How To Open Your Heart When It Involuntarily Closes

In relationship,

And I'm going to make a lot of generalizations here,

And I hope you guys will forgive me for the brevity and for the lack of disclaimers and heteronormativity of what I'm going to talk about.

And can we just do that without it being a charged thing that I'm not being all inclusive here?

Okay,

So most men,

Women don't know this about men,

Generally speaking.

Most men are responders,

Especially men who have masculine essence.

They're responders to their environment.

Are you guys still with me?

Does this feel true for you so far?

When you're connected to a woman and her heart is closed,

Most men also experience closure in their hearts.

If a woman is experiencing a tidal wave of emotions,

Usually so is her man.

The only difference is that he has no context for it and feels a little crazy and also does not have social upbringing that facilitates him being able to express what's actually happening for him.

I'm making a lot of generalizations here,

And I really,

Really know that you guys are advanced enough in your own practices to take all of this on responsibly because this is not me saying you need to blame your woman and tell her that she needs to open her heart,

Okay?

But I want you guys to know the truth of this so that you can have agency here because it is not necessarily your partner's responsibility to just open her heart so that you don't have to experience your closure in your own.

But you'll gain a lot of power knowing that sometimes if you feel like you have an involuntary closure that it's not yours.

And when you can recognize that,

You can choose to open it again because you don't have to go searching for a reason.

This is especially true in deeper intimate connections.

It takes a very sovereign woman to be willing to admit that she has that kind of impact on her man,

And it's just a truth that I have experienced time and time and time and time and time again.

And it's also important to recognize that if your woman is experiencing a closure that it may have nothing to do with you and most likely doesn't have anything to do with you,

But your connection has it be that you're responding to her closure.

So that also doesn't mean that there's a threat because she might involuntarily be closing her heart as a mode of self-preservation for something in her life that brings up one of her stories.

And when you're talking about the masculine and the feminine and the masculine is the container and the woman is all the material inside of it,

You can see how this impact might happen really easily.

Because when her material is not filling your container,

You're like,

Your whole system isn't going into alarm mode under the radar.

Right?

Are you guys still with me?

Have you guys?

Your system will go into an alarm of like,

Where's all the love that's supposed to be here?

Right?

You guys have all experienced this.

Okay.

Most men that I talk to about this are like,

Oh,

That's what was going on.

And this doesn't mean that the key to the solution to the problem,

Because this isn't,

It's not really a problem,

It's just like an awareness of dynamic that I think is really helpful for men to know.

It's not to go to your woman and be like,

Hey,

What's wrong?

Let me help you with that.

Which is what most men do.

Because they can,

On some level they can sense because we're connected to one another,

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not,

On some sense they can sense that their partner is off.

And this is where relationship just falls apart because he's like,

Hey,

What's wrong?

And she'll be like,

I'm fine.

Or she'll give you the silent treatment,

Which is even better,

Because it just adds to more confusion.

Or she'll say,

I'm having trouble and I don't want you involved with it.

Yes.

Or she'll say,

You didn't do the dishes last night.

That's the best.

Yeah.

Which isn't actually what's bugging her.

Which is actually not what's bugging her,

Ever.

There's always something else underneath.

And I love that you guys have already found some levity in this,

Because this is just a place where relationship gets stuck all the time.

I'm going to share my own personal experience here.

As a woman,

I assume that the men in my life can feel me,

Whether they know it or not.

And so I over communicate.

I will literally say to someone,

You might be feeling me right now.

If I know that I'm having a thing and that I'm feeling it,

I will let the people who I'm closest with know so that they don't feel like a lunatic.

Because when I'm having a feeling,

It's pretty big and it can knock people off of their feet if they don't know what's coming.

It's not very often that I have really big emotions like that,

But like when I do,

They happen and you want to let somebody know so that I can say to them,

This isn't yours,

It's mine,

And I'm in this experience and I'm doing my practices and I'd love for you to just hold space for it and go about your day.

Most people don't do that.

But I don't do that just with men.

I do that with everybody so that they know that if I'm having an experience,

That's what they're feeling.

And what that affords a person to do is to say,

OK,

How do I temporarily disrupt my natural inclination to respond,

To hold the container of her heart so that I don't get pulled down with her?

And this is where the masculine and feminine practice is extremely powerful and very,

Very important because you will get pulled down with her if you don't have permission to feel the things that she's feeling in your own body.

Everything just got really quiet.

And Mark is grimacing with his,

He's got his eyebrows.

So tell me what you're hearing,

Joe.

What I'm hearing is you just,

You basically just told me that I have something that I can do about this and I'm waiting for what you're going to tell me that is.

So this is the spot.

Once you've,

Once you can,

You have in your awareness,

I feel a closure,

I don't think it's mine,

I don't know what it is and I'm confused.

And then you recognize this is probably not mine,

Right?

When you can get there,

This is probably not mine.

From that point,

And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not yours,

But if you're impacted by it,

It's hitting something that's yours.

This is the place where you take responsibility.

And it could be hitting something that is unconscious for you too.

Yes,

You see where I'm headed with this,

Right?

So a little bit,

Right Mark?

Okay,

So this is really like kind of conceptual,

But I think you're going to relate to it because you guys have all had these experiences.

So if you lose me,

Please raise your hand.

I'm going to try and be as detailed about it as possible so that you can understand how it functions.

And then when you,

Your mind wanders about experiences that you've recently had,

It's going to plant into those places.

That's how you're going to integrate it.

So we all feel one another at all times,

Whether you're the masculine or the feminine.

We're all feeling one another.

The tendency is,

Of course,

For the masculine to be in response to the feminine.

And one of the reasons why,

Like Joe and I have talked a lot about this.

If you go headfirst into just explicit masculine practice,

But you don't have,

You haven't healed in your feminine as a man,

There's only so much capacity you're going to have to hold her.

Because if you don't have within your ability to consciously feel the entire broad range of emotions that she has,

Including her unconscious emotions,

There's going to be a point where your heart closes too.

She's no longer going to feel safe.

And she's going to stop and she's going to respond to you.

You guys still with me?

If you haven't,

Let's say the thing that you haven't healed in yourself is some level of grief.

And she experiences loss and she goes into both conscious levels of grief and also unconscious levels of grief.

And her heart closes because the unconscious levels of grief are too much for her nervous system to hold.

So she checks out.

She fights,

Fights,

Freezes.

The amygdala tells her this is danger zone.

I can't feel this feeling anymore.

That's what's happening in the actual body.

The sympathetic nervous system goes on overdrive.

The heart shuts down.

So we're mixing science and spirituality a little bit here,

But you guys are still with me,

Right?

When that happens,

If his capacity to experience grief is profound because he's done his own work to feel his own loss in his own life,

His opening can actually magnify her ability to see what she can't see and she'll get deeper.

The opposite is also true.

If he feels her closure and doesn't know what he doesn't know about his own grief here and he doesn't inquire to what there is to know about it,

He won't be able to hold her to get any deeper and you'll get stuck.

When you say inquire,

Do you mean in himself or with her?

In himself.

In himself.

And so.

.

.

Exactly how that is played out in one of the biggest relationships in my life is that I did not have that capacity in the past.

Yeah.

So this is where personal responsibility and also surrender happens in the masculine is that in order for him to hold her,

He needs to be willing to expand deeper in his own experience to allow himself to be porous,

To feel what she can't feel for herself so that he can reflect it back to her.

And this is where stoicism gets really in our way.

Yes.

That thing of we need to be strong and not feel,

That's really what we fucked up.

This is,

This is,

And it's incidental,

It's not really what David Data teaches,

But it's what people deduce from his teachings that results in a lot of retraumatization and relationship because men think I'm just going to try and hold all of this,

But they can't feel enough to truly hold it and then they get burnt out and they can't actually,

Like they get blown out because they don't have the tools to go deeper.

And I would be willing to bet that if you worked privately with David Data or John Weiland and I know if you work privately with Justin Pierce,

They teach that,

But they don't teach it in their group programs and they don't teach it in their online seminars.

This is deep practice.

So let me clarify.

It's a willingness to actually get fucked up around your grief and feel all of it at a deeper level and expand your willingness to have the sensation.

Yes.

And not fucked up.

Curious.

Okay.

Curious.

Oh God,

I feel like this.

What does it,

What does it really feel like?

Okay.

Give me more.

What is this?

And then you decide is it's safe for me to go into this deeper.

I could potentially feel more of this in my body and it may result in you having emotions.

And usually if you get curious about a thing and actually allow yourself to just feel it,

It goes away in like 90 seconds.

And then all of a sudden you can hold for someone else again.

If,

God,

I'm giving you guys a lot of concept here and I would really love to just individually walk you guys all through this experientially,

But we're not going to do that today.

So if you attach a story to what you're feeling and you take yourself out of the feeling and you say,

Oh gosh,

I lost my mom when I was five and I'm still not fully recovered from that.

And my mom betrayed me when she died and I'm going to be abandoned.

You hijack your experience.

So you have to have discipline in the mind to say,

Nope,

No story.

I'm going to feel this.

I'm going to feel what grief feels like in my body.

And you let it totally wash over you,

You as a masculine in the feminine.

This is energetic agility,

Joe.

This is what we talk a lot about.

Wait,

I want to control all of that.

I can control it.

Yeah.

No,

We just went like,

We just like went on a whole journey down to the core of the earth.

And like,

We're here at the core of the earth.

Can you guys feel that?

One of the ways that this often plays out in relationship,

If he's unaware of these practices,

Is he moves into addictive tendencies,

Substance abuse,

Codependent behavior,

Avoidance,

Rescuing,

Because he doesn't know what to do with it.

Because it's lots of energy to feel in your body.

Men are significantly more sensitive than anyone ever gives men credit for.

And they're not taught to look at that.

And so it's all underneath the surface.

And so you three now have permission from me to dig underneath the surface,

Knowing that it's safe,

Knowing that it could potentially not be yours,

It could potentially be yours,

And you use the discipline of your mind to say,

I'm going to feel this energy.

So this is where you take yourself deeper.

And this is how you get your heart to open back up again in the face of a partner who hasn't opened up again yet.

And that will actually have an effect on her and she will open.

Because you have just wrapped yourself around her.

But not in protective clothing,

But actually in just being willing to feel and expand into everything and not.

.

.

Yeah,

Your capacity for consciousness is just broader.

And this is endless,

Endless work in relationship.

It's like,

How do I,

As a woman,

How do I open wider and allow more to flow through me and more to fill up the space?

And as a man,

It's how do I expand to hold it?

And I say man,

Woman,

Masculine,

Feminine.

Right.

And that dance goes between,

Because on some levels,

A woman also,

When he goes into his feminine,

She can also do the same thing for him.

How do I expand to hold this so that he feels safe?

If there is some healing that has to happen,

And this is what happens in relationship,

Is like,

The more you open wider,

The deeper you go.

There's no being done.

No.

And it's not going to destroy us.

Exactly.