Heart and Circulatory System

The heart is our center for feeling, loving, nurturing, forgiveness. It is essential we all practice these techniques. For some of us, it is much harder than it sounds. I don't have all the answers to heal a heart, but what I do know is that you have all the answers on how to heal your heart. And most likely it will come from how you deal with your emotions. I find so many heart chakras that are imbalanced. It is our greatest defense against dealing with issues that we should feel. Instead, we avoid and hide from them.

What we are learning is that the heart has a brain. We are not taught to use the brain of the heart.. we are not taught to feel.  We are taught to think and thinking can create a lot of worry, stress, trauma. If we learn to by-pass the brain (which is where we create our mental torments), and send these thoughts to our heart, our heart will surround the thoughts with love thereby transforming them from negative to positive. Practice using your heart to think.

When we bring our thoughts to our hearts where we can feel them and then attach our desires to our thoughts and feelings, we are able to create joy in our lives.

Our life experiences will teach us that feeling bad is simply a way in which we can one day appreciate feeling good. Life experiences are up and down - positive and negative. You cannot have one without the other. But what we learn from the negative experiences is that we truly want to encourage the positive ones to surround us for the majority of our time. And from the negative, we learn how to maintain the positive.

Practice sending love and light to every person you meet each day. It is the greatest way to get your heart to open. The more you do it, the better you will get at it, and eventually you won't have to practice this technique at all - it will become a way of life for you.

There will be many people who will suggest many healing methods to get the heart healthy. But the most important thing you do is what you put into your mouth daily. What I have learned most about the heart is that our digestive system will use the heart to store any excess food or drink we cannot absorb or eliminate properly.

In order to maintain a healthy heart and circulatory system, the following steps are easy to take: Make sure your digestive system is in proper working order. When this system is not working to potential, the body cannot digest and absorb properly and so it will use the heart to store instead. This is definitely what you don't want to happen!

Foods to avoid to heal the Heart and Circulatory System:
Avoid foods with hydrogenated oils, and yes, once you begin reading labels, you are going to find out that they are in lots of things you eat. Fried food also needs to be eliminated. Avoid pork as it is very hard to digest.

Change from cow dairy products to rice milk, almond milk, coconut milk, sheep or goat dairy products including milk, cheese, ice cream, yogurt, sour creams, etc. Everything today is available and everything tastes good as well!

When eating meats keep the following in mind. A healthy digestive system can handle 4 oz. of red meat per meal; 5 oz. of chicken or turkey per meal; and 6-7 oz. of fish per meal. You should limit your meat proteins to once per day. An unhealthy digestive system may not be able to handle any!
Introduce beans into your diet daily. Two cups of beans per day along with 1 oz. of nut and 1 oz of seed will supply your body with the good proteins and fats necessary to stay healthy. Change your cooking oils to extra virgin olive oil (we like Greek or Italian for quality). Your heart will love you for it.

Add organic lecithin granules to your diet every morning. One to two teaspoons daily will help to keep those arteries clean, along with ground flax seeds.

And of course, walk, run, garden, exercise… movement that makes you happy will make your heart happy. Smile and laugh a lot. This type of exercise goes right to the heart!

Herbs and supplements that are beneficial to the Heart and Circulatory System:
There are many herbs that can help to cleanse the arteries. Some of my favorites include: Dandelion to keep the gall bladder healthy. In turn, a healthy gall bladder helps to create a healthy heart. They are all connected! Hawthorne berries help to strengthen the heart muscles. Burdock and red clover are blood cleansers.

Michael's Naturopathic products makes a wonderful blood cleanser called "Blood Cleanser". How appropriate! Another Michael's formula that may be helpful is called "Heart Factors" which contains many of the supplements and herbs to heal a heart.

Grape seed extract helps to keep the blood flowing. Lecithin helps keep the arteries clean. Vitamin E strengthens the heart and helps keep it clean. (Seeds are our food source of vitamin E.) Many studies indicate that CoQ10 helps keep the heart healthy.

Many of my clients have found that Magnesium is also essential to a healthy heart. You can find magnesium in food sources such as sesame seeds, poppy seeds, almonds, dark leafy greens and fresh green herbs. With one client, simply adding Hawthorne with magnesium, along with dietary changes of course, helped bring reduce her blood pressure significantly.

Physical symptoms of Heart and Circulatory Imbalances:
An unhealthy heart will create an inability to exercise and breathe properly. Under great stress, you might feel pain or palpitations just above the breast on the heart side. Of course, the most serious side effects of an unhealthy heart would be the heart attack. But if we learn to listen to our early warning signals, we may be able to change an unhealthy heart to one that is strong and happy.

When the circulatory system is clogged, many people will feel numbness, tingling and coldness of the outer extremities.Negative emotions that aggravate the Heart & Circulatory System
The emotion that affects our heart and circulatory system the most is worry. Many people don't even recognize their worry. They do recognize, however, that their mind is constantly thinking and never resting. Ultimately, this does equate to worry. Turning worry to trust is essential to healing. If we can trust that everything is the way it needs to be, there would be nothing to worry about.

The flower essence I use most often to help heal the circulatory system is called White Chestnut. The White Chestnut personality has a mind that does not stop thinking; it jumps from one thought to another. It sometimes keeps the person from going to sleep or may wake in the middle of the night and not be able to fall asleep.

The flower essence Honeysuckle may also be helpful in that it allows us to release ourselves from the past, instead focussing our energy in present time. Willow is often used to transform our bitterness and resentments back to forgiveness and joy. And in order to learn to love ourselves, we must first forgive ourselves.

Agrimony is another flower that could help with issues of the heart. We classify Agrimony as an anger flower, but it begins with mental torment that turns to anger in the system. The agrimony personality type often finds it necessary to abuse them selves. And with self abuse comes a lack of self love.

Stress and tension also play a role in heart health. Learning to put a little energy into each action or mission is a huge improvement over the Vervain personality who puts way too much stress and tension into any mission they undertaken.

The most important thing we can do to begin healing our heart is to begin loving ourselves. We cannot love others unless we love ourselves. We are mirrors in which we project. Larch is the flower that works on our self-esteem and our ability to become confidant in who we are.