Why the heart is linked to feelings, love and life

There are countless sayings and proverbs about the heart, but all agree in linking this organ to feeling and sensitivity. “Nothing weighs as much as the heart when it is tired,” wrote Juan Zorrilla de San Martín. For John Paul II, “the worst prison is a closed heart.”

More than two thousand years ago, Confucius said: “You must always keep your head cool, your heart warm and your hand long”, and “No matter how far the spirit goes, it will never go further than the heart.” A Russian proverb states: “The heart is a child: it waits for what it wants”.

The heart is the vital organ and is related to the soul, love and feeling.

When one does not know what to do, in a difficult situation, or when making a momentous decision, the right path must be guided by the heart. See with eyes closed, feel with an open heart: the hunch is the sign of our soul, hidden and repressed by the thinking and calculating head. Are you prepared to become a child who only manifests with the beating of his heart and expect what you want?

the mystery of the heart

Lying on the medical table, the young mother lives an experience that will forever unite her with the being she carries in her womb. the beat of a pounding, rhythmic heart resounds, loud as a drum, through the loudspeaker, as it flutters, tiny, on the small screen of the ultrasound machine. However, it is the bond that unites the mother’s heart to the baby, and each beat, each sound, is the affirmation of a desire to exist, of a desire for survival without reserve, without fear.

It is the origin of life, the impulse towards the great adventure, unknown but imminent and inescapable.

How, who, what set the heart in motion so that a barely shaped embryo began to beat not to stop until its last breath? What is the mystery of this organ divided into four cavities, capable of feeding a complex network that extends to the last corner of our body?

The heart beats an average of 36 million times a year. No machine can work as efficiently and precisely for as long. And it only weighs about 300 grams. All doctors hang a stethoscope around their neck to listen to the heartbeat. Because of the cough, because of having a fever, because of a stomach ache, because of high blood pressure, because of anxiety… it doesn’t matter what the reason is: they want to hear the heart. If a person’s heart stops, the first thing is to revive it to recover that unique and harmonious rhythm. Feeling the pulse is the simplest test of whether someone is alive or dead.

They say that the size of the heart is equal to the size of the fist of each one, and the truth is that the energy of the heart is expressed in the palms of the hands, which are like the tentacles of the heart. We extend our hands to touch, to feel, to find out, to grope. We open our arms to bring our heart closer and unite it with that of the person we love. We rest our heads on our chests to give free rein to feeling and rest our reason. Pu-boom, pu-boom, pu-boom… it’s the perfect harmony.

From water to fire

According to Chinese medicine, the first impulse of life is chi. the essence of everything that exists and the impulse of transformation. Without chi nothing happens, and the origin and essence of chi comes from the Kidney, the element of Water. That source of life takes shape and action starting from the impulse of the Kidney chi, transforming into the opposite element: Fire, the Heart. This is how the fetus develops, this is the Universe, Yin and Yang, Moon and Sun, Shadow and Light…. One does not exist without the other.

The heart is all love, it is truth, beauty and goodness. He is considered the “Emperor” of all vital organs, the one who gives life to the senses. Acting with your heart in your hand is a demonstration of frankness and sincerity; having it in a fist reflects a state of anguish and despair; feeling it so big that it does not fit in the chest is synonymous with generosity and shows the goodness that houses the essence of Being.

The heart keeps the rhythm of our feelings, not only joy, but also sadness, anger, anger, anxiety, fear, excitement, disgust, worry. Although Chinese medicine links each emotion to a specific organ, any of them affects the heart first, becauseIt is the heart that gives meaning to the five sensory organs. A sad person cannot feel joy, fear also closes us to it, because the heart shrinks and its rhythm and chi are altered.

Diastole and systole, expand and shrink, fill and empty… with each movement the heart reminds us of what it is to live: relax to receive, push to give. It is a small universe inside the body, the synthesis of the origin and the end.

emotional ups and downs

Is the heart just a muscle What contracts and expands to move blood? So why do you feel your heart skip a beat when you receive bad news? Why is your rhythm unleashed in anxiety? Why does it calm down when the uncertain wait has passed and calm comes? Why does it overflow when we don’t know what happens to someone very close?

Worry messes up the heart, fear diminishes its capacity, anger unleashes its disharmony, sadness slows it down and joy restores its rhythm and strength. How can a muscle change its state in so many different ways? Why doesn’t the kidney or liver do it? Surely they do but we don’t notice it so much because they are governed by the heart, they are at the service of the “Emperor” of feelings.

Living is an adventure, an adventure in which we cry and laugh, we are scared and angry, we suffer heartbreak and encounters, we fall down and get up again, we walk, we run, we stop to catch our breath, we start the journey again. long road that leads us to the end, to meet the great surrender of life that is death. Meanwhile, each heartbeat reminds us that living and dying are as subtly linked as night and day. During the day we live and at night, when we sleep, we are rehearsing death, because deep down we live to die, and we die as we have lived.

the root organ

It is said that we Chinese do not express our feelings, but we express them without stopping, without thinking and without fear, we incorporate them into every word. All Chinese characters associated with feelings or thoughts are rooted in the heart, because the head –the brain– is the reflection of the heart and must be governed by it. The soul resides in him, so it is not surprising that to kill Dracula, the stake had to be driven into his heart and not into his head.

Science has made incredible advances and has changed the way of living. It seems that you lose awareness of what is important, in terms of the essence, and that the material, tangible and palpable is gaining more and more weight, that thought prevails over feeling, that reason gains ground over intuition, words over gestures, victory over forgiveness, winning over give.

People who suffer a heart attack without having the previous symptoms and heart attacks caused by an emotional impact are increasing. The number of deaths due to cardiovascular diseases is the highest of all, while living feeling less and thinking excessively. We take care of food but not feelings, because it seems that being sentimental is equivalent to being weak, immature, irrational. The heart and soul are suffocated in this way by hunger, sorrow, desolation, loneliness, misunderstanding, cold, emptiness, lack of tenderness or openness.

Because today nothing is understood if it is not visual, when you close your eyes, the world loses its shape, and when we remain silent, it loses its meaning. Then we feel agitated and we are prey to anguish: we no longer recognize the world without images and sound. As we move so far from our essence, fear and panic invade us.

The vital score

The heart is not only an intelligent and tireless muscle but also is the universal center of love, openness, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance, faith, trust, awareness, light. Each heartbeat transmits love, each heartbeat absorbs pain, injustice, ignorance, rejection, anger, confusion and everything that darkness represents. It welcomes those feelings and cleanses them to return them in the form of nutritious, pure and healing blood, which sends to the last corner of our being.

That’s why when something happens to us, we instinctively breathe in with our heartbeat to be able to withstand the impact, and then we expel it clean and healthy. We do it without knowing the reason or its mechanism. It is in the heart, the essence of life and death, where at every moment light and shadow walk hand in hand. The melody of our life is composed in its heartbeat, even if we don’t know how to read the score, play its instrument or sing its song. We just breathe. We live without marking the rhythm, without noticing the notes. Often the symphony plays without the conductor who performs and conducts it noticing.

Those who practice chi kung, tai chi or yoga know how to merge with the essence of beauty and simplicity and pay attention to breathing. In Buddhist meditation, the first step is to close the eyes, allow them to observe the nose, and the nose, in turn, observe the heart; that simple, that profound. The eyes manifest the spirit and vivacity of the heart chi by observing oneself, sitting, motionless, just allowing the breath to flow: inhale, inhale, diastole, systole, open and close, contract and expand, birth and die… That way we we connect to consciousness, truth and beauty.