“The cure for pain is in the pain.” - Rumi
Throughout history, the heart has played an important role in our understanding of the human body. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle identified the heart as the most important organ of the body, defining it as the seat of intelligence, motion, and sensation. He considered the heart to be a “hot, dry” organ that acted as the body’s center of vitality. Other organs, such as the brain and lungs, existed solely to cool the heart. Aristotle’s beliefs about the heart’s heating properties were supported for many centuries, with future scholars reiterating his belief that the complexity of the heart’s fibers and the intricacies of its chambers reflected its role as an intelligent organ. The Aristotelian view of the heart persisted into the Renaissance, during which its importance expanded into the realm of the metaphysical, where it became widely accepted as the primary spiritual center of the body and the seat of all emotions.
Our understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the heart is vastly more sophisticated and detailed than Aristotle’s imagined three chambered organ, a description that was based on his observations of chick embryos. But despite all we know about the heart’s chambers, arteries, sinus nodes, and Q waves, some of Aristotle’s writings still hint at some basic truths about this organ. Culturally, we hold the heart as the symbolic hub of a person’s energy and the resting place of wisdom, as well as the center of intuition. And although science tells us that the brain is where emotions are processed and understood, we still look to our heart as the place where our feelings come to life.
February, with its emphasis on all things love related, was designated as American Heart Month in 1963. The intention was to draw awareness to heart disease, which was, in the 1960’s, the leading cause of death in the U.S. Unlike now, doctors knew very little about the factors that contributed to cardiovascular disease, although many suspected smoking, poor diets, and excessive alcohol. Since then, our understanding of the heart, cardiovascular disease, treatments, and the lifestyle factors that contribute to it have expanded exponentially. Unfortunately, despite all the statins, blood thinners, beta blockers and sophisticated surgical treatments, even six decades later heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S.
Even though our knowledge of the heart’s physiology is vastly more sophisticated than Aristotle’s three-chambered rendition, his reference to the heart’s intelligence may not be archaic. The heart is an incredibly sophisticated organ, one that may be best referred to as the great regulator. With a built-in pacemaker, the heart regulates its own neurological activity and has sensors which govern the rhythmic activity in even the smallest capillaries in the body. Most importantly, the heart monitors the body’s environment, making adjustments to blood pressure in response to changes—both small and large—that continuously take place throughout the body.
Most people associate heart health with blood pressure. We know that chronically elevated blood pressure is a warning that the heart is working too hard and could be a sign of disease. Lower blood pressure is considered ideal as it reflects a properly functioning heart, one that can easily supply the body with a rich supply of oxygenated blood. Although generally true, this description doesn’t quite capture the subtleties of what makes a heart healthy. As the great regulator, the heart shows tremendous variability throughout the day in response to what is taking place in the body. Rather than pumping along at a steady pace, a healthy heart is quite busy, continuously monitoring, evaluating, and responding to changes in the body. A better representation might be an organ that is resilient, able to increase its workload when needed, responding to stress quickly, but downshifting seamlessly when the stress has receded.
Decades of research have shown that a good portion of heart disease is preventable through lifestyle interventions. We now know that diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, and stress play a big role in the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Increasingly, however, scientists are discovering that what goes on in our head may be even more important for the health of the heart than we previously believed. Given what we are learning about the mind-body connection to health, Aristotle’s assertion that the brain existed to cool our hot, dry hearts may not have been so farfetched.
In 2016, WHO announced that stress is the “epidemic of the 21st century” and a leading contributor to chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease. Stressors range from famine, war, and climate change to poor diets and a lack of social support systems. But for those who study ancient spiritual texts, stress is not a modern problem; what is referred to as “stress” in this century was presented long ago as suffering by historical figures such as Buddha, Jesus, Patanjali, Rumi. They counseled that suffering was inevitable and was an essential part of becoming human as well as an important element along the path toward enlightenment.
Science is proving what historic spiritual figures have long known about suffering—all of us face stressors throughout life, but how we respond to them determines how negatively they impact our health. The Buddha tells us that we get stuck in a cycle of suffering due to what he calls “the three poisons” of passion, aggression, and ignorance. Patanjali makes a similar claim in The Yoga Sutras, telling us that unnecessary suffering is caused by the endless whirling of the mind--what he calls “vrittis”—which are fueled by the mind’s afflictions of aversion, desire, and ignorance. We face challenges every day but, while they do make life difficult, we make it worse when we try to run away from stress, cling to our desires, or deny that suffering exists.
The core message of these spiritual teachings is that stressors generate strong feelings, but we make them worse when we try to push them away. Emotions can be strong and feel all-consuming but they typically fade over time—some very quickly. They do cause stress and some level of suffering, but trying to avoid an emotion leads us to create elaborate storylines in which we blame ourselves or others, or deny that the emotion exists, telling tales that only serve to keep the emotion alive. The flash of anger that comes when someone cuts us off in traffic would fade if we sat with that red hot sensation for just a moment. But instead, we construct long elaborate tales about the “jerk” who was in such a hurry, who almost caused an accident, spinning a story which packages our anger into a neat bundle of blame. We carry that blame around, checking on it throughout the day or even longer, reliving that anger while the incident has long since evaporated into the ether.
Positive emotions can drive us to seek experiences that make us feel happy. Some experiences are benign, but others easily lead to cravings. Addictions come under the category of cravings, which drive us to cling to experiences that may not be healthy but feed our desire for more. Our cravings can be due to chemical dependency or arise out of boredom. Either way we cling to our desires to avoid the uncomfortable ache of wanting something but failing to attain resolution. Desire is one of the poisons that make lifestyle modifications—especially diet and exercise—so hard to maintain. If we could learn to sit with the discomfort of longing, eventually that desire would fade. Like aversion, our stories keep our cravings alive. We create tales about how we can’t live without something or someone, how a craving isn’t quite as bad as it may seem, how we know it is bad but we are powerless to change. We fuel the desire by grasping when the solution is to let go and soften into the loss.
The wisdom of the Buddha and Patanjali is good medicine for our heart. As the great regulator, the heart is designed to handle suffering; it’s physiology is designed to adjust to the ups and downs of our emotional reactions. It shifts into high gear when it senses a stressor and then relaxes when the threat has gone away. The more stressors it is exposed to, the more resilient it becomes—that’s why ignoring our emotions is not a healthy solution. That, too, requires elaborate narratives. But the heart depends on the brain for cues. It can’t distinguish between what’s real and the fantasies of our endless narratives. Keeping our emotions around with our elaborate stories doesn’t allow the heart to relax. Made of cardiac muscle, like any other muscle in the body, the heart can only work hard for so long until it becomes fatigued and inefficient.
There’s nothing wrong with passion, aggression, desires, or fear; all emotions are simply energy that reflect our experience of the world. They come and go, and our heart adjusts to them. Learning to sit with them, to experience them, to learn from them is what makes our heart stronger. The Buddha teaches that the peacock’s feathers have such brilliant colors because it eats poison, that our suffering can become a source of great wisdom in our lives, and, by trying to make emotions go away, life will lose its vitality. Our poison can become the heart’s medicine.
As we enter February and consider the health of our heart, perhaps we would be wise to notice how our endless thinking and the ways in which we run from pain and cling to desires impact the health of that wise and intricate muscle that beats tirelessly in our chest. Can we use the brain to cool our heart by dropping the storylines and, instead, simply sit with our emotions, noticing our breath, and allowing them to pass?
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