Last August, we discussed the heart, my Exhibit A in any discussion of the bodymind. With all its talk of love and chocolates and Valentines, February seems like the perfect excuse to revisit our most important internal organ.
Still skeptical about the bodymind? The English language is not, as words like heartened and disheartened suggest. Indeed, belief in the bodymind is international. For example, words like courage, encourage and discourage stem from the French word for heart (la coeur).
While the heart may be the “Supreme Ruler,” it and its environs are frequent dumping grounds for emotional overloads and traumas. This should come as no surprise as the aforementioned words and phrases like “take things to heart” suggest. The heart already has a day job. It isn’t designed to be a dumpster or live in one, and these parked traumas interfere with the heart’s performance, forcing it to work harder and wear out sooner. Who wants that?!
Early in my bodywork career, I was drawn to a patient’s heart. Her complaints included depression and lack of energy. Putting my hand on her sternum, I felt this strong posterior pull, as if her heart was glued to her spine. When asked, she said that she was a nurse who worked with the terminally ill and that she’d gotten very close to several patients before they’d passed. As I felt the undertow from those connections, I asked if she’d be willing to release those patients from her heart and memorialize them in some less personally costly way? Yes. Soon her newly freed heart was swinging nicely across her thorax as designed.
Recently, I felt another patient’s heart pulling strongly to the right as if it was a little too chummy with the right lung. When I asked her body whether the associated restriction was primarily physical, emotional, spiritual or a combination, she reported that it was primarily emotional and added from about 20 years prior. Remembering what that was about, she released the associated emotion, allowing us to restore her heart’s mechanical freedom and innate motion.
I have felt hearts that seemed to be stuck in the patient’s throat, sometimes as the result of a sudden loss and the associated shock, other times following a violent collision with a steering wheel or shoulder harness. After that upward pull was released, faces that had been pinched for years relaxed, and softened. Oh, happy day!
Even a couch potato’s heart beats some 40 million times per year and pendulums across the thorax four million times a year. Over the decades, restrictions like these exact a heavy toll. The toughest textiles made disintegrate after 150,000 rubs, providing a little perspective on the miracle of living tissue and its ability to persist for decades, even in the face of various insults: For example, an 80-year-old heart has swung back and forth across the thorax some 320 million times and beat an incredible 24 billion times. Unbelievable!
Our brains automatically park emotional overloads in our tissues so that we can survive to fight another day. We can ignore those meadow muffins and their health consequences, or we can use the bodymind connection to etch-a-sketch our way to a smiley face and a healthier tomorrow, today.
—For 30+ years, Mike Macy, LMT, has specialized in CranioSacral Therapy and Visceral Manipulation. An avid skate skier, hiker, and birder, he can be reached at mefmacy@gmail.com.
This article appears in Feb 15, 2023 – Feb 21, 2024.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
