What the Sacred Heart Has to Do With Your Business & Adrenal Glands
“With all vigilance guard your heart, for in it are the sources of life” (Proverbs 4:23).
We have all seen the beautiful image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Many have it hanging in our homes alongside His Sorrowful Mother. We see His heart exposed, encircled in thorns, crowned with flame, bearing a wound in its side. It is the image of a heart that has been fully pierced and is, somehow, still beating and offering itself.
For many women in business, that image is the very opposite of how they have learned to operate.
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that an open heart is a vulnerable heart, and a vulnerable heart gets hurt. In Proverbs 4:23, we are told, “With all vigilance guard your heart, for in it are the sources of life.”
Whatever we went through, it caused us to adapt and become competent and composed. This looks like learning to lead from our heads and manage from our calendars, and being very good at producing results while keeping our interior lives carefully behind glass in order to stay safe.
But, over time, your body keeps a record of that strategy, and your adrenal glands are among the most honest witnesses to what your nervous system actually believes about safety.
Your adrenal glands are two small, walnut-sized organs that sit like little hats on top of your kidneys. When the nervous system perceives a threat, the adrenals release cortisol and adrenaline. This causes your heart rate to rise, your digestion to pause, and your muscles to brace. This is a gift when you are in genuine danger. It is the body doing exactly what it’s designed by God to do.
The problem is that the nervous system does not distinguish between a lion and a difficult client email sent at 11 p.m. It does not know the difference between physical danger and the fear of being seen as incompetent, or dismissed in a meeting, or “not enough” in some quiet and nameless way.
If your nervous system learns early that you have to earn safety and perform love, it will carry those lessons forward by constantly scanning for threats. Many women’s bodies are running a decades-old security protocol in situations that are no longer threatening.
Why the Feast Matters for More Than Piety
The feast of the Sacred Heart, celebrated each June, is not simply a devotional observance meant for those who prefer a quieter, older expression of faith. It is a theological claim about the nature of love and the posture in which it operates.
The heart of Jesus is not guarded because it has made a decision that love is worth the cost of openness.
This is the opposite of what a chronically activated nervous system produces in us. When the adrenals are running hot, and the threat-detection system is always a half-second ahead, openness feels more reckless than virtuous.
Practically, this looks like not trusting your intuition (what I believe is the guidance from the Holy Spirit), difficulty trusting others, and feeling that rest is irresponsible and unproductive.
So instead, we manage, optimize, and produce. We measure our worth in output, because the body remembers 一 even when the mind has long since moved on 一 that performance once felt like the only way to secure a place at the table.
The Wound Beneath the Workflow
What is actually beneath a heart that is guarded? Typically, it is not what is happening in the present. It is actually triggering a response of what the body remembers during a childhood experience. When a child encounters an experience of fear, rejection, abandonment, etc., before she has the resources to integrate it, her nervous system wraps itself around that wound to protect her from that “danger” again and builds a life shaped by its edges.
This looks like a child growing up, entering into her vocation, building a career, leading teams, launching businesses, and showing up for her clients with real skill and genuine care. But, she does all of it with a nervous system that is still, in the quiet background, working very hard to make sure that wound — that danger — never gets touched or experienced again.
True healing asks a different question. Not "how can I function better inside the life my wounds have built for me?" but "who was I before the wound taught me I had to earn my place?"
What an Open Heart Actually Looks Like in Practice
So, how do we even begin to answer that question? We look to the Sacred Heart! The Sacred Heart does not ask us to lead carelessly or without boundaries because an exposed heart is not a doormat. It is present, unhurried, unafraid of its own longing, and capable of genuine connection rather than managed performance.
A woman whose nervous system has begun to soften its vigil of guarding begins to lead differently. She speaks from a place that is grounded rather than defended. She can receive honest feedback without feeling like her worth is being questioned, and she can be still without feeling like she is falling behind.
Her adrenal glands 一 no longer monitoring threats that have long since passed 一 can do what they were actually designed to do: respond to genuine challenges, recover cleanly, and rest between demands.
The nervous system genuinely regulates differently in a body that has begun to experience safety not as something to earn, but as something that belongs to a woman by virtue of who and Whose she is.
The Invitation from His Most Sacred Heart this June
It seems that the Church gives us the Sacred Heart in June for a reason. Summer is the season when the created world is most fully, unhurriedly itself. There is something in June that undoes the pace we have normalized for the other months of the year.
It is worth sitting with that image again 一 Jesus’ precious heart that is pierced and open and still beating, still giving, still entirely uninterested in self-protection 一 and asking yourself: what would change in your business, your leadership, your relationships, if your own heart believed that it was safe to operate in that unhurried way?
Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in You.
Brigid Tebaldi is a wife, mother of five, homeschooling mom, and board certified health coach specializing in Spiritual Somatic Rewiring - a signature framework that combines nervous system repair, subconscious belief work, and the truth of scripture to create permanent transformation at the root level.
When she's not in session you'll find her outside with her kids, deep in a conspiracy theory podcast, or in the kitchen baking something that disappears as quickly as it comes out of the oven.