In order to expand your heart in this
way, you must unlock it and reclaim your Heart Freedom. Poets, mystics, philosophers, and
scientists have long pondered the mysteries of the heart. Religious
thought claims the heart as the center of spiritual love.
Essence of Emotion
Poets, mystics, philosophers, and
scientists have long pondered the mysteries of the heart. Religious
thought claims the heart as the center of spiritual love. Christianity
associates divine love with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Hindus revere
Shiva’s sacred heart, Buddhists extol the heart as the site of
compassion, and Sufis see the heart as the seat of God. The ancient
Egyptians believed that the heart was home not only to emotions but
also to thought, personality, moral awareness, and the soul. Greek
philosopher Aristotle believed that the heart, not the brain, was the
seat of mental processes.
We now know that the heart does
indeed have a mind of its own. Simple experiments on frogs in high
school laboratories demonstrate that the heart, composed of involuntary
cardiac muscle, is autogenic or self-excitatory—signals for initiating
contraction need not come from the brain but can also originate in the
heart muscle itself.
Your heart beats continuously for your
entire lifetime, fulfilling its primary function of circulating oxygen
and nutrient rich blood throughout your body. It also affects you in
other ways: neurologically, by transmitting nerve impulses;
biophysically, with pressure waves; biochemically, with hormones and
neurotransmitters; and energetically, with electromagnetic fields. With
every heartbeat, energy and information are transmitted to all your
cells and back again. This excited exchange is the energy charge we
call emotion (“energy in motion”) from the Latin verb meaning “to move.”
Although your heart is about the size of your fist, metaphorically it
can expand to embrace the entire planet and all humanity as well as
that one person who you know as your soul mate, in a sublime energy
field of love and compassion. In order to expand your heart in this
way, you must unlock it and reclaim your Heart Freedom.
