Yesterday morning, I made a mistake I’ve made countless times before. I opened Instagram while drinking my coffee, seeking a moment of connection before starting my day. Within seconds, my screen became a window into humanity’s full spectrum of experience. It left my heart feeling closed down.

First: a video of children’s bodies being pulled from areas of war, the wails of mothers. Swipe. A fitness influencer flexing in a mirror, with a gleaming smile. Swipe. Mourners lowering a shrouded body into the earth while a grandmother collapses in grief. Swipe. Someone’s perfectly plated breakfast with the caption “Living my best life!” Swipe. A spiritual post with soft, meditative background music to the caption, “God is Good!” Swipe. Families reuniting with hostages, tears of joy mixing with visible trauma. Swipe. A cat video.

I set my phone down feeling drained out. My chest felt hollow, my breath shallow. In less than three minutes, I’d witnessed the extremes of human experience compressed into bite-sized content, each story demanding a different emotional response. My nervous system didn’t know whether to grieve, celebrate, or simply shut down.

This is our daily reality now, a never-ending schizophrenic feed of tragedy, triviality, and banality, each scroll a gamble between heartbreak and distraction. And here’ the question that haunts me: How do you keep your heart open when the world feels like it’s falling apart?

How Do You Keep Your Heart Open When the World Feels Like It’s Falling Apart

The Natural Impulse to Close

That morning, every fiber of my being wanted to delete my social media accounts, build walls around my heart, and retreat into the safety of not knowing what’s happening in my friend’s lives and out in the world. Maybe you’ve felt this too—this desperate urge to protect yourself from the weight of the world’s pain.

This impulse isn’t wrong. It’s your heart’s natural wisdom trying to prevent emotional flooding. For thousands of years, humans processed the suffering of their immediate community. We were never designed to bear witness to global trauma in real-time, interrupted by advertisements and cat videos.

Yet there’s something deeper that your heart knows: When we close ourselves off from pain, we close ourselves off from everything. The same walls that block out suffering also block out joy, love, and the very connection our hearts crave.

The Hidden Cost of Spiritual Overwhelm

What I experienced that morning has become so normalized we barely recognize its impact. This constant emotional gear-shifting—from mass murder to gym routines, from massacres to meal prep—creates what trauma researchers call “spiritual overwhelm.” Unlike emotional overwhelm, which exhausts our feelings, spiritual overwhelm attacks something deeper: our sense of meaning, coherence, and connection to life itself.

Dr. Judith Herman, who pioneered PTSD research, notes that witnessing violence, even through screens, activates the same neural pathways as experiencing it directly. But social media adds a twisted element: it intersperses trauma with banality so rapidly that our psyche can’t properly process either.

This creates the central paradox of our modern existence: we are simultaneously more connected to global suffering than any humans in history, yet more isolated in how we process it. Our ancestors experienced tragedy collectively—gathering to mourn, creating rituals to process grief, supporting each other through shared hardship. Today, we witness unfathomable suffering alone, often while physically surrounded by people absorbed in their own digital worlds. We’re connected to everything but present with nothing.

The Problem with Closing Your Heart

Last week, one of my Heart Mastery Circle participants shared something that stopped me cold. “Gabriel,” she said, “I’ve started feeling nothing when I see the news from the Middle East and Ukraine. Not because I don’t care, but because if I let myself feel it all, I couldn’t function.”

Her confession reveals our collective coping mechanism: selective numbing. When overwhelm becomes chronic, the heart doesn’t just close to pain—it closes to everything. Joy becomes muted. Love feels distant. We move through life wrapped in emotional bubble wrap, protected but profoundly disconnected.

Yet closing our hearts carries its own risks. HeartMath Institute research shows that emotional shutdown disrupts heart rate variability (HRV), our key marker of resilience. Lower HRV correlates with increased inflammation, compromised immunity, and heightened disease risk. In trying to protect ourselves from feeling, we literally make ourselves sick.

The Science of Keeping Your Heart Open

Here’s what changes everything: an open heart doesn’t mean an unprotected heart. The counterintuitive truth is that keeping your heart open isn’t about consuming more suffering—it’s about engaging more intentionally and consciously with life, including our virtual lives.

Through twenty years of teaching applied heart intelligence, I’ve learned that we can remain compassionately engaged with the world’s pain without being destroyed by it. This requires both presence, heart coherence, as well as surrender.

The HeartMath Institute’s Global Coherence Research reveals something profound: when we maintain heart coherence, we can process difficult emotions without being overwhelmed. It’s like developing emotional antibodies that allow us to witness suffering while maintaining our capacity to respond with love rather than shutdown.

Ancient wisdom traditions understood this intuitively. Buddhist teachings on bodhicitta (awakened heart-mind) describe cultivating “strong back, soft front” the capacity to stand firm in our compassion while remaining tender to the world’s pain. The mystic traditions speak of the “broken-hearted warrior” who lets their heart break open rather than break down.

The World Isn’t Broken—It’s a School

Here’s a perspective that changed everything for me: What if the world isn’t falling apart? What if it’s a vast school where souls learn through contrast and challenge?

In Gaza and Israel, in Ukraine and Sudan, souls are learning profound lessons. Some are discovering what it means to die for their beliefs about God. Others are learning to live for God and for kindness and love. Some are finding what they’ll sacrifice their lives for; others are discovering what they’ll create from the ashes of loss.

This doesn’t minimize suffering or excuse cruelty. But it helps us understand that chaos isn’t a sign of failure, it’s part of how consciousness evolves. Every spiritual tradition teaches some version of this wisdom. Hindus see Earth as a place where souls work out their karma. Buddhist teachings view suffering as the gateway to compassion. Christian mystics describe life as the “vale of soul-making.”

This perspective helps us understand chaos as unintegrated potential, the necessary dissolution before new growth. Just as the caterpillar must completely dissolve in the chrysalis before becoming a butterfly, our world is undergoing a similar transformation. And what you’re watching secretly from the privacy of your screen is its growing pains.

How to Keep Your Heart Open: 7 Essential Steps

Drawing from both ancient wisdom and cutting-edge heart-brain research, here are seven practices to help you maintain an open heart when it feels like the world is falling apart:

1. Acknowledge Pain with Compassion

The first step to keeping your heart open is to face what hurts without turning away. Spiritual traditions worldwide recognize suffering as part of the human journey, while science shows that suppressing emotions disrupts heart rhythms and creates more stress.

Practice: Place your hand on your heart and breathe slowly (5 seconds in, 5 seconds out). Name what you’re feeling without judgment—grief, anger, fear. This simple act of recognition activates your prefrontal cortex, helping you process emotions without being overwhelmed by them.

HeartMath research demonstrates that heart-focused breathing reduces cortisol and creates coherence between the heart and brain, allowing you to process difficult emotions without shutting down.

2. Align Heart and Mind

Mystics like Rumi described the heart as the seat of divine wisdom, while neurocardiology now confirms that the heart contains its own intrinsic nervous system—a “little brain” that communicates bidirectionally with the cranial brain.

Practice: Start each day with the Quick Coherence Technique: Focus on your heart while breathing slowly, then recall a feeling of love or gratitude. Hold this for 1-5 minutes, establishing coherence before engaging with the world’s challenges.

This practice creates measurable coherence in heart rate variability, reducing amygdala reactivity and enhancing prefrontal cortex function—exactly what’s needed to stay open-hearted in difficult times.

3. Create Sacred Boundaries

Both spiritual traditions and modern psychology recognize the importance of discernment—knowing when to engage and when to step back. This isn’t about closing off; it’s about intelligent filtering.

Practice: Pay attention to what you allow into your personal digital space. Choose specific times to engage with news, setting clear time limits. Don’t believe everything you read or see. Apply your critical thinking and common sense. Before consuming challenging content, take three deep breaths to ground yourself in your heart.

Research on stress physiology shows that constant exposure to negative stimuli triggers prolonged sympathetic nervous system activation, depleting our capacity for empathy and compassion.

4. Find Beauty in the Cracks—Recognize God’s Presence

Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” This poetic insight points to a profound spiritual truth: beauty is a quality of God, and when we seek beauty, we’re really seeking the Divine presence in all things.

Even in suffering, even in chaos, God is present. The mystics understood this—that the Divine doesn’t abandon us in darkness but reveals itself through unexpected grace, through moments of tenderness amid tragedy, through the helper who runs toward danger, through the stranger who offers comfort.

Practice: Train yourself to look for God’s fingerprints in the darkness. Each evening, record three moments where you witnessed beauty, grace, or unexpected kindness—evidence of the Divine presence moving through your day. This isn’t about denying suffering; it’s about recognizing that God dwells in both the wound and the healing.

Neuroplasticity research shows that what we repeatedly focus on shapes our neural pathways. By intentionally seeking God’s presence through beauty and goodness, we strengthen our capacity to perceive the Divine even in the midst of chaos. We train our hearts to recognize that we are never alone, that even in our darkest moments, we are held in Love.

5. Practice Radical Gratitude

Every spiritual tradition emphasizes gratitude as essential to well-being. Modern research confirms this wisdom, showing that gratitude practices significantly impact heart health and emotional resilience.

Practice: Each morning, place your hand on your heart and name three things you’re genuinely thankful for, focusing on how they feel in your body. Let gratitude become your rebellion against despair.

Studies show that gratitude increases heart-rate variability and activates parasympathetic recovery after stress. It literally helps your heart recover from challenges more quickly.

6. Trust Your Heart’s Wisdom

The heart’s intelligence isn’t metaphorical—it’s biological. Your heart contains approximately 40,000 neurons that sense, feel, learn, and remember, communicating constantly with your brain through neural, hormonal, and electromagnetic pathways.

Practice: When feeling overwhelmed, place your hand on your heart and ask, “What is the deeper truth about this?” Or, “What is the deeper lesson here?” Journal any insights. Your heart processes information differently than your analytical mind, often perceiving solutions your thinking mind might miss.

HeartMath research on intuition has shown that the heart often receives and responds to information before the brain becomes aware of it, demonstrating a form of intelligence that complements cognitive knowing.

7. Connect to the Collective Heart

Indigenous wisdom teaches that all hearts beat as one, while HeartMath’s Global Coherence Initiative scientifically measures how group coherence amplifies individual practice.

Practice: Join with others in heart-focused meditation, whether in person or online. My Sacred Heart Meditation Circle, Heart Mastery Circle, and weekly Global Heartstreams are my invitation to practice synchronizing our heart rhythms in community. You can learn more about these programs here.

Research on group coherence shows that synchronized heart rhythms can amplify and extend the electromagnetic field generated by our hearts, creating ripple effects beyond what we can see.

We See the World As We Are

My friend and mentor, Adrian Freedman, wrote a song entitled, “My Heart is the World” that talks about a profound spiritual truth now backed by scientific understanding: we see the world as we are. “When there’s peace in my heart, there’s peace on the earth,” the song continues, “My heart is the world.” Let that sink in for a moment.

This isn’t just poetry—it’s precisely what HeartMath research demonstrates through their studies of the heart’s electromagnetic field, which extends several feet beyond our bodies. Our inner state literally changes the energy field around us, influencing others in ways science is only beginning to measure.

When our hearts are in chaos, we perceive more chaos in our environment. When we cultivate peace within, we begin to notice peace without. That morning with Instagram, when I returned later with a more coherent heart, the same content revealed different aspects—the helpers rushing toward danger, the moments of human connection amid tragedy.

Final Thoughts

As I write this, I’m thinking of you, perhaps feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, wondering how to stay open without being overwhelmed. If this is your experience, I want you to know something: Your heart already knows the way. It’s been navigating this dance of opening and closing your entire life.

Adrian’s song ends with a prayer that I’ve now made my own:

Dear God: Give me love, light, peace, faith, hope, joy in my heart.

Because when you tend to your feeling heart first, when you fill it with these qualities, you don’t just change your experience of the world. You change the world itself, one heart at a time.

Keeping your heart open to the full experience of life isn’t just a spiritual practice, it’s planetary medicine. Every time you choose love over fear, presence over panic, compassion over closure, you add something precious to our collective field that impacts your perception of the world, and the lives of people around you.

Will you join us in this practice of keeping our hearts open? Of being the peace, love, and light our world needs?

From my heart to yours,

—Gabriel

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