when you think about what it takes to be living your best creative life, freeing your creative potential so you can create what uniquely wants to come to life through you, and finding your authentic artistic voice, your first thought is most likely not going to be "what i need is to open my heart to love".

even after working through an abundance of heart-opening creative invitations, we are unsure. the story that tells us we need to hunker down, try harder, follow any given set of tried and true steps to success is so deeply ingrained in us that it is what we default to every time we encounter resistance.

we want the answers, the methods, the steps, the inspiration as our relationship with our hearts has suffered great injuries. we have been severed from the power of our intuition. we are terrified of the unknown.

yet, awakening our hearts to the love that we are is the number one key to connecting to the source of infinite creative potential in our art, our lives, our lives as heart.

it is how you expand and open to abundance, trust the mystery and poetry of life, flow into the collaborative nature of your creative process by co-creating with Source, it is how you move beyond fearless.

everything that makes you come alive is on the other side of fear. it always comes down to a choice between love and fear. opening or closing. an all fear is fear of feeling.

it can be challenge to even know if you heart is open or not.

here are some clues that you are trying to protect your heart and not fully opening:

- you are not being truly authentic, expressing all of the parts of you freely
- you are holding off being vulnerable
- you are overthinking, overanalyzing, and generally stuck in your head

i know some of you have been holding back. not in creating - there, you shine. but in owning up fully to who you are, and in allowing the waves of emotion to pass through you.

i have been courted by this idea that i need to get my act together and not be so extra, so emotional, so sensitive, so intense all the time.

that at some point, my wild and highly sensitive feminine heart will settle down, and i will become some sort of even keeled reasonable version of myself.

but guess what. it's not happening and it's never going to happen. because it's not meant to be. we are not meant to not feel, not rage, not wild-out and express what is given to us to feel.

i promise you: surrendering to the depths of even the most intense sadness, will not destroy you. the pain and the grief wants nothing more than to be seen and held in your warm embrace. being with it, fully present to what is and what arises, will open your heart, and cut right through the limiting beliefs you've erected in an attempt to protect yourself from the depth of your own heart.

this being human is a messy, wild, inescapable affair.
we are here to feel deeply and allow the wisdom of our emotional body to guide us.

when it feels like too much and we feel like too much, it's hard to see it as a gift, but that is exactly what it is. the more we can own it and stop trying to suppress it, the more we can channel it into power and creative potential. feeling deeply is like the generative power of nature: it drives creation and creative living. think of the intense power generated by a waterfall, or the awe-inspiring waves of the ocean.

you are not too much. and your feelings are not too much. we need to put an end to that narrative. you are a force of nature. the world needs you to be exactly who you are, the whole of it, feel exactly what you are feeling, and express yourself freely. great art comes from those who own the heck out of who they really are.

allowing yourself to feel the things you are most terrified to feel will dissolve resistance and open your heart wide.

so today, here is what i want you to do:

1. give yourself permission to feel it all. set aside time for it, and create the space. play some music, light a candle, get on the floor, and cry your eyes out. let it pass through you. all of the loss and the grief.

2. write a love letter to your shadow self. all of the parts of you that you have pushed down and rejected over the years - welcome them to the table for one glorious feast.

this is not an easy invitation. this is the important work, the foundation for living and creating from a whole heart.


all love,
-anca.