Heart to Heart

Communication is about connection.

There are so many ways to communicate these days. Email, SMS, twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, cell phone, blogs, video conferencing and on and on. There seems to be no limit to the choices that we have to reach out to someone and connect with them.

Why then are people so lonely?

Loneliness was already considered a health risk before the pandemic, and is ranked along with obesity as health risk among Americans. Apparently, it is akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But why would that be so when we are more connected than ever before?

I don’t believe that it’s just because of the isolation of the pandemic (although it doesn’t help). Some of the loneliness times of my life have been among a crowd of people. It’s basically a theme of living in NYC. Physical proximity to other people isn’t enough, we need to feel connected in some way.

Heart to heart:

One of the things that I miss about the theater is the strange, exhilarating feeling I getwhen an actor is able to open her heart and connect the words of the play to the hearts of the people in the audience. It’s a gift that I can’t find anywhere else, not even in film.

What does it mean to open our heart?

The need to connect.

When I was working with a voice trainer many years ago, he talked about the importance of communicating with “the need to connect.” In an exercise that we all had to do (and that will show you why actors are so weird), we all had to run outside and shout our names into the air with the expectation of a response. I was young and a little embarrassed, so I did it self-consciously, more interested in how others were behaving than how earnestly I was trying to connect to myself.

But there was one woman in the group who took this exercise seriously. She was a little younger than I was, perhaps in her late twenties, but she had serious health issues. I think that this workshop was a gift to herself before going in for transplant surgery. All I remember of that day is how she shouted her name over and over, her whole body leaning out the door and every part of her earnestly expecting a response. I was in awe.

What if you opened your heart to yourself?

This is the question that haunted me after that workshop. There are so many ways that we try to block others from seeing and hearing us that we seem to be obscured even from ourselves.

Are you willing to be seen?

Are you willing to get to know your own heart?

Communication is about connection.

What if you took the time to imbue your communication with the intention to connect and to be seen? When you reach out to a friend or relative, check in with your heart first. What are you feeling? What is going on for you? When you think of this person, what do you want them to feel? Check in with your heart and reach out to them and connect with their heart.

I promise that you will be giving someone a gift and you might even change your perspective on this life. When we take the time to connect our hearts to another heart, we bring the world closer together. We heal a little bit.

Pick someone you love and who you think might be lonely. Reach out with this intention and with this clarity and see what happens. Think of it as an experiment. Loneliness is a disease that we cure when we reach out to another human being as a human being.