To the Heart of the Matter
February is a month to “take heart”. In the heart of winter’s short days, long nights, cold winds, and post-holiday weariness, it is easy to become disheartened. However, it is vitally important to reconnect with your spirit, recommit to your goals, and reclaim your whole self.
Ample research connects depression with heart disease, and this is after all, National Heart Month! In addition, February marks Eating Disorders Awareness and Preventions Week, as well as National Girls and Women in Sports Day! Whether you are trying to prevent heart disease, heal an eating disorder, or celebrate your inner athlete, connecting with the heart is essential.
According to author Gary Zukov, emotional awareness is The Heart of the Soul, the name of his book co-authored with his spiritual partner, Linda Francis. The authors point out that all of our compulsive behaviors are an attempt to avoid emotional pain. The book provides clear guidelines for using emotional awareness to connect to the soul where we can live in love and trust rather than in fear and doubt. Doing the work necessary to achieve emotional awareness involves identifying the physical sensations connected to emotional feelings and using that knowledge as sign posts indicating where the work of healing needs to begin — not a job for the faint of heart! But once achieved, the rewards are harmony, co-operation, sharing and reverence for life.
It is becoming abundantly clear and more widely recognized that the body, mind, heart, and spirit are intimately connected and that self care must include all elements of the self to be complete and to facilitate healing of the entire self. It is a task requiring determination, fortitude, faith and hope. There is always the choice of allowing the difficulty of the challenge to be an excuse for becoming disheartened and giving up. Other than the dubious comfort of “familiar misery”, there is little to be gained in making that choice. The alternative is to go lion-hearted into the work of healing one’s life. As you go, carry with you, like the heart’s Olympic torch, the words of Plato, “Once you have set foot upon the pilgrimage, do not go down again to darkness and to journey beneath the earth, but live in light always”.