How to Be Fully Free
Show me a heart that can fully feel everything, and I’ll show you a heart that can be fully free anywhere.
“What opens your heart?”
I was facilitating a workshop for a men’s mastermind, when I posed that question. The guys didn’t have an easy answer. So I opened the draft manuscript of my next book to read an excerpt:
When everything is going the way you want it to, the choice to be openhearted is an easy one—so easy, in fact, that it doesn’t feel like a choice at all. You just open your heart to what is. You let it all in. You come all the way out to meet it. When your team wins the big game, it doesn’t feel like you’re choosing to enjoy it—it just feels like celebration. In fact, your heart is subtly opening like that all the time, and you let it.
My heart naturally opens to my first sip of coffee in the morning.
Sunrises over the Atlantic and sunsets over the Great Plains.
Good weather at my tee time and good moods at dinner time.
A walk in the woods.
Peppermint Patties.
My wife’s approval.
People doing what I believe is best for them.
God answering my prayers according to my preferences.
Did I mention my wife’s approval?
Financial security.
More financial security.
Also, in case I haven’t mentioned it, my wife’s approval.
Openheartedness is what happens when you are fully experiencing the present moment without doing anything to it. When all is going well, it can feel a lot like breathing. It just happens. It isn’t until something knocks the wind out of you that you have to be intentional about getting your breath back.
Twenty-four hours after that men’s gathering, I got the wind knocked out of me.
My oldest son Aidan is living in Chicago, chasing his dream of becoming a comedian. Professionally, things are going great, but he’s suffered a string of personal setbacks. Most recently, he broke his arm in a hit-and-run accident on the city streets. Unable to work his day job for several weeks—and with no paid leave—he decided to convalesce with us.
He returned home with his best buddy—his cat, Billy—who is a bit of a celebrity in our family, given what a great companion he is to Aidan. Upon arriving in town on a hot day, Aidan stopped at Walmart, leaving the car windows slightly cracked so Billy wouldn’t overheat.
When he got back to the car a few minutes later, Billy was gone.
I got the call after he and his brother had been searching the vast parking lot and surrounding fields for fifteen minutes with no sign of Billy. My heart slammed closed, as I gathered my daughter and we raced to join the search. My wife arrived a few minutes after we did. And for the next three hours we hunted for Billy, our hopes dropping as fast as the sun on the western horizon.
While I was searching for Billy, I was also searching for a way to open my heart to this experience, because even though this loss would be devastating to my beloved son, I’ve learned something about openheartedness:
An open heart doesn’t make you weaker, it makes you wiser.
When your heart is open, you show up to the worst stuff in life with the best stuff inside you. On the other hand, navigating a crisis with a closed heart is like playing a guitar with mittens on—you lose your best ability to make something beautiful out of it.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t get my heart open—the prospect of losing Billy was just too painful.
The sun had almost set when I finally entered the Walmart to buy tape for some Missing Cat signs—the kind of sign you see faded and tattered weeks later, knowing the cat was probably never found. Walking out of the store, tape in hand, I got the text:
“He was in the car.”
Billy had been hiding in the wheel well. And with that information, my heart finally opened wide, but it wasn’t joy that came out at first. It was all the sadness I’d been unwilling to feel at the prospect of Aidan losing his best buddy on top of all the other losses he’s been enduring. It was the sorrow of The Big Question: How much hardship can my dear son tolerate before it gets the best of him? It was the grief of all the painful things we can’t prevent.
So, right there in Walmart, I wept.
What do you naturally open your heart to? When you answer that question, you’ll come a little closer to the joy that can make life feel like a gift.
What do you have difficulty opening your to? When you answer that question, you’ll come a little closer to the grief that can make life feel like a threat.
Are you interested in opening your heart to all of it? When you answer that question with a yes, you’ll come a little closer to the freedom that can make openheartedness feel like a superpower.
When we’re not willing to feel the sadness of something, we become trapped inside all the patterns of thoughts and behaviors designed to not feel it. Therefore, once we’re willing to feel it, those patterns cease to be our prison.
Show me a heart that can fully feel everything, and I’ll show you a heart that can be fully free anywhere.
How are these ideas about openheartedness helpful to you? What questions do they raise? What other reactions do you have to this post? Feel free to share in the comments, and please feel free to react to others’ comments as well!
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Most people want freedom like they want abs, without doing any crunches. But emotional freedom? That’s Olympic-level vulnerability. You don’t just sip your morning coffee and arrive there. You open your ribs like cathedral doors and let both angels and raccoons waltz in.
That moment in Walmart? That’s sacred ground. Grief and relief holding hands in the fluorescent lighting aisle. Bless Billy, high priest of the Wheel Well Temple.
Thanks for reminding us that a fully feeling heart isn’t fragile. It’s feral and faithful.
"...It isn’t until something knocks the wind out of you that you have to be intentional about getting your breath back."
Geez man stop hurting me. I don't care about your dumb cat. I'm telling you it's not important to me so stop making me cry about my own kick to the chest over your inability to properly determine if an animal was in or around a vehicle for several hours. ....But, I do care about my children. In my layoff two weeks ago today, before my second attempt to pass a major exam (failed again), I sat alone in my house, children gone to camps, wife gone to be with her granny while her mother was with her sister (the younger sister, getting a lumpectomy)...I sat there alone...absorbing and dazed and then I sobbed. I sobbed so hard it scared our cat. He was lurking in hopes to grab a piece of my snack then stared at my wrinkled face with water streaming and my convulsing body and decided he didn't need to be there. He just curled up in a comfy spot to give me space...without totally running away. My thoughts were on my children. What if I couldn't find a new job, what if I couldn't match my salary even with a new job. What about the camps and the things I do to show love to my kids at Christmas. What will I do to help them smile and feel safe and comfortable. It was terrible. It still is. I'm already tired of trying to find a job, but I won't stop.
Then you come along and throw your words at me and I read them like a naive fool who seems to forget how you make all my tears come out, even in times past while I was sitting at work, or as Elijah sees his wife at her parents home.
I know what it's like to fall off the monkey bars in the 1980's during recess at the elementary school. Not the short ones for the "little" kids, the "big kid" ones. I know what it's like to land on your back on the dirt packed harder than bedrock. I know what it feels like to wonder not only, "will I ever breathe again", but "have I ever breathed before". That flash of, "maybe I die right here". I'm on the ground again. I'm having a hard time breathing. I wonder if I'll get to breathe anymore...if I ever was really breathing. I feel so much lately...so raw. I'm getting tired of feeling man. I'm so, so tired. I was already feeling things before the recent events of life. Little twinges of midlife psychology, knocking on the door, looking for consideration. Now this. Now your dumb article....sorry, my petulance is all I have in some measure of jest and feigned rebellion to feel any control at the moment.
I don't know what to do but I'm trying to do right things. I'm trying to apply faith, logistical smarts, sage wisdom from others who know this well, seeking support from family and friends. All of it. I have a lot you see. So much. I'm scared because, I wonder if I'm supposed to lose what I have. Am I supposed to be humbled back to the dirt...breathless...so that I find a new and better priority in life? Am I supposed to shed layers of things and stuff and comforts so I can finally be real and honest about what little I actually deserve in life? So I can stop being fake and be the lower version of myself? Or am I just supposed to stay some course that will be a shining new and better outcome I never could have imagined? Who knows...not me. God knows. I have trepidation aking Him just what He wants me to know. I think, or I thought I was aware of some things, but I'm really stewing in my doubtful juices of late and it's tough. Best I can muster for now is Mark 9:24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. - I'm the man with children, hoping for their sakes an my own pathetic helpless feelings that a personal miracle can be worked, even though I'm not so great in my trust of the Lord. Not so great at believing like Thomas in John 20: 27-29.