Love Medicine

Without love, we will not bother
to look very deeply into the world of another.
Love is an absolute necessity in diagnostic, medical,
and in all counseling and therapeutic processes.

Human growth occurs most favorably in meetings when individuals express themselves vulnerably and authentically. The authenticity of open, honest and sincere relationships are a necessary and real prerequisite to successful healing relationships. Love is what heals, love is what sustains, love is what cures, and love is what makes therapy successful. Unfortunately, the problem with the world and with the professions of medicine and psychology is the great lack or absence of love.

Love is something we feel when we are close and feeling one with another being. Dr. Scott Peck defined love as the willingness to go out on a limb, to truly involve oneself and struggle at an emotional level with another in a relationship for the purpose of shared growth. Love is certainly something we feel when we give to others especially when it is a part of ourselves we are giving.

Dr. Brené Brown, in a Ted Talk presentation, speaks about something all of us need to ponder on from time to time. When we look deep, inside we find our heart sitting at the center of our being and that being is vulnerable. Most people are lost to this world of deep feelings, thinking as fast as they do there is less time to feel.

My staff has been good enough to take the exercises from my HeartHealth book and put them into a form of online mediations in a course form (free) that focus attention on this most essential organ that sits in the center of our being. This year over a thousand people have signed up.

The heart, which represents our capacity to feel, is an access point to a source of wisdom and intelligence that the mind cannot compete with. The heart, which only opens when we are vulnerable to our feelings, is important for increasing personal effectiveness, improving health and relationships and achieving greater fulfillment.

The heart is at the center of more than we can dream of, yet it is a factor that is not at all understood or even recognized by contemporary psychiatric or medical theory.It is the abandonment of the seat of feelings, the repression and denial of the heart that is at the center of much illness and disease.

One of the great challenges in medicine is to understand the complexity of causes that lead to cancer. There is a great secret to life, health and disease, one that is little known, understood or talked about except in vague ways. This secret explains largely why one person gets sick and another does not under the influence of the same causes. Our bodies have a core, a central point, just like the solar system does. Without the sun at the heart of our system, the planets would just fly off because without a coherent center systems just don’t work.

Dr. Clancy D. McKenzie of Capital University says, “Enhancing the love energy of the patient is an effective way to increase the healing process. This holds true for both psychological and physical healing: enhancement of love energy should be a part of every physical remedy, because it is a vital ingredient to healing.” Thus HeartHealth meditations offers a direct path to ehancing the love energy of patients.

Over the last 30 years increasing evidence has been found for
the existence of complex links between the immune system,
the central nervous system and the endocrine system on
the one hand, and psychological phenomena…on the other.
Van Gent, et al.

Heart Rate Variability

The science of heart rate variability (HRV) gives us a way of exploring the incredible and wonderful world of the heart. HRV is a physiological marker of how we experience and regulate our emotions. HRV is relatively easy to measure. Rather than calculating the number of beats per minute we measure the time that elapse between one heart beat and the next one.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk says, “The heart, gut and brain communicate intimately via the vagus nerve, the critical nerve involved in the expression and management of emotions in humans. We experience emotions in our body, not in our heads. Emotions are first a physical state and only secondary interpreted as a perception in the brain. By learning, literally how to control our heart, we learn how to gain mastery of our emotional brain and vice versa. We can actual change the state of our brain by what we do with our bodies. The way we move, the way we breath, the way we interact with other people physically. Important that we experience emotions in our body and not in our head.”

The American Institute of Stress has reported that up to 90% of doctor’s visits are stress related. The HRV of a patient gives us a full readout in terms of health, medical diagnosis and treatment pathways that will bring a person back to harmony and health. Bottom line, the heart knows what is going on in the body. In fact, it knows everything that is going on even with our emotions and minds. HRV can provide information to users about situations where their stress or anxiety levels may be higher than normal.

Dr. George Monbiot has a lot to say about the consequence of closing the heart in his essay, Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart. We need open hearts to be healthy. Civilization needs love to survive. Love makes a differece.

“What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis. There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.”

Grace of the Heart

There is a quality of heart and pure being that can be called grace. The grace of the heart offers us a quality of being that is healing, animating, invigorating, supporting, nurturing, and comforting. The grace of the heart offers an inner tranquility and peace that the mind by itself rarely possesses. The essence of the heart is love, light and health.