Also what opens your heart? For me it's lightness of being, vivacity and humour. What closes it is fear, suffering, and anything I think is getting in my way, which can be anything and it varies according to the endless fluctuations of my ego perceptions and attitudes.
I found I'm in Aged Care because that over time has opened my heart. I have married my wife because her heart is wide open and she is like a lamp in front for me to follow. Although I often don't look.
I believe that an open heart is a key ingredient in keeping your mind and memory strong, and that a closed heart will damage not just your heart but your chances for a fulfilling life that constitutes the winning formula for remaining in tip top condition mentally.
What makes for a successful older life is fulfillment, and an open heart allows you to see all things in a way that witnesses fulfillment everywhere.
I guess our usual way of living is to try an alter the life around us so as to approximate what we want that we think will give us comfort and joy.
Yet the world around us, in all it's glory, is trying to do the same thing and rarely coalesces into our glad picture of it, if at all.
Where as with an open heart we find that the comfort and joy we want from the world, is living wonderfully within us and that we are feeling and seeing this wonder as we just live our day, with no need to change anything. An open heart will do this in a holy instant.
It's an every day miracle available to us at a moment's notice and often just happens without our doing anything. A blessing bestowed without warning. A beautiful thing to behold.
So how to have a open heart?
There are things to learn, to do and to practice and then there is just plain old "give it time".
Start with things that you always wanted to do. Possibly ground to a halt during your teen and adult periods, when becoming and training for adulthood and then maintaining that became all consuming.
But now as older adults, you again have been given immense freedom to peruse "you". Often what you were doing and had urges to do before "growing up" can be stimulated and coerced back.
All the areas of compassion can lead to an open heart. Things like volunteering, visits to older frailer people, or others in our global village that could use a helping hand.
If you have money, you could support some cause, or start up some great idea to improve our lot.
Go join a singing group, or pick up the Ukulele, and have a pluck. Or even a musical society. An arts group, or walking group. Mix with people to open that heart.
You could learn to open to a spiritual discipline, and practice there, moving around the many different themes and types of schools for some kind of spiritual attainment.
Look, the world is your oyster. Certainly if you like shellfish. Otherwise the world is your hamburger.
An open heart can be got in as many ways as there are people to think of ways to get there.
I think the keys must contain love, compassion, forgivenesss, and spitutual view that allows, compliments and includes.
Forgiveness must be thought of in a new light, for as we have often considered it as forgeting the "Crime", forgiveness becomes impossible. Forgiveness happens only when we understand a person in a way that permits and allows forgiveness to happen naturally. Children have it given to them by their very nature of generosity and joyousness.
Buddhism, A Course in Miracles, Yogananda, and many other sources can offer a system of thought that will help to open that heart.
I have included "Inclusion" as something important to pursue, because when any of your actions, thoughts and feeling seem to include others rather than exclude them, open heartedness is automatically yours.
Anyway time to get off the soap box now. On last thought is to put open heartedness in Google and go from there. Good luck.
Paul
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