Why I Called My Work “Do The Heart Work”

Pictured here:

I photographed my son Samuel in 2020 watching eagles in the Highmoor Nature Reserve region near the magnificent Kamberg Valley. This is a page out of my book, Do The Heart Work - Volume 1.

For years, my journaling practice lived around my dining room table. Friends, family, teens — anyone who wanted the space to breathe, to learn to journal write, to reflect, to tell their truth, or simply put pen to paper — pulled up a chair. Those times became a kind of sanctuary. A small group doing something brave: listening to their hearts and lives and learning to speak to themselves with love, with kindness and mostly with honesty.

When we moved “to the mountains” as we like to call it — the KwaZulu Natal Midlands in 2020, everything changed. Brookdale Health Hydro invited me to turn what I’d been doing around my table into a three-day retreat. It was incredible. I did that for four years, four times a year. I suddenly found myself sitting with leaders in business and industry, people who carried enormous responsibility. People who were brilliant thinkers and even better doers. They were knocking life out the park: achieving, delivering, leading, reading, working harder and harder.

They were doing all the hard work.

But the heart work? Not as much.

There wasn’t a lot of time to slow down enough to hear their own hearts. To notice what mattered. To honour their deepest values rather than just name them in theory, but actually live them. Many were just exhausted, edging towards burnout, unsure how to come home to themselves. They were so brave to sit and face some hard truth in the midst of so much “success”.

Offering them journal writing as a path back to their hearts was, and still is, one of the great joys of my life.

That’s why I called this work Do The Heart Work.
Because the inner work matters just as much as all the outer work we do in the world.

And I defined Heart Work like this: (this is out of my book - Do The Heart Work - Volume 1: Write Again. A 21 Day Journaling Journey.)

Skimp on your inner life and your outer world suffers.

Because your heart is the engine room.

The compass. The sacred soil from which everything else grows.

I want to grow old with a heart that is soft.

Soft enough to resist cynicism,

Soft enough to forgive again and again,

Soft enough to feel wonder, still.

Because hardness creates stuck places.

And when I feel it creeping in,

I refuse to pitch a tent there.

I want to be a bridge-builder, not a wall-maker.

Emotionally in tune enough that the chorus of my soul sings with empathy and compassion.

I want to live in a way that makes it hard for my heart to grow cold.

A life of warm beats and honest welcomes.

Of real conversations and understanding.

I want to be flexible,

Not just in body,

But in spirit.

Curious. Tender. Brave

Still awed by beauty, even in the mess.

I want to stretch toward the places fear has cobwebbed over.

And sweep them clean with faith, with hope, with love.

I want to lean into heart attitudes that look uncertainty in the eye and don’t flinch.

That choose movement over paralysis.

That choose trust.

That’s the kind of heart I’m tending to.

Strong. Soft. Spacious.

Capable of joy and sorrow.

Laughter and lament.

Rooted and responsive.

And that kind of heart doesn’t just happen.

It takes tending.

It takes truth.

It takes time.

It takes Heart Work.