Outrageous Courage & The Heartbrain

Outrageous Courage & The Heart Brain

I find you all with my body aching. What’s this aching all about I wonder? Is it that I ran too far the other day, that I’ve been sleeping crooked, curled around Lucca with my head wedged into a nook, or is it that it’s the culmination of so much holding - emotionally and physically of so many things that we seem to find ourselves holding. Is it a response to the shocks and traumas we find ourselves swimming in. Is it the sign of a forthcoming cold.

Perhaps it is the radiation of a broken heart. This week I’ve been feeling my heart aching - an aching across the chest spreading to the diaphragm. An intensity that peaked when, on Sunday, my stepfather took a nasty fall with a very scary fracture to his neck. Thankfully, he’s doing Ok but it will be a long road to recovery. He is one of the kindest men I know. Heartbroken also, again and again, with the state of the world with the seeming relentless divergence away from kindness, compassion and common humanity.

Sometimes I find myself analysing everything but some things aren’t meant to be analysed I don’t think. They don’t need to be given a meaning. But I ask myself what does this aching heart and body of mine need. How can I tend to it. What can I do or offer the world with so many aching hearts around.

The heart offers a sense of reaching out and taking in. Reaching out with kindness and compassion towards this community we’re knitting together. Towards loved ones. Towards those I find difficult to love.

The heart is not only a pump circulating blood around the body. It also, Anne Baring states, is an organ that is a centre of intelligence and consciousness. It is the main organ in the body that coordinates the functioning of our autonomic nervous system - the sympathetic (fight and flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest). It continually interacts with the brain: neurologically, biochemically, biophysically and energetically. Cardiologists call this whole system ‘the heart brain’. It has a continuous highway of neural communication between the older, limbic (more instinctive) emotional brain.

This can help us understand why emotions, instincts and the heart are so important and so intrinsically linked. The electromagnetic energy in the body, accordingly to the Institute of HeartMath, envelops every cell of the body. ‘It’s 60 times greater than that generated by the brain and can be detected a number of feet away - 12-25 feet in all directions.’ Have you ever wondered why you feel a certain why in someone’s presence? Maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with it too.

It is through the electromagnetic energy field of the heart that we have access to a wider energy field that connects us to each other and the greater field of planetary organism. - Anne Baring

Just placing a hand over the area of our heart changes the brain waves, Baring writes. Is it any wonder that we place a hand over our heart if something shocking happens or we feel compassion and love for another. Or even if we want to show someone else how much we care.

I was reading a myth about a lion featured in Baring’s book (I’ve been reading “A Dream of the Cosmos, A Quest for the Soul” by Anne Baring and highly recommend it) that touches upon these emotions associated with the Heart and the Lion - courageous, instinctive, passionate, full of courage, fierce, tender. Courageous.

It got me thinking about a quote from ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’ that I mentioned last newsletter.

The idea of outrageous courage touched me. I could feel this was the invitation that was nested inside this despair. I, or rather, we are being asked to cultivate outrageous courage in the face of outrageous loss’. Francis Weller

Outrageous Courage.

I’ve been practicing some heart centered practices to help keep this heart open, to be full of courage even in great despair, and bring some curiosity and connection this area and this is the focus of the yoga Nidra that I am sharing with you all today too. It’s a Yoga Nidra that is designed to not wake you up at the end so it’s good in case you are using it to fall asleep.

Other things I’ve been filling my cup, belly and heart with this month:

~ I’ve been eating really nutrient dense, nourishing foods recently - my body can’t seem to get enough. Hazelenut and ricotta cake, chickpea curries with creamy coconut and sweet potato, black bean stews with peanuts and spices, chai with full fat milk, wedges of toast thick with butter. The need to nourish, not deplete, is very real with the beginning of Autumn. What’s filling your bowl at the moment?

~I’ve been practicing Yoga Nidra in the early hours of the morning - building myself a nest to burrow into.

~I’ve never felt more knitted into and grateful for the community that I’ve met through yoga and Biodynamic Massage. Just constantly inspired, I learn so much from what you have to say and experience, and it is such a privilege to hang out with so many of you all. A huge heart-full thank you.

Grief is an intensely interior process that can only be navigated in the presence of community…This is the solitary journey that we cannot do alone. Francis Weller