HEART: An Awake Path for Working with Grief, Fear, and Difficult Emotions

By Lisa Ernst

I began shaping HEART in the days after the ice storm that stripped our beautiful tree canopy from our yard. I found myself sitting with a kind of shock and ecological grief that didn’t want to be processed or solved. What helped wasn’t analysis, but contact — a way of staying close to the felt experience without being carried away by it. HEART grew from that necessity.

While HEART shares a family resemblance with RAIN, it is designed to move more slowly and to stay closer to the body. Rather than a linear sequence, HEART can function as a series of doorways — sometimes entering just one is enough.

HEART isn’t meant to be completed. It’s meant to be entered. Sometimes one step is enough to interrupt spiraling or overwhelm and reestablish contact with the present moment.

H — Hold

Pause and create space.
Gently hold the moment without rushing to fix, resolve, or judge. Let yourself be present with what is arising, just as it is.

E — Explore

Name what you feel.
Turn inward with curiosity. Sense into what’s here — grief, fear, anger, tenderness — without categorizing it as good or bad. Notice the texture, the tone, the flavor of the experience as it’s lived.

A — Awareness

Rest in awareness.
Allow the emotion to unfold within awareness, remembering it is part of your experience, not the whole of who you are.

R — Reside

Feel it in the body.
Notice where the experience lives physically — tightness, heaviness, warmth, movement. Stay close to the sensations themselves, letting them be felt without needing them to change.

T — Tend

Offer compassion.
Bring kindness to what you’re experiencing — perhaps through a gentle inner phrase, a hand on the body, or simply a soft, non-abandoning presence.

In times of personal, ecological or political grief, the impulse is often to turn away or to fix what cannot be immediately restored. HEART offers another possibility: to stay. It isn’t meant to be finished, only entered. Even one step is often enough to interrupt spiraling and return to presence. From there, our capacity to respond is enhanced.