Dear Reader,

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring with you what it looks like when your heart begins to open, how to recognize the signs, and why is it that the heart seems to close again right after it opens. This closing of the heart, or “dip” as I often call it, feels very much like a dark night of the soul or the experience that love has abandoned you.

If you’ve been in that place, where love feels real, but so does the purifying fire, please know this: you’re not broken. This is a common stage of the healing journey, when the heart’s light starts summoning everything in us that isn’t love.

Today, I'm sharing a grounded set of practices for moving through that dip with more steadiness, emotional strength, and presence, so you can keep your heart open without getting overwhelmed.

Heart Coherence When Everything Feels Dark & Closed

In my latest video, I share four simple practices that work powerfully together when you’re moving through a dark night of the soul - or any major cycle of healing where the heart feels raw, heavy, or suddenly closed again after opening. When love awakens the heart, it often initiates a purifying process: the light rises, and so does everything in us that still needs to be met, felt, and released.

I'll walk you through Tuning In & Witnessing, Neutral, the Letting Go technique, and Heart Coherence. Each practice supporting a different part of the journey: staying present with what’s here, reducing emotional charge, releasing what you’re holding, and regulating the nervous system so you can return to inner stability.

If you’re in the dip right now, let this be a steady companion set of tools you can return to again and again to hold the light, stay emotionally strong, and keep moving forward with your heart intact.

Something I wish someone had told me

When I started my healing journey, I thought healing moved in a straight line. That you go into something: grief, fear, shame — you feel it, you work through it, and then it's done. Filed. Put behind you. What no one told me is that it happens in cycles.

One of my first major cycles was around grief. Grief for the loss of my youth. For friends I'd left behind when I moved countries. For a version of life I had quietly imagined but never lived. For projects I never got to complete. I went into it. I stayed with it. I let it have its full weight. And I came out the other side not without scars, but with something new. A softness. A spaciousness. A kind of strength I hadn't had before.I genuinely thought: that chapter is complete. Then life moved on. Things settled. For a while there was flow. And then the next cycle arrived when something external triggered it.

The next major cycle was around shame. The kind that announces itself slowly, it just makes you want to stay small. It showed up when I started making videos after a long break. Seeing my face on a screen, standing in front of people and talking about the heart, I didn't like how I looked, how I sounded. What happened to the younger guy I used to be? The old wound that came up to be healed was around self-acceptance, and blaming myself for getting old, losing my youthfulness. And my mind wanted to argue: I've outgrown this.

But I hadn't outgrown it. I'd just finally become open enough, real enough to face it. Feel it deeply until slowly it began to lose ground. That's what I wish someone had told me at the beginning. That as the heart opens and love gets in, that love will continue to bring out all the unlovingness within you. All those deep dark places within you in need of healing.

The healing journey doesn't move in a straight line. It moves like the rings of a tree. Each one marking a season, a passage, another layer of growth. Slowly, over time, what changes isn't that the cycles stop. What changes is that you start to recognize them, and treat yourself with deep compassion, acceptance, and love as you move through them. Learning to do that is a skill you can learn. A necessary skill if you're walking this path.

This Weekend's Practice: Radical Self Acceptance

When the heart opens, the “unlovingness” that’s still living in the nervous system often rises to the surface: discomfort, contraction, shame, fear, grief. This practice is a simple way to meet what’s here with radical self-love: not fixing it, not bypassing it, just bringing presence to it until it softens.

3 steps:

1) Gently tune in to the emotional discomfort that’s coming up right now. Give yourself permission to acknowledge it, welcome it, and allow it. (No forcing, just honesty.)

2) Place a hand on your heart. Begin breathing slowly in and out, as if you’re breathing through the heart space. Let the feeling be here, and create a little more room around it with each breath.

3) Invite a quiet sense of appreciation (even if it’s small). Then whisper this:

• Even though I’m struggling to accept this feeling, the presence of divine love is holding me right now.
• Even though I cannot feel the love, I know it's purifying presence is here with me.
• Even though a part of me feels like I can’t handle this, the presence of God within me can.

Stay for a few more breaths, letting gratitude and appreciation continue to fill your heart as you rest in the awareness that something greater than you is now holding you up.

Resources You Might Enjoy

One Last Thing...

Healing was never meant to be done in isolation. One of my favorite quotes from Harville Hendrix is: “We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship” That’s not just poetic. It’s practical.

The unlovingness within us doesn’t just dissolve because we “figured it out”… it dissolves because it’s finally being held in a safe, unconditional, human space, with presence. So if you’re in the fire right now, let this be your reminder: you don’t have to carry it alone.

Thank you for being here, for opening this email, for doing the work, and for letting me be in your space a little each week.

Wishing you a really beautiful weekend.

From my heart to yours,

—Gabriel

PS. When you're ready, here are several ways I can support you on your journey.
PPS. One last thing… If someone shared this newsletter with you, you can always subscribe to the newsletter here.