When you first bring attention to your heart center, tears often spring up. Janine describes this as “housekeeping” — the heart houses grief and other emotions that haven’t finished processing, and simply attending to them allows them to move. She recounts sitting and crying every time she attuned to her heart, going through layers of “gunky emotions” before reaching a quieter, more nourishing connection.
This is one reason people avoid inhabiting the body: the body is housing unprocessed pain. Avoiding the body is an unconscious strategy to avoid that grief. But the avoidance also cuts you off from intuition, aliveness, and the ability to deeply connect with others.
“I think sometimes we avoid the body because it’s housing grief that we haven’t finished processing.”
The invitation is to treat the arising emotions not as problems but as cleaning — a necessary passage that yields a more intimate relationship with yourself.
Related Concepts
- Joy requires welcoming all emotions
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses all
- Grief of self-abandonment
- Shame about grief shuts down all emotions