Your Amazing Heart

The heart is an amazing instrument. It beats constantly, around 35 million times a year. That means in a lifetime, the heart beats roughly 2.5 billion times, and pumps around one million barrels of blood. An astounding instrument which keeps us alive and well. As goes the heart, so goes the body – and us along with it.

For the ancients, the heart was not the seat of emotions, but of the will, our hidden intentions. The heart was viewed as the center of the person, the domain of the soul. The Greek term for “heart” used in the New Testament, “kardia,” referred to both the physical and spiritual heart. Indeed, as I once wrote, “The heart is body to the soul.” So interwoven are the two aspects of the heart, that though I can distinguish them, I cannot separate them. Anyone who has ever fallen in love, for example, can attest to how the heart is affected, both physically and psychically. And people can and do die of a “broken heart.”

The heart is the abode of love and the special feelings thereof. I remember a conversation with a young man who was waiting for his second child to be born. He told me his fear that he would have no room in his heart for the new baby, since his heart was so full of love for his first child and wife. I told him to relax, because he would grow a brand new section of his heart to house the love he would have for the coming precious one. As writer Spike Jonze said, “The heart is not like a box that gets filled up; it expands in size the more you love.”

I saw him months later and brought up our previous conversation. I asked, “So did you find room in your heart for your new daughter?” He beamed back at me and said, “You were right; it’s like I have another section of my heart with her name on it.”

This fact is extremely important to human relationships. Old heart wounds may never fully heal, but remain all our days as “ground under repair.” You might think you are completely over something, until you get pushed back into it, and realize that the cement is still not fully hardened, that the pain you no longer felt can come back and revisit you, usually to a lessened extent.

I have worked with numerous couples who got remarried after a divorce. I never met anyone who got married in order to go through a divorce. Nor have I met someone who did not remain among the “walking wounded” regarding their previous marriage and/or family situation. Granted, some had more harmonious, even friendly-like separations and divorces; but they are in the real minority. Sensitive areas stay sensitive in varying degrees.

So whenever I conducted pre-marriage counseling for those previously divorced, I always stressed the “new heart” dimension. The miracle of a second marriage is that you get to start fresh, even with the baggage you bring with you from the last relationship. It is rather like getting on a new train with your old baggage – as well as some new things.

It is vital that as all your heart chambers must stay in constant communication, working together for the good of the whole, so must your psychic or spiritual heart remain open to the action of all its chambers. A chamber is where a relationship is housed, such as that of you and your mother, or father, friend or beloved. The miracle is to keep your life of loving whole and harmonious.