Our heart, like our breath determines that we are alive. It begins to beat just 5 weeks after we are conceived; it is our essential life force.
When you come to consider it, how often do we place our attention on our heart, apart from when we have a problem with it? Problems with the heart manifest in numerous ways, angina, heart attacks, eurythmia, heart burn and heart ache. Yet our language is filled with references to the heart. When I first started to study the fascinating connection between the mind and body back in 2001, The Healing Power of Illness by Defletheson and Dahlke was the essential reference book. Now regrettably out of print this precious gold mine of a book discusses the metaphor of our language and the connection between our physiological and psychological symptoms. When we refer to the heart it always represents an expression of emotion whether it be sincerity, joy or sadness. Common phrases and words regularly occur in our everyday language.
When we want to express our heartfelt sincerity we are often heard to say “With all my heart”, or “from the bottom of my heart”. Children in the school playground say cross my heart and hope to die, meaning they are making a promise or being asked to keep a secret. The solemnity of the statement if you either share that secret or break that promise is that we are dooming our own life. Proving to the other person that we are dead serious about keeping that promise.
We may refer to someone who is kind, compassionate and generous as warm hearted, big hearted or having a heart of gold. We describe people as being cold hearted, and when we are stricken in love we are broken hearted.
When we are happy or delighted we say my heart sang with joy, or his heart leapt for joy. If we are downcast we refer to being downhearted or having a heavy heart, our hearts can be in our boots. If we are alarmed our hearts can be in our mouth, likewise if we are disillusioned we might not have our heart in it.
When applying terms of endearment we hear people say bless your heart; I love you with all my heart and my heart is fit to bursting and when we are excited our heart is all a flutter!
We show our love by cooking our nearest and dearest hearty food, or we approve of someone’s hearty appetite.
Essentially our language and our thoughts determine and reinforce what we get from and out of life. Louise Hay, self- help guru and metaphysical writer of “You Can Heal Your Life” writes that the heart symbolises love whilst our blood symbolises joy. “Our hearts lovingly pump joy throughout our body”. She goes on to observe that when we have a heart attack, or suffer from angina our hearts don’t actually attack us. When we deny ourselves love the heart begins to shrivel and we cut ourselves off from joy and a feeling of connectedness.
Our modern day all consuming love for money and material things is squeezing the joy out of our hearts, as we work harder to pursue our love for progress, our lives are becoming more and more stressed killing and paralysing us with heart attacks, angina, and high blood pressure.
To live with an open heart is to be open to loving everything from the smallest creature, to lovingly caring for a tender seedling, to loving your neighbour and loving your enemies. For as Jesus said “love thy enemies”, which when you unpick it, means when you love someone unconditionally then you have no enemies.
An expression that I have recently been thinking about is the expression home is where the heart is. Having recently moved out of my long term family home into rented accommodation I found myself questioning this statement. I kept referring to “home” as my old house. But now I feel more and more at home with myself as of course my heart is inside me.
Nicola Menage's Blog 