What It Means to Be “Enheartened”
- Rev Kev
- May 19
- 4 min read
Updated: May 20
Many spiritual traditions speak about living from the heart, but what does that actually mean? Why does it matter? And how can our church’s plant sacrament, Ayahuasca, help us reconnect with it?
I’d also like to share some of my own experience with this journey.
The Mission of SOULS
The mission of SOULS is to help all beings awaken to their true spiritual nature through a direct experience with the divine.
To me, awakening means shifting from identifying only as a human being—with all the struggles and temporary circumstances of life—to recognizing yourself as an eternal spiritual being having a human experience.
A big part of that process requires being connected to your heart.
The second part of our mission is direct experience. In a world flooded with information, opinions, and distraction, I believe true spiritual understanding comes through lived experience—not belief alone.
That’s why we work with Ayahuasca as a sacred plant sacrament. When approached properly, it can help people step outside ordinary conditioning, reconnect with their soul nature, and gain insight, healing, and clarity.
The goal is not escape. The goal is to bring those insights back into everyday life and live with more love, joy, freedom, and purpose.
What It Means to Be Enheartened
When I talk about being enheartened, I’m talking about the ability to feel your spiritual heart—your energetic heart center, or heart chakra.
This is our connection to universal love, higher consciousness, and the higher self.
If you can genuinely generate and feel love within yourself—and freely give and receive it—you are likely enheartened.
If not, there may be healing work to do.
A simple way to explore this is to pause, relax, and tune into the center of your chest. Can you feel warmth, openness, or love moving through your body? Or does the area feel numb, tight, or blocked?
In my own life, whenever I feel depressed, anxious, emotionally flat, creatively drained, or disconnected, it’s usually a sign that I’ve stepped out of my heart.
When I reconnect with it—when I allow myself to truly feel again—I begin to feel better very quickly.
My Own Healing Journey
Not feeling good is what led me to Ayahuasca in the first place.
In my early forties, I went through a deep depression that I couldn’t pull myself out of. Conventional approaches weren’t helping, and eventually I traveled to Peru for an Ayahuasca retreat.
Very quickly, I was shown that my energetic system—especially my heart—had effectively shut down.
Through the work, I saw how childhood trauma and cultural conditioning had caused me to close my heart as a form of protection. The problem is that when you shut down your ability to feel pain, you also shut down your ability to feel joy, love, and connection.
You stop feeling the bad, but you also stop feeling the good.
By middle age, that emotional shutdown had become depression, anxiety, numbness, and exhaustion.
Our sacrament showed me that I needed to process years of stored emotions, heal my energetic system, and learn how to remain open-hearted.
I now see this pattern in many people who come to our church. Eventually, people become emotionally full. They lose the capacity to process more stress, emotion, or pressure—and the system begins to break down.
Why the Heart Matters
Being enheartened is essential both for awakening and for feeling truly good as a human being.
One way I describe it is through what I call the “equation of awakening”:
Enheartened + Embodied = Ensouled
To awaken, we need both an open heart and a grounded presence in the body.
I also believe the human experience is fundamentally about feeling. We are here to experience emotion deeply—to love, grieve, connect, grow, and evolve.
If we disconnect from the heart, we miss much of what life is trying to teach us.
This idea appears throughout spiritual traditions. Jesus Christ taught love for one another. Gautama Buddha emphasized cultivating goodness and purifying the heart. The Dalai Lama wrote extensively about compassion and the open heart. Contemporary teachers like Ram Dass and Michael Singer also point toward openness, love, and emotional presence as central aspects of spiritual growth.
Why So Many People Are Disheartened
Modern culture conditions many of us away from feeling.
As children, especially sensitive children, we are often taught that emotions are unsafe or unacceptable:
“Stop crying.”
“Stop being so sensitive.”
“Boys don’t cry.”
Over time, this conditioning, and the inability to process trauma, creates emotionally disconnected adults.
Many of the struggles we see today—depression, anxiety, burnout, emotional numbness, and even rising suicide rates—reflect a culture that discourages people from fully feeling and living from the heart.
The Medicine Path
The path I teach through SOULS is what I call the “wake up path,” or the “Wu path.”
It consists of five stages:
Clearing
Healing
Growing
Serving
Awakening
The first stages focus on clearing emotional debris and healing the energetic system so the heart can reopen. This then leads to the conditions that enable one to become enheartened, and eventually awaken.
Ayahuasca can be a powerful tool in this process because it helps people temporarily shed conditioning and reconnect directly with their deeper soul nature.
But the work doesn’t end with ceremony. Remaining open-hearted is an ongoing practice of learning how to process emotions, stay connected to love, and navigate life consciously.
Final Thoughts
If you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed, emotionally numb, or disconnected from yourself, I encourage you to explore practices that help you reconnect with your heart and cultivate direct spiritual experience.
Whether through ceremony, meditation, healing work, or another authentic path, becoming enheartened can profoundly change the experience of being alive.
In my experience, it leads to more love, more joy, more freedom, more peace, and a deeper sense of purpose.
I wish you all the best on your path.