keep your heart open?

There is historic value in the heart closing when it needs to so to protect from overwhelm and flooding in the nervous system. Ideally not permanently or entirely, but just enough to regulate. The human heart can certainly develop to remain more open, but by design, contracts to regulate emotional pain, especially when combined with shock or any sympathetic response.
If the mind judges or has learned to exclude, ignore, deny the pain of loneliness for example, the heart closes to the feeling itself. This closing in turn gets projected as excluding or shutting out another person or perhaps a situation so that we do not have to feel the lonliness. These feelings are indeed called exiles and they often show up under distress.
From a spiritual or survival perspective both, it seems obvious that to deny these feelings, hate them, hide them, spiritualize them is best. But from an integrative perspective, these feelings must be included.
So, when the human heart is flooded with the very human feeling of loneliness, it is the awake, aware Consciousness perfumed with true, unconditional care that gives space for the feeling to move and be experienced. The ‘victim’ in the persona cannot hold loneliness, it can only react to it thereby reinforcing the crisis of loneliness. The ‘pleaser’ or ‘fixer’ in the persona cannot allow shame, it can only manipulate the environment to stay safe.
When the shift happens from identity to Self-energy, we wake up and wake down. The unbiased and unthreatened consciousness gives space to any feeling so then the body can do what it is designed to – feel and rebalance in its wake. This in turn awakens the higher heart – the unconditional heart – and allows inherent qualities to rise naturally. Qualities such as connection, compassion, freedom, or authority.
Waking down is when the untethered awake, aware consciousness holds the myriad of knots in our body/mind that correspond with beliefs, opinions, and emotions. From the eastern philosophy of energy anatomy our bodies hold seven lifetimes of karma.
The psychonaut sees that there is plenty of information to work with in our own bodies so simply recovering from a crisis is nowhere near the whole of the work. The smallest of triggers can be a trailhead to personal and collective restrictions in consciousness.
The journey of waking down is following these trailheads to release deeper and deeper holding patterns, associated with beliefs and feelings, so to relax even more naturally as our true nature.
In this we see that as the heart opens and closes, we can use this as an opportunity to hold the parts that are defensive, insulted, grieving or angry. And each time this is held we simultaneously become more of our natural Self and embrace our humanity too.