How to Connect to your Heart’s Desires

Connecting to your Heart-Brain 

(Credit to Mami Onami) 

This is one of my favorite practices to do with myself and to guide people through. It can be lifechanging, so if you are ready, please grab a journal or have somewhere to write, draw, or vocally record what you experience.  

Our minds love to think. It is what they are good at! When we are faced with a decision, experiencing mental overload, rumination, or the crazy 8 loop as Mark Pointer calls it, it is time to drop in to our hearts to gain clarity. Otherwise, we can ride that thought train to the middle of indecision city!  

The mind speaks in thoughts and reasons, pros and cons. The heart speaks in images. If you are someone with aphantasia, there may be a feeling or a distinct word, rather than a clear image.  

Let’s begin:  

Take some deep, slow breaths. Begin to turn your attention inwards, on your breath, your body. You may close your eyes for a moment to really connect in. Take three breaths with your eyes closed, soaking up the present moment experience of just being you. Notice any sensations your body has for you when you connect to it. Sometimes I get a tingling sensation that makes me smile, like my body saying hey girl! 

Next, shift your focus to your mind. Place a hand on your head or fingers on your third eye. Feel that attention all in your mind. Now we’ll bring that attention down. Slowly trace your finger down your nose, your cupid’s bow, lips, chin, throat, sternum, ending at your heart space.  

Flatten your hand against your heart. Feel the space beneath your hand, in between your chest and your back. Your heart is here. You might visualize it as a glowing green orb, a different colored light, an anatomical heart, or another symbol. You may imagine a galaxy beneath your hand. Whatever it looks like (or feels like), connect with the spaciousness that exists here.  

You are going to ask your heart a question and your heart wants to know that you will listen to it. Tell your heart that you promise to listen, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Say, “I promise to listen. I will receive what you show me.”  

Now ask your heart, “What do I want?”  When you see an image, zoom in and zoom out. Stay with this image. Who is around you? What is around you? Where are you? Take it in.  

Once you receive this insight, the mind may take over and begin to make sense of it, planning steps, and thinking. Stay with the heart, come back to the heart. If you need to, say outload, “I am with you, heart, I want to see what you show me.”  

The second question you’ll ask your heart is “What do I need to do?”  Again, when your heart shows you, stay with it. Just observe. You don’t need to do anything right now; you are just listening to your heart’s intuition. All you need to do is listen.  

Write down or record what you learned. You may also share it with someone who you trust. To share it with me, email me at talya.matz@gmail.com. I would love to hear your heart’s desires.  Again, know that you don’t need to do anything right now, but you now have the option to take a step closer to what you really want. You can do this heart practice anytime you need heart guidance.  

The Self-Doubt Wave that Topples me from time to time

I wonder if I’ll forever be finding my groove. I sometimes have it, then it slips away, and I don’t even notice until it’s completely all gone. At that point, I am in full blown self-doubt spiral mode. Oh man, self-doubt is probably my least favorite experience this life has offered me so far. It is the most confusing feeling, and I despise it.  

My antipathy for self-doubt makes it even more important that I fully feel it when it arises, rather than suppress and avoid. 

Oh the paradox of feeling your feelings. I read a quote from one of my longest used books for bibliomancy, A Guide for the Advanced Soul by Susan Hayward, taken from my dad (Thank you, Dad). The quote is: “The way to freedom is feeling your feelings.” As I read this, I smiled and shook my head, because Spirit is always so spot on and often tells me the thing I want to hear the least but need to hear most. I asked myself: “what am I avoiding feeling?”  

Tired, confused, lost, annoyed, drained, bothered, inferior, like I’m failing, upset, wanting to give up, stuck, scared.  

I want to let myself feel these feelings and I, like many of my clients, have a fear that if I do, I will get stuck in them. I know that this is not true, and yet I still suppress them out of fear. So what do we do with this? Create the container for the magic to happen, for the feelings to be felt. Give myself the space to fully go there. Through dance, through writing, through slowing down, crying in the shower, improv singing on guitar- those are some of my ways. I get to remember to do those things to actually let myself release it. When I get caught up in the day to day, it is easy to let these feelings pile up and then they often come out sideways. 

I learned this lesson about feelings the hard way many times, and I often think about the time I learned how to swim in the ocean. I grew up in New York, going to the beach with my family in the summer. Anyone who swims in the ocean knows you actually need to run towards the waves to avoid getting caught in them and trying to run out against the under-toe is basically a full proof plan for getting knocked down. I did not know this as a kid, so I continuously tried to outrun the waves and inevitably would get trampled. One time I got toppled by two waves in a row, flipped underwater, scraped by sand, and felt like I was going to die. When I got out and recovered, someone told me to go into the waves instead of trying to run out. So I’m supposed to go towards the danger? Hell no! But I tried it once and realized they were right. The easiest way to avoid getting toppled by a wave is to dive right into it.  

Water symbolizes the unconscious and emotional world. How you would swim in the ocean is how you ought to deal with your feelings, dive right in.  

I want to show up real and authentic. Which means that I expose that even though I can guide people through their messes, I too am a mess. Deeply messy, deep in self-doubt, deep in “what the hell do I do now someone please help me because I don’t know if I can anymore.” It is simply part of life, no matter how connected to the other side of these emotions I am. In fact, the deeper I connect with joy and uplift, the deeper I connect with sorrow, weight, and horribly uncomfortable, unbearable feelings. That’s just how it works. Reminding myself of that is so helpful when I am in the middle of the mess. It helps me to remember that this is part of what it is to be fully alive, fully human. I would not trade any piece of this beautiful, messy, then gorgeous, then ugly again life I get to live.  

Treating self-care like my JOB

 Earlier today I was on a walk and delighted myself with the thought that “it is my professional duty, my job, to take care of myself!” How many other people can say that? Of course, it is everybody’s job to take care of themselves, and we should all treat our self-care with the same necessity that we do our paid work, but many of us do not see if that way. In recent months, I have been greatly expanding my capacity to serve more people, produce more creative work, and connect with more people in my community in a meaningful way. Through this period of stretching myself, I have significantly ramped up my self-care practices, incorporating new things and revisiting old habits that keep me feeling like me.  

Self-care practices are absolutely essential and nonnegotiable for me as I do the work I am here to do. I am the leader of myself first. If I do not show up for myself with honor and discipline, then who will? How am I to show up with others if I am not doing all that is in my power to care for myself? Even if I do not feel my best, knowing that I took even one baby step towards showing up for myself is often enough to make me feel so much better. It is foundational. It is me walking my talk, a way that I practice integrity and coherence. It is how I inspire and empower others with my presence and being, which is part of what makes being in a therapeutic or coaching relationship with me so powerful.  

I have listed many of my self-care habits in the map I made above. What I want to expand on here is how I create the structure for myself to actually make these habits part of my everyday life, so that I do not have to even think about it, I just do it. One of the ways I ensure self-care is seeped into my life is by scheduling it into my calendar. Tuesdays are my extended self-care days. Every Tuesday morning for the past two semesters (in the summer I stopped doing this because my time was less structured), I wake up and go to the gym. I work out, which I LOVE to do and then I go to the locker room which I pretend is a resort spa, and I go in the sauna and cold shower after.  I make sure to keep another day during the week, usually Friday open for more self-care and whatever I want to do.

Boundaries are part of self-care. I take care of myself by saying no to things I do not want to do. Anything that is not a full bodied “hell yeah!!” is a no. It has taken me a while to accept that that means less socializing, but honestly it feels so much better to be actively choosing everything on my schedule instead of agonizing over whether I should cancel this plan because I ignored my initial feeling to say no. I am a very social person and I also love being alone. Knowing when to spend time with just me is key to taking care of myself. Just earlier today on my walk, I felt the impulse to call someone, but then I gave it a second thought and actually the only person I felt like being with in that moment was me and I just needed to accept that and take that walk with myself.

Another magical way I ensure self-care is easy for me to apply to my everyday life is by adjusting the practices I lean on according to my hormone cycle. When I am in follicular and ovulation, I dance and move and run and belt my favorite songs every chance I get. That is what my body craves during those phases. When I am in luteal, I take naps in my self-care time and do yoga Nidra and walk and sky gaze. When I am in the first days of my period, I really focus on resting, heat, and exerting the minimum possible effort while still showing up and being present.  It is such a drastic difference from running every day to napping every day that I am laughing about it as I write, but it feels so natural to treat myself this way. I simply honor the phase I am in and adjust my approach to self-care accordingly.

How my relationship to luteal changed

When I began my menstrual cycle exploration, I was in high school. I was one of the few teenagers fortunate to have adequate health class experience in school, thanks to Mrs. Brown at NYC iSchool! I learned about the four phases of the female hormone cycle, what each hormone does and the journey the egg takes from ovary to uterus via fallopian tube highway.  

At the time, I was on hormonal birth control. I had a Mirena IUD placed at age 14 when I started having sex with my boyfriend at the time. Since I had an artificial cycle, the information I learned wouldn’t quite feel tangible to me until years later when I came off hormonal birth control and began tracking my cycle.  

I love tracking my cycle and living in connection to my natural rhythm. I have learned so much through connecting with my body in this way and I want to share what I have learned, what has worked for me, and how I transformed my relationship with my cycle from one of annoyance, irritation, and discomfort to joy, flow, friendship.  

The hardest part of my cycle is by far the luteal phase, when PMS happens. PMS is just the 5-7 days before menstruating when physical and emotional symptoms increase. Honestly, the PMS is not even the worst part of my cycle, it’s more like the whole two weeks of luteal. For years I struggled with how to relate to this phase, because it was just so challenging. I would wake up annoyed, irritated, with this awful feeling in my heart of anger and anxiety. I would feel overwhelmed easily, moods swinging around like crazy, and struggled to connect with my partner during this time. All I wanted was to be showered with affection one moment, and then *poison dart red devil eyes* “don’t you dare look at me” the next. I felt crazy and guilty for acting like a b at times.  

I knew that if I was going to teach this work to people, I ought to get curious about the most challenging part of my phase for myself. I did more exploring through an amazing menstrual educator named Angelina Hernandez (you should all take one of her workshops, they are fantastic and well worth it). Using the power of metaphor, symbolism, nature, and my creative mind I found subtle ways to relate to my luteal phase that ended up being just the tweaks that I needed to find more ease.  

Luteal is the season of Inner Autumn. When I think about applying this season metaphor to fit how I actually feel during this time, I think of how the leaves make those wind tornados on the ground sometimes. I think of the smell that autumn has, very distinct. I think of the vibrancy of the colors of the leaves; what was once green, a color of calm has changed into bold reds, oranges, yellows, and dull browns. The leaves change color before they fall. Some leaves do not ever fall; they stay hanging on. When the leaves fall, they pile, and bugs and little creatures start to lay their eggs in them. The leaves cover the ground, keeping the soil warm before they decompose. I remember what it was like to play in the leaves as a child, raking them into a big pile in my Savta’s front yard, then running and jumping into them.  

What does the season fall mean to you?  

It is the time of the last harvest, of the darkness approaching. The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer. Our rhythm turns more inwards as we spend more time inside and more time asleep, in dream state.

This transition can be challenging as we reminisce about the sweet fleet of summer (ovulation), longing for those golden days when we were outside for hours with no chill.  

When I think about my luteal phase now, I think about honoring the massive shifts; like being equipped with the perfect fall outfits- enough layers that when the sun comes out I can enjoy it without sweating and when the chill comes back, I have my favorite warm sweater to put on.  

It doesn’t mean I don’t feel all the feels, but that I know what to give myself in times of need and I prioritize that.  

When boundaries made me close my heart and the one thing that helped me open it back up

I used to think that having boundaries meant closing myself off. When I first read about highly sensitive people or empaths, I began to treat myself like something that needed protecting. I began to fear my own sensitivities and what would happen if I picked up someone’s energy. So, I started closing my heart and almost obsessively fixating on boundaries, protection, and clearing my energy.   

Then one day, my dance/movement therapy teacher, Dr. Danielle Fraenkel, said something that completely shifted my perspective. She said, “If you pick up energy from someone that you don’t like, just let it go.” So simple! I was mind blown. I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to protect myself with boundaries but what I had really done was close my heart. I wanted to live heart-open and trust myself that I could handle it if I felt out of wack due to picking up someone’s energy.    

I learned that I do not need to set boundaries out of fear. I learned that when I set boundaries out of fear of others, I am reinforcing the message that my sensitive nature makes me weak. When I set boundaries out of fear, I closed myself off to being impacted by others in positive ways too! When my heart was closed, I wasn’t even protecting myself either, I was just living in fear of being flooded, instead of trusting myself that I can handle it.   

When I set boundaries out of self-love, I reinforce the message that I am worthy of my own protection. Protection is not something I give myself because I “need” it. I can handle picking up other’s energies because I know that I can simply let it go. When I stopped fixating on trying to avoid what is frankly impossible to avoid, I started showing myself that I can rise to the challenge. This strengthened my discernment and self-trust. My inner sense of security strengthened too, knowing that I got this. My sensitivities do not mean I need to treat myself like a baby, a fragile little girl. Sometimes I do show myself extra care, but I want to live in a world where I can live without fear of what might happen if I don’t protect myself and close my heart.  

I used to wear scarves around myself like a hood, which is a beautiful practice for protection, at the airport because I felt too exposed and sensitive if I did not. I used to wear my noise cancelling headphones to cope with loud spaces. I get it, these things are helpful when you feel overwhelmed. But I want to live in the world! Fully in it! I want to be able to handle the world at full volume because I know I can! That makes me feel capable, strong, and good about myself. So, I trained my nervous system to feel safe and allowed myself to settle into the discomfort of intaking a lot of stimuli. (It’s called being present.) This does not mean that I push past my internal compass and stay in places that I do not want to be. But at the airport, I walk around with my ears out, head up, present, making eye contact, and it feels GOOD to be fully in this world. Identifying as a highly sensitive person gave me an excuse to treat myself like a fragile thing and to live in fear instead of fully owning the power that I have to feel safe and secure in any environment.  

Now, my boundaries are because I love myself, not because I am scared of what might happen if I don’t set them. In other words, fear is not the main force I move from, love is. I know I can handle what might happen if I don’t protect myself in these particular ways because I challenged myself and saw that I was fine when I did.