As I contemplate the fact that everywhere I look these days, I see red and pink hearts, large and small, several questions come to mind. The first is. "Which came first?" Was all the commercial hype of Valentine’s Day preceded by knowledge of the inextricable connection between the physical, body-organ heart and the emotional, body-controlling-mind-controlling heart? (I call that the “inner heart”, the one whose operation we can’t necessarily see, hear or operate on.) I wonder if we spend more on health care for the heart or on Valentine’s Day paraphernalia, and how long people have been trying to find the intersection of heart-organ health and heart-emotional health—and I wonder what our instruction manual has to say about it all.

Yes, the heart is our center: physiologically, biologically, emotionally and spiritually. It controls the vast network of the circulatory system, which in turn keeps alive and nourishes the most delicate, yet resilient, sophisticated and valuable machine known to mankind. First medically understood back in 1682 by William Harvey, but also recognized as the center of movement, thought and sensation by Aristotle nearly 2,000 years earlier, the heart has always been identified as the most vital part of human anatomy. I think we all get this. What’s interesting to me, however, is the slowness with which we’ve come to learn, accept and act upon the similar finding that our emotional and spiritual center is also tied up with the heart. It’s just as vital, just as “in control” as the mechanical part of our heart—or maybe  the emotional heart is a mechanically functioning thing, as well.

Maybe the grand plan was always that the emotional heart would be master of the body—the control center and top of the body-chain. In our instruction manual, the Bible, the heart is mentioned no fewer than 800 times, while the brain is never mentioned. Most clearly in Luke 6:45, our instruction manual lets us know of the preeminence of the emotional heart: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” 

Therefore, in addition to the usual heart health suspects like blood pressure, cholesterol and exercise, we must pay equal attention to our spiritual and emotional health—albeit they are nowhere near as easy to identify or quantify. In this month’s issue of Natural Awakenings, we asked some of our local heart hospitals, the American Heart Association and holistic nurses about how we can all have more heart-healthy lifestyles and to weigh in on the critical importance of spiritual and emotional heart health. Also, no conversation about heart health is complete without exploring the famous question, “What’s love got to do with it?” In her article “Living in the Frequency of Love,” Marlaina Donato encourages us to live love as a verb—a powerful call to action that inspires and heals.

This month we also celebrate everything green, healthy and sustainable in North Texas as we kick off our series looking at what various cities in the region are doing to make sure that it remains a magnet for relocations as people demand a higher quality of life. Our first stop is Plano, one of North Texas’ sustainable standouts, where the community is pulling together to see that the city’s growth enhances their green and healthy offerings.

As always, Natural Awakenings is chock-full of timely information that we hope you will find useful on your journey to living a healthier life on a healthy planet.

Blessings until next month,