I had gone all the way to Costa Rica to deepen my passion for my work, to gain more skill, to grow. 

And what the retreat gave me, above and beyond that, was something I hadn’t known I was looking for, and yet something I have always, always wanted to get back to.

What I found was my innocent heart.

From a young age, I rarely felt safe enough to feel it. I think a lot of us know that experience, even if we’ve never named it that way. 

For so many of us, it’s a slow, almost invisible process — learning to pinch off the love we feel, to meter it out carefully, to protect the open and tender place in us that got hurt one too many times.

What we each want and endeavor to maneuver toward is to return to that place. To live from an open, innocent heart.

And yet our lives, in almost every way, are built to move us further from it.

I was reminded of this during a volcano excursion at the retreat, when our guide said something simple that deeply moved me, “We receive everything we need from nature.” 

What I received from that was this: I am not separate from nature. We’re all connected with nature and in so many ways, nurtured by it. And yet the way we live — closed windows, locked doors, concrete — is just this perpetuation of separateness. 

We all crave connection. And the connection we’re craving most is the one we’ve lost with our own nature. Our true nature.

There is a saying I return to again and again: every behavior is either an expression of love or a call for love, no matter how unskillful it may appear. I’ve found this to be true. 

Love is what we’re after. All of us, in every action, in every relationship, in every striving and every fear. We’ve been brought up to believe and act as if we get love from around us, outside of us, as if we’re separate from it.

But the love we want, and do everything to have and feel, is in our own innocent heart. 

Innocence is our true nature. And by innocence I don’t mean naivety. I mean lack of judgment. In the innocent heart, there’s no need for judgment or for protection. And yet protection is exactly what happens.

We protect because we’re waiting to be loved by another. And when that love isn’t shown, or doesn’t arrive in the form we need, our fundamental value feels threatened. So we protect ourselves with a variety of shields. 

Those shields act as a kink in the hose of flow in our life. 

We keep looking for love from behind our protective shield, and it is never enough to quench our heart, because inadvertently, we’ve encased our heart inside an impervious, protective shell. 

No matter how much love comes toward us, it can’t get through.

We become separate from our heart. From our essential self. And what ensues is a fruitless search, in which it’s easy to feel lost, because we can’t seem to get enough.

If any of this is resonating, I want you to know: you’re not alone in it. This is what being human commonly looks like when you’re not grounded in your core. And the fact that you can feel it, that you can recognize it, means the way back is closer than you think.

This is what I came home from Costa Rica knowing:

In my heart, I am innocent. I am loved. For each of us, there is a possibility to receive the love that we want. Don’t need to earn it, find it, or convince someone to give it to us. Everything we really want is already here. 

Fundamentally, love is innocent.

And it’s been waiting for you, in your own heart, all along.