Today, I am going to share with you a story about how I came to recognize that I had been living for a VERY long time letting my conditioned mind make decisions for me versus allowing myself to listen to my Heart. 

There was always a part of me that knew things were out of alignment because there was always some kind of drama or chaos in my life, but I was choosing to ignore the signs. I was in need of a little Heart-Connection tune-up. I actually feel like it’s a common theme for many people on this planet to be living in this state of imbalance between the head vs heart. That being said, I hope my story gives you perspective and helps you realize how common it is to be letting our conditioned mind run the show. It’s pretty amazing how brilliant, expansive, and healing it is when we make the conscious effort to reconnect with our Hearts and live more from our heart than from our conditioned mind. 

I have always been on the search for love, but because of my own conditioning, I kept myself very stuck for a long time not knowing how to truly connect with the feeling of love in my heart. It wasn’t until recently — namely, having a baby in 2019 and then having the global pandemic hit in 2020, that I finally got the call to go deeper into my heart and get a really good glimpse at how and why I had been living from such a head-over-heart place — and how I learned how to shift into a heart-centered space.

This shift truly changed my life and allowed me to feel alive. I felt as though I was finally able to “achieve” and “experience” the things I had been searching for for over half of my life consciously. Which I know now, is connection, it’s love, it’s trust, and finally it’s living from a place of “there is more to life than feeling stuck, constantly striving, and being in pain and continual suffering.”

I discovered that I was pregnant at the end of 2018, when I was 35 years old. In the two week period following, I allowed this reality to sink in and began to sink into the new trajectory of my life’s path. I began to FEEL more than I had ever allowed myself to feel before in my entire life. My pregnancy was unplanned so yes, it was a bit of a surprise, but I was truly happy about the news and did my best to stay present with the process.

It’s worth mentioning that I had been on my version of the “spiritual path” for many years and had a lot of spiritual philosophy in my head, but had not yet learned how to allow myself to feel my emotions in my body and to allow the feelings to flow. I’ll just say I had a lot of good diversion methods — alcohol, drugs, shopping, food, men — to distract myself from really feeling my feelings.

Needless to say, when I began feeling the emotions of love, magic, and wonder (as well as the fear, anger, and grief) in my body as this little being developed inside of me — I got a glimpse for the first time the immensity of the power that is available to us when we allow ourselves to sink into feelings.

I pretty much spent nine months alone and in complete surrender to FEELING MY EMOTIONS in my body. It was a magical time and I will never ever forget how incredible of an experience it was to bring a brand new life into this world. 

Being in such a sensitive state, I let myself be exposed only to the people I felt safe around. To be honest, I really really enjoyed this isolation and new discovery I had found in meeting the love vibration. I started to allow my heart to open for the first time since I was a very young girl, which was when I learned to close it down to the world.

Fast forward to when my daughter was about three months old, I began to lose contact with this energy of love. I had this expectation that it was just going to be there forever…little did I know what a rude awakening I was in for during my transition into motherhood, and what a blessing this experience would end up being as I became determined to return to that love I had gotten a glimpse of for a moment in time.

I was striving for that intense feeling to return but the more I strived, the more disappointed I got when I couldn’t find it. I got very depressed, I started seeing my diversion habits return — drinking and obsessively working, mostly to avoid feeling all the feelings of shame, numbness, anger, and grief that began to sweep over me. 

I felt completely disconnected from my daughter. I felt like a total failure having lost this connection to that special feeling of love I experienced during my pregnancy and in the first few months of my daughter’s life. Feeling like I was losing touch with this inner magic, I really started to spiral downward. 

Now, as difficult as this moment in time was, I was also aware that even though I didn’t know how to get it back, there had to be a way.  I knew from all of my years of studying spirituality intellectually, that there in fact was a way, and I would somehow find it if I just keep holding on to that vision. 

When my daughter was 9 months old, quarantine and confinement swept over the world and it was the exact catalyst I needed to finally allow myself to slow down. Little by little, as the world began to go through the stages of awakening that we are still very much in the throes of, I was led back toward the exact source of this Love.

Here is what I learned in my experience: I had closed my heart at a very young age for the reasons that most of us do — I was a sensitive child and did not have the emotional education to teach myself  how to feel emotions thus learning ways to avoid feeling them. 

My personal experiences taught me that love was not safe, that feeling was not appropriate and it made people uncomfortable, and in all of this conditioning I actually developed a belief system that I did not believe I was deserving of love and that I was not capable of “doing it right”.

The really interesting thing was that I had done this inventory in my 20s and 30s and knew that I had some version of these belief systems — but that only made me feel worse about the whole thing and not being able to connect to love again because I knew why I had these “blocks,” but I didn’t know HOW to unblock them!

So here’s the funny thing that I realized in all of this — that every time I started to “go into my heart,” I felt pain. I felt resistance. I felt numbness. I felt literal walls. I felt fear and disappointment, shame and guilt, and this kept stopping me from going in deeper.

I kept doing this same thing — breathing, having emotions, resisting the pain, and feeling stuck again. I was resisting going to these “dark places” because I was expecting love and magic to just jump out, I was still telling myself the story I had told myself my whole life - the story that I wasn’t doing it right and that I shouldn’t have these feelings. 

One day shortly after quarantine began and I had been practicing this stillness and being more present with myself, I decided I was just going to go into my emotions and let myself sink to the bottom of the ocean, and accept and love myself for ALL OF WHAT SURFACED. 

It was a tiny little shift in perspective. I tell you this because I want you to really HEAR ME OUT HERE because this is the HOW of getting into your heart and allowing it to open.

You have got to know that the more you resist — either the sensation of energy (aka emotion), or you resist accepting and allowing your experience to play out because of a belief system that you are “wrong” or “not doing it right,” then you will continue to run up against walls of resistance and it makes it very difficult to allow  your heart to fully open. 

Allowing your Heart to fully open is a full surrender to the totality of who and what you are — a letting go time and again — to allow your body the full experience of FEELING. And no, it is not always going to feel like butterflies and rainbows, like joy and happiness and love. These beginning stages of going into our heart-space often bring up a lot of more dense emotions, which as I just shared, were my resistance and what was preventing me from reaching the gems underneath these outer layers.

When I had this minor shift in perspective, it was not long before the love began to surface more and more and more. I got past the outside layers I had built up, and continued to allow my heart space to open up and just be seen and experienced as it was, and I let go of my expectations of what that looked like. 

And I’ll be damned if love wasn’t right on the other side of the anger, grief, shame, guilt, and fear that had essentially been keeping my heart protected because of the illusions of my conditioning.

I finally realized the truth of the Heart - and that is that is has space for the kaleidoscope of emotions we feel, and one emotion is not better or worse than any other emotion. The point is to just be in acceptance of whatever is there in any given moment and allow the energy to flow freely. 

I want to mention here that sometimes things don’t change a lot on the outside when you first begin to deepen your connection with your Heart. Sometimes we have this expectation that massive changes will happen in our lives when we do this deep inner work, and they can, but honestly the changes are often more subtle. Simply getting familiar with HOW TO FEEL AGAIN and how to listen to your heart is the magic! This will be the guiding light that will illuminate your path of flourishing in love, connection, happiness and joy as you begin to integrate and heal those deeper and darker dense emotions that we resist to na avail and keep us disconnected from love. 

For example, I still have relationship challenges, but with this newly established connection to my heart, I am WAY more grounded and able to stay present and open while having a difficult conversation that brings up a lot of emotion.

I still have plenty of triggers. I still have times when I get frustrated with myself, or my job, or the challenges of parenting, but having this heart-connection allows me to draw on the wealth of intuition and emotional wisdom in any given situation. 

I can finally speak my truth and em in my power because I am speaking from my heart and not my head.   I have more integrity, I have better boundaries, and I trust in the decisions I make today because I know they are coming from me and my Heart, and not someone else's expectations of me (aka the past conditioning I lived with for so many years).

To wrap this story up, I want to say that I wish for you to be able to begin surrendering to your heart more and more from this day forward. You will know when this begins to integrate in your life because you will feel more empowered, stable, happy, and “in the flow” with life. 

You will no doubt experience many synchronistic events and as you allow the magic of your Heart to unfold, you will have access to the infinite wisdom that lies within your heart and soul. 

You will begin noticing that you feel more child-like wonder, and you will begin to feel more optimistic. It is truly empowering to re-learn how to live from your heart. Your Heart will lead you toward your purpose, it will allow you to pursue more of your joy and passions and the more you take action on your intuition and your Heart’s guidance, you will experience the magic of this space which is the infinite gift that keeps on giving.

With All My Love,

Hollis