The heart

more insight into chakras and biofield tuning/healing

When my mother died, at her funeral, I spoke about her and hearts. I spoke about her love of hearts—she signed her name with one and loved them as decor. I spoke about her big and generous heart. And I spoke about how ironic it all was because of her struggles with her heart, cardiac disease—requiring angioplasty, stents, blood pressure medicine, experiencing her first heart attack at 43, etc. etc.

It was not lost on me that she loved hearts, had struggles with her physical heart and experienced much heartache throughout her life.

I thought of her life and her hearts, and what I said at her funeral, when I read this, recently in Electric Body, Electric Health:

“My observation from an electrical perspective is that heart disease is the body’s response to unmanageable emotions. When we carry emotional burdens for too long, the physical heart gets strained. The heart is strongly impacted by grief, despair, sadness, and hate, and a backlog of these emotions will impairs its physical functioning. When we harden our squishy, tender hearts to keep out tough emotions, we arrest that flow of life and electricity that’s pumping through the heart at every moment.”

I frequently sit with and try to consider the pain and trauma, despair and heartache that my mother experienced during her lifetime that I simply cannot ever understand: abandonment by her mother, abusive stepfather, ripped from her father and believing for years he abandoned her, being shuffled from foster home to relatives who didn’t want her. Then to a sister’s suicide, marrying an alcoholic who volatile and verbally abuse, who was frequently was unemployed, to a sister’s suicide, postpartum depression and chronic insomnia, more PTSD and depression and intense anxiety. Years of abuse and financial instability in living with an alcoholic, while trying to raise two children and support them financially, trying to finish her education degree. Then—her own health conditions, heart attacks and cardiac disease, and her husband’s suicide.

All of that sounds like quite the recipe, a perfect storm to result in heartache and damage to the heart.

I grow more and more convinced of the need to understand the profound emotional and embodied effects that trauma and grief have on the mind, the energy—-the soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it, the body, and the overall self. On who we are, what we experience and endure, and what we carry.

And that if we don’t address that gunk, with whatever healing or therapy works for us, that we will indeed carry it within our being indefinitely. And it will result in health deterioration.

We frequently hear the expression—so and so died of a broken heart. My friend described the death of her father this way, after the death of his daughter by suicide and the pain that that brought. It is not hyperbole, figurative. Is it real.

Go gentle on yourselves, friends. And take seriously heartache, even when it seems elusive and in the ether. It brings with it some very severe, very potentially detrimental physiological effects. Don’t believe the lies that are the western mindset/colonialist framework that try to relegate emotions to this insignificant realm, one associated only with the feminine and weak-minded.

Polish and tend to and heal your hearts.

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