When the Heart is Stretched to the Edges

Ouch!

There are times in life when the volume turns up on everything—when each moment pulses with feeling, and the heart feels stretched to its very edge. Not broken, not shattered, but expanded so far that even silence seems to echo. I’m in one of those moments now. Where joy, sorrow, fatigue, awe, fear, and love all speak at once. Not in harmony, but not quite in chaos either. Just… fully alive.

It’s not that anything in particular is wrong. It’s that everything is happening. The body knows it. The breath gets caught, then deepens. The nervous system, usually good at skating over things, suddenly drops into the moment with no escape plan. The old ways of coping—numbing, hiding, intellectualizing—don’t work here. This is the realm of feeling all of it. And there’s no map.

I suppose the mind tries to label it: grief, change, healing, overwhelm, growth. But the soul doesn’t need those labels. The soul just asks that we stay present. That we stop resisting the flood and instead learn to float, even as our limbs shake. This is a kind of initiation, though not one that’s been formally announced. You just wake up in it one day, heart raw, skin thinner than paper, eyes wide.

And yet—within the intensity, something luminous is present.

This isn't suffering for its own sake. It's life insisting on being fully lived. There’s a quiet intelligence at work in this ache. Something is stretching us beyond our former shape. We are being made larger—not in ego, but in capacity. To love. To feel. To hold space. To see the beauty in a single moment, even as it dissolves.

What a strange gift it is, to feel so much. It humbles you. It undresses you. And if you let it, it will remake you.

So I don’t have solutions, only breath. I don’t have answers, only presence. But I know this: when everything feels like too much, it may be that you're actually becoming more. Not too much. Just finally, undeniably fully here.