Practicing Nurture and Care for Your Heart

Do you know how to access nurture and practice healthy care for your heart? This is a critical healing skill that we all need to learn when it comes to receiving comfort and recovery through the difficult emotions that we experience hardship, trauma and the neglect that many experience in life.

When mental and emotional challenges arise in us, we can feel trapped within ourselves. At times, our instinct is often to reach out—call someone, text someone, schedule an appointment. And that’s good. We need community and support. But there are also moments when it’s just you, God, and the devil. In those moments, we need more than a crisis reaction. You need something cultivated and built up inside of you—a healing atmosphere of nurture that you’ve learned to cultivate.

But most of us recognize that nurture is not something that always flow easily, especially for ourselves. So today, I am going to address nurture, self-compassion, and the practice of caring for your heart. This is critical in trauma healing, but also for every aspect of our mental and emotional health.

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What Is Nurture?

When I talk about nurture, I’m referring to the provision of spiritual and emotional nourishment that builds healthy connection, equips us, fosters growth, and empowers us for recovery during hardship and trials.

Nurture has a two-fold impact. It first welcomes you into compassionate connection, care and comfort. But it also equips you with emotional and spiritual resilience so you can step back into life and embrace an overcoming journey.

Three Main Keys of Nurture

1. Provision of Spiritual and Emotional Nourishment

When we think of nourishment, we think of food and nutritional health. You’ve probably eaten a meal where you felt full but weren’t actually nourished because it was junk food. What about your emotions and spiritual life? What does it look like to feel truly nourished?

There are four components I call the “4 Cs”:

Compassion sets the stage for relationship connection. It’s how love operates—seeing yourself and others through the lens of loving kindness, patience, and embrace.

Connection has to do with the bond that is built. Your ability to bond to someone in a healthy way is established first and foremost by your parental relationship. The first person you meet is your mother coming right out of the womb, with your father right alongside. Through the father and mother relationship, you learn nurture by bonding with them.

How many of us never built a healthy bond? Then we come into the body of Christ, and now we’re connecting to God who is our Father. But what’s a father? What does that even look like? The Bible also speaks about the bond we have for one another as brothers and sisters, showing us this bonding is important.

God is very nurturing. The Bible speaks of His tender care. Peter talked about “casting your cares upon Him” (1 Peter 5:7). Why? Because God cares for you.Jesus expressed how He longed to gather Jerusalem under His wing. The Old Testament pictures God bringing us under His wing (Psalm 91), leading us by still waters (Psalm 23). That’s all nurturing language.

What about the Holy Spirit who’s known as our Comforter? Do we know how to receive that? Do we know how to connect to that? Do we even know what that comfort looks like when it shows up?

Care helps you recognize what a need is and know how to fill that need. This is a big aspect of emotional health—learning to identify what you need right now and knowing how to go about meeting that need in healthy ways.

Historically, when it came to care, parents thought about putting a roof over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back. Those are important physical nurturing needs. Many people went through times where they didn’t have any of that and had to live in survival mode. But there’s a deeper aspect to what care brings: knowing emotionally where you’re at, learning how to connect to what you need in healthy ways, and having that compass for other people—knowing how to be a caring presence for others.

Because we lack compassion in our journey and lack healthy connection and bonds, we don’t always know how to care. So we either become super needy in our walk, or we become performers—always giving out, giving out, giving out until we’re burnt out. We don’t know how to receive anything.

Comfort involves knowing how to actively receive comfort—the kind of emotional attunement that responds patiently with kindness rather than harsh criticism. It’s knowing how to recover at the end of the day from hard work, stress, or things that overwhelmed you. It’s knowing how to land in a place where you can emotionally recover.

2. Equipping

I am a big fan of this word. Equipping is putting the tools within your tool belt so you can live this out. There are three aspects: modeling, training, and correcting.

We get equipped best through modeling—what we watch and see, observing the example.

Training is more than teaching. It’s putting tools in your hand so you can practice and do it yourself.

There’s also value in helpful correction. Corrections are part of nurture. It’s not a life of just picking out everything you do wrong, but there is something within Scripture about healthy discipline—helping you learn how to curb appetites that aren’t fruitful, seeing patterns that aren’t fruitful for your life, and learning renewed pathways.

Proverbs 4 talks about wisdom that comes out of both father and mother relationships—wisdom gained from nurture, care, and comfort, along with the equipping of modeling, training, and correcting.

Most people I talk to don’t even have a healthy lens of what correction is. They fear it. If they even sense correction is coming, they think, “Here’s the hammer that’s going to fall.” We’ve developed a very unhealthy relationship to what correction means.

Without equipping in nurture, we become vulnerable to a lot of unhealthy patterns. We don’t like them, we don’t want to do them, but it’s all we know.

3. Fostering Development

I like this word “foster” because it’s furthering your development, launching you. You’re empowered now. You have tools and references to grow and keep going—like a parent launching you out so you can live an overcoming journey.

Continual growth happens. You can practice it on your own. When it’s just you, God, and the devil, yes, you’re grateful for support, friendships, and tribe. You appreciate resources. But when you’re alone, you’re not afraid of being alone because you know how to relate to yourself. You develop an emotional strength within you to live an overcoming life.

The Fruit of Nurture?

What’s the fruit that shows up? Two things:

Greater emotional health—You relate to your own emotions in a fruitful way, and you’re better help for other people’s emotions. You can listen and provide helpful feedback.

Resilience—This is a word I’ve been teaching for decades. It’s the ability to bounce back. You go through tough times, tough days, tough challenges, but you step up, you heal, you grow. Resilience is learned. It’s not just something you have; it’s something you develop. Usually it’s through the difficult times and challenges.

Shepherding Your Heart

When I talk about nurture and care for your heart, it’s a world of shepherding your heart.

I go back to a scripture that’s been near and dear to my heart since my teenage years: “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” (Proverbs 4:23)

It’s like a well you’re tending to because everything flows out of it. That word “keep” means to guard, to watch, to preserve. You’re looking over it with care.

I used to look at this verse (and I think many people look at it this way) as “watch over your heart so you don’t do bad things. Be careful, you’re going in a wrong direction.” While this is true, do we watch over our hearts to remind ourselves to continually be rooted in God’s love for us?

Do we watch over our heart to know our limits and boundaries? To know when to let go of burdens? To watch over areas where we’re becoming obsessive or compulsive? To learn in sober and healthy ways how to tend to our emotional needs?

This is shepherding. A loving shepherd is exactly that—loving. It’s not a “whip you into shape” mentality. That’s not shepherding.

I want to exhort you to watch over your heart with care—not with condemnation, but with compassionate and sober attention. This isn’t about selfishness or self-indulgence. It’s about stewarding the life of your heart.

What Happens When Nurture Is Missing?

Nurture is essentially the opposite of neglect, dismissal, and emotional abandonment that characterize trauma and brokenness that so many carry. One of the core impacts of complex trauma is the absence of nurture.

When nurture is missing—through neglect, dismissal, emotional abandonment, father wounds, or mother wounds—we lose something critical: the ability to receive comfort and practice self-nurture toward ourselves.

People who’ve experienced a lack of nurture often find themselves:

Disconnected from God and His compassionate comfort
Disconnected from self, from understanding their own heart and needs
Disconnected from emotional intelligence
Living with an inner critic and hostile relationship with themselves
Experiencing anger, irritability, and emotional spirals
Unable to tolerate uncomfortable emotions
Feeling constant emptiness and seeking to escape through addictions
In a constant, unsettled emotional state
Unarmed and not knowing how to bounce back and overcome

When you don’t have nurture, you don’t know how to nurture yourself. You don’t know what to do. You’re unarmed.

The Practice of Self-Nurture: Learning to Shepherd Your Heart

1. Relating to Yourself Through Compassion and Grace

Learn to respond to yourself the way God responds to you—with grace, mercy, and patience.

This is not pity and self-loathing. Those patterns are actually unloving and anti-compassion. Nurture is not avoiding yourself—it’s embracing yourself, right in your pain. It’s not avoiding or denying, but seeing all things through compassion and grace in a sober way.

Self-compassion in our journey—knowing that struggle is part of the human journey, embracing struggle but knowing how to work through struggle—is so important. This means not joining the inner hostile chorus that’s shouting harsh judgments at you.

How many of us have an inner hostile critic? When something is off, when things are getting difficult, all of a sudden there are voices screaming at you: “You’re such an idiot! You’re a failure! You’ll never change! Here you go again!” On and on. It’s relentless.

2. Allowing Room and Space for Uncomfortable Emotions

Uncomfortable emotions are part of our journey. We need to learn to work through them with practice.

Instead of immediately judging, suppressing, or running from what you feel, practice letting it pass through. Allow it to float through without making it mean something catastrophic about you.

This takes practice. For years, I practiced the opposite—shutting down, pushing away, powering through. But I’ve learned that when I give room for uncomfortable feelings, they actually move through me more quickly. When I fight them, they stick around.

I have this example I use: I love watching Bob Ross painting shows (the painter with the happy little trees). I watch him paint, and he’s painting away. Everything looks great—beautiful mountain range, beautiful sky colors. Then all of a sudden he takes this dark color (dark green or brown) and slashes it on the canvas. You’re like, “Bob, what are you doing?! You’re messing the whole thing up!”

But Bob stays calm. “It’s okay, we’re just going to work with this.” Then he takes his brush, sweeps it in, and suddenly it becomes part of the shadowing for the mountain. It actually adds depth and dimension to the painting.

That’s what it’s like with uncomfortable emotions. They show up on your canvas and you panic: “What is this?! Get it out!” But what if you took Bob’s posture and said, “It’s okay. Let’s work with this. Let’s see what this is about. It’s part of the process”?

That’s nurture. That’s the posture we need toward our own hearts.

3. Learning to Calm Emotional Triggers and Catastrophic Reactions

Trauma creates a highly engaged trigger response. You’re on a hair trigger, ready to go from zero to one hundred in seconds.

Nurture brings a presence of compassion to embrace you, not just fix you.

Self-nurture means learning to pause. To slow down the reaction. To not instantly believe every harsh thought that enters your mind.

When you feel triggered, instead of immediately reacting, you can practice saying, “Okay, I feel triggered right now. What’s underneath this? What do I actually need?”

4. Learning What You Need

When struggle comes, ask yourself: What do I actually need right now?

Not “What should I do to fix this?” Not “What’s the fastest way to make this feeling go away?” But what do I genuinely need?

Maybe you need rest. Maybe you need to cry. Maybe you need to go for a walk or call a trusted friend. Maybe you just need to sit in God’s presence without trying to perform.

Learning to identify your needs is a critical part of emotional health. When you don’t know what you need, you just react. You reach for whatever’s closest—food, your phone, binge-watching, work, busyness. But when you can pause and actually identify the need, you can meet it in a healthy way.

The Practice of Self-Care

I hesitate to use the word “self-care” because it’s been captured by our culture in ways that can be misunderstood. It can lead to self-indulgent patterns that are just another form of escape.

Self-Care Is NOT:

Self-consumed introspection
Self-indulgence
Jumping into addictions
Checking out and numbing out
Taking a vacation from life

Self-care is not just a spa retreat. While spa getaway can be great, it’s really about the environment you are cultivating within. Many people do a spa getaway or vacation, but they don’t practice the regular heart of nurture that is needed for our healing and freedom.

The Goal of Self-Care

The goal of self-care isn’t self-focus. It’s learning to:

Recognize your boundaries and limits
Receive what God offers
Fill your heart with what’s good and true
Have healthy awareness of your heart’s condition
Recover connection to who you really are
Reconnect with joy and fulfillment
Replenish the reservoir of what you give out
Give out authentically

Practical Steps for Nurturing Your Heart

Let me give you some simple, practical ways to nurture your heart:

Sleep. I often start here. Are you getting adequate rest? So many people are running on empty because they’re not prioritizing sleep.

Slow down. Our culture rewards speed and productivity, but your heart needs space to process, feel, and heal.

Find healthier habits to decompress at the end of the day beyond TV and your phone. What helps you actually unwind rather than just numbing out?

Delay the constant jump to stimulation and vices. When discomfort comes, don’t immediately reach for something to make it go away. Sit with it for a moment.

Have moments where you just feel what you feel. Make room to simply feel without reacting.

Run everything you’re going through in the lens of compassion. Tell yourself, “It’s okay that I’m off or struggling right now.” Welcome a loving narrative to yourself.

Become lovingly aware of your physiology. Where does stress build up in your body? Trauma disconnects people from their body. Learning to tune back in with compassion is healing.

Welcome joy and wonder. When’s the last time you did something just because it brought you enjoyment? Learn to see the beauty in simple, everyday experiences. See the sacred in ordinary moments.

Read. Not just scrolling social media, but actually reading something that feeds your mind and heart. Even a physical, tangible book can be a great way to embrace a nurturing moment.

Make room for “nothing.” We’re so afraid of empty space, but sometimes the most nurturing thing you can do is have time where you’re not trying to accomplish anything.

Have one-on-one conversations that are not agenda-driven or in a hurry. Real connection happens when we’re not rushed.

Focus on what you CAN do, not on what you can’t. Discouragement grows when we fixate on limitations. Hope grows when we take small, doable steps.

The Transformation That Comes

When you practice nurture—when you learn to shepherd your heart with the same compassion God shows you—something shifts.

You develop a renewed relationship with your emotions, your struggles, and your pain.

You slowly become more resilient by learning to receive God’s comfort and extend that comfort to yourself.

And here’s what I’ve discovered: The more I learn to nurture my own heart, the more capacity I have to love others well. Because I’m no longer operating from depletion, from inner hostility, or from performance. I’m operating from a heart that’s been tended to, cared for, and filled.

Keep in mind, that this is not about finding a “just right” place so then I can give out. Nurture opens up the river of love to be received and to flow through me.

So let me ask you: Is it time to embrace a new level of nurture for your heart? What does your heart actually need? And are you willing to give yourself permission to provide it?

You don’t have to figure this out perfectly. You don’t have to get it all right. You just need to begin. Start small. Practice compassion toward yourself. Make room for your emotions. Learn what you need. And trust that as you tend to your heart with care, the fruit of emotional health and resilience will grow.

Empowering You to Live Healed and Free