”You have a good heart, and that’s the most important thing,” my mother said, looking me straight in the eye. For a few years, she had watched with concern as I moved around in a – to her equally South Jutlandic and Lollandian eye – incomprehensible and semi-dangerous environment in the capital, and was embarking on a lifestyle she hadn’t quite seen coming.

I was 20 years old. Existentialist. Started university. Read Sartre, Marx and the Dalai Lama. Had a nose ring, purple hair and was dressed in black from head to toe. Sometimes I also wore a hood over my head. Activism was partly replaced in the late 90s by a permanent job, a garden club house, a husband and children. With the children came undoubtedly a special insistence from the heart, which alternately overflowed with joy and love or hurt with worries if the boys got sick or were sad. However, I still probably mostly associated the heart with a pumping muscle or something that responded to emotions. Completely like most others around me. And for the following 10-15 years I swung around in that opinion with complacency.

At a mindfulness course, I was introduced to the heart as a kind of third brain in addition to the brain and the stomach. At the course, we were initially asked to feel the heart. I tried. Everything I could. I listened. Everything I could. I breathed deeply. I stopped breathing. I pressed my hand both hard and soft against the place where the heart was. Nothing. But I ended up leaving with a curiosity and an experience that there was much more hidden in that heart. In the time since, I have also increasingly noted the number of words in everyday life and in newspapers that contain the word heart: cordiality, heart space, heartache, heart arrest, heart tenderness, heart courage, heart chamber, heart muscle, heart warmth, heart blood, heart friend, heart sigh, lion heart, heartless, mother heart, heart palpitations, heartbeat, etc. And I noted that I also took to heart when I talked about someone I loved, and when I wanted to show gratitude, or I was moved or sad.

In 2018 I am again on a week-long retreat. And the invitation to ”feel your heart” is uttered quite a few times during that week. I respectfully felt – everything I could. Zip. Zero. Nada. Still nothing. Honestly: Why? What the f… am I doing wrong? The others clearly seem to have discovered it, and they talk over and over again about what their heart is telling them.

In the food line, the younger man, who was sitting diagonally across from me in the large oval circle, whispered: ”Think of someone you love or care about. It will help you discover and sense the heart when you can direct it towards something.” He had clearly discovered that there were difficulties over there on the window side. I thanked him, and I also thought that it sounded reasonable and I also felt I sensed something more, before a few hours later I took my seat in the chair in front of my teacher:

”What do you mean when you keep talking about that heart? I can’t even feel it beating,” I began, while I illustratively pressed and rotated my hand over my chest in a fairly wide radius, so that I at least managed to hit it – the heart. My teacher’s otherwise calm and intense gaze flickered for a split second, and perhaps he even had time to think: ”Why is she here?” But he listened completely and completely friendly and curiously and replied with a small smile something along the lines of that heart reaching out very well.

And then right there.... on the penultimate evening of the 2018 retreat to selected notes of Mozart's Elvira Madigan, my fellow student's advice in the back of my mind and my teachers' trust and presence suddenly broke through.

It is still difficult to put into words what exactly happened. But a touch struck me through the music and was supplemented by an energy within me and between us, who were sitting together for the evening meditation. It vibrated, it slowly took its place – the heart – and at the same time it was as if it reached both further in and out, while invisible strong threads were spun between us in the room. I also had a clear feeling that I was not the only one who experienced that a special atmosphere, mood and sense of togetherness had arisen – a kind of heart opening.

After half an hour, three more blows on the singing bowl signaled that we had finished the evening meditation. Yet several of us remained seated in this, for me, special moment of both discovery and contact with that heart, where I undoubtedly leaned into the experience of others. Relieved, silent and touched, I found the bed.

Since then we have been following each other and trying to get to know each other better – my heart and the rest of me. And it is actually going well. When I hear others today asking in wonder about that heart, I understand exactly what they mean. And at the same time I am convinced that they will discover it too. Probably even much faster than I did. And that will only be good. Because it wants something. It can do something. That. The heart.