Hi friend,
There’s something tender about what it means to live with an open heart. To allow ourselves to love deeply, knowing that love always carries the risk of loss. The more we open, the more we feel it all: the ache, the beauty, the impermanence that makes each moment sacred.
There’s a reason many of us inherited guarded hearts from our ancestors. Because the deeper we love, the more potential there is for immense grief to wash through us. The more we have, the more we have to lose. The more open our hearts become, the more they can be broken.
And yet, life’s greatest joy is found through connection — friendship, family, community, parenthood — all the ways we choose to love and be loved. On the other side of love is grief; we cannot have one without the other.
This is the sacred paradox of being alive: we can move through life half awake, armored and protected, or we can open fully — knowing that love and loss are companions, each making the other more meaningful.
When we accept that nothing stays the same forever, that endings are inevitable, we have a choice: to live in fear of what we might lose, or in deep presence and gratitude for what is here, right now.
May this reflection be an invitation to stay open…to let love and grief shape you, soften you, and remind you of how truly alive you are.
Inside this week’s newsletter, you’ll find:
🌕 Full Moon in Taurus Report: November 5, 2025
This Full Moon invites you to root into your worth and align your life with what truly matters. As the Taurus moon meets Scorpio Sun, stability and transformation dance together — a call to release what no longer supports your values and stand firmly in what does.
💗 Somatic Practice: Opening to Love and Loss
A guided embodiment practice to help you soften into the heart’s natural wisdom — the place where love and grief meet. This practice supports you in staying open to life’s impermanence while finding gratitude and beauty in what is here, right now.
📲 New On Instagram: Recent posts and reflections from the feed.
🔥 What's New at Rising Woman:
We have a brand new downloadable workbook for soul-led entrepreneurs, healers, and creatives — Essence: A Guided Somatic Journaling Process to Clarify the Heart of Your Work.
Uncovering the essence of your work is the first step to creating an offer that feels authentic and naturally attracts the clients you’re meant to serve.
If you have many gifts to share but aren’t sure how to bring them together into something cohesive and true to you, this workbook will help you find your clarity.
🌙 Check out our recent astrology report:
🕊️ The Latest Rising Woman Posts:
🌿 This Weeks Reflection
With deep love, comes the potential for immense grief. We cannot have one without the other.
✨ Practice for the Week: Opening to Love and Grief
1. Arrive in your body
Find a quiet place where you can sit or lie down comfortably. Take a few slow breaths. Feel the weight of your body being held by the surface beneath you. Let your shoulders soften and your jaw unclench.
With each exhale, imagine releasing any armor around your heart — the subtle layers that keep you guarded or braced. You don’t have to force anything open. Just breathe space into what’s already here.
2. Touch the center of your chest
Place one or both hands over your heart. Feel the warmth of your touch, the pulse beneath your palm, the quiet rhythm that has been with you since before you were born.
Notice any sensations — warmth, tightness, tingling, numbness — and simply witness them without judgment.
3. Invite love and grief to meet
With each breath, imagine your heart as a doorway that opens to both love and loss.
Visualize love entering with a golden light — expansive, warm, radiant.
Then invite grief — perhaps as a cool blue current — to move in alongside it.
Let both coexist within you, love and grief interwoven.
Breathe them together until they are no longer opposites but part of the same sacred rhythm.
4. Feel into impermanence
Bring to mind something or someone you love deeply. Notice how your body responds — the ache, the gratitude, the tenderness.
Instead of turning away, breathe deeper into that feeling. Let it remind you of how precious this moment truly is.
5. Closing the practice
Gently bring your awareness back to your hands resting on your heart.
Take one final deep breath — in through the nose, out through the mouth — and allow your heart to settle into stillness.
Integration prompt:
Afterward, journal or reflect on this question:
Where in my life am I being invited to love more deeply, even knowing it might break my heart?
Journaling Prompts
Where in my life do I notice myself guarding my heart, and what am I protecting it from?
What does being “open” feel like in my body? How do I know when I’ve closed off?
What fears arise when I consider loving fully — people, places, or life itself?
How have love and grief coexisted in my story? What wisdom has loss given me about love?
What does it mean for me to live with a broken-open heart — not as pain, but as aliveness?
How can I honor the truth that everything changes, without collapsing into fear?
What daily practice or ritual helps me return to presence and gratitude for what is here right now?
May we remember that love asks us to stay awake — even when it hurts, even when it changes us. May we trust that our breaking hearts are evidence of a life fully lived.
Here’s to meeting each moment with tenderness, gratitude, and the courage to stay open, again and again.
Love,
Shay
P.S. We love hearing from you. If something in this week’s letter resonated, my team and I would be so grateful to hear your reflections.