to choose to be with it—to feel what you feel while you feel it, to create a moment of presence with it, to coalesce with it, to dance with it, to stay with it, to allow it.

In the mental health and even healing industry, there is a lot of problem-solving. There's a lot of fixing. There is a lot of creating generative movement by finding problems, often with the present moment, with things as they are. Just like you can create an opportunity to shift states, you can also create an opportunity to stretch a moment and stay with this state—to show your hurting heart that you are there with it, to let your heart hurt.

This is a creation of a moment of presence without judgment, of being with something without it needing to change or be fixed in order to be allowed. It is a really honorable way to steward energy: to choose to be with what is, to be with something, to be with the feeling, to be with the way that something feels without needing to shift or change it, and without either making it your identity or something about yourself or making this feeling something about your worthiness.

Often, my clients at the beginning of our work together will feel that if they have a trigger, that means whatever healing work they've done prior hasn't worked because their trigger or their feeling came back. There's this reorientation that I really believe needs to be happening around healing work, where triggers and feelings don't mean that something's not working. It means you're alive. It means you're human. It means you're here. It means you are feeling. It means you are healing.

Over and over again, our feelings and our triggers and the ways that we are activated give us opportunities—whether that opportunity is to shift what we feel, or whether that opportunity is to be with what we feel. It gives us an opportunity to be present, to be intimate with ourselves, with life, with who we were, with who we are, with who we are becoming.

Every moment of being with, every moment of choosing to steward your energy into generative motion or to steward your energy into the present moment and stretch the moment a little longer, is an opportunity to dance with the divine. It's an opportunity to be intimate with yourself, with others, with your heart that's beating, that's healing, that's hurting, that's loving.

You are allowed to be all that you are—permission to be with what is, without judgment. Through that, may we continue to create more wholeness and less fragmentation, more cohesion and more coherence inside of our lives, inside of our nervous systems, inside of our whole entire world.