So, how do you love your heart? By taking care of it—by nurturing it—keeping it physically fit, emotionally sound and intellectually informed. Notwithstanding the fact that you can't live without it, the heart is unique among all your body's equipment. Unlike your legs, arms and eyes, its sense of things is accessed differently; from the inside-out rather than the outside-in. When you see things with your eyes or touch them with your skin, those organs send signals to your brain to interpret what you're seeing or feeling. Your heart doesn't come in contact with anything on the outside. Instead it, collects information from everywhere, working through other organs and mechanisms. For example, the heart doesn't feel hot and cold; rather, it accesses feelings such as like and dislike, love and hate, and emotional hurt and compassion. We're constantly learning more about how our heart's "feelings" work.

As the center of love, joy, sadness and anxiety, among other things, the heart is fundamentally important to our human existence. It's also one of the easiest, most responsive aspects of our body's health to take care of, and one of the most overlooked, perhaps because the things we do intentionally to support other body systems tend to benefit the heart, too. While the pillars of good heart health are non-fungible and non-negotiable, research is giving us new insights into the heart-mind and heart-gut connections, as well as the benefits of heart health practices, starting in childhood.

The bottom line is that maintaining a healthy heart is well within our control, says the science, arguably more so than many other body systems. I have to think this is because of our masterful creation. God made us and the planet and everything on it to be intertwined to the point that when one small part of that master plan gets out of kilter, it throws off or has inevitable consequences for another part. We are wonderfully interdependent, complex systems, each operating simultaneously alone and together. For example, the quality, quantity and location of our plant population impacts our health, determining how many of the calories, nutrients, vitamin and minerals that we need we actually get. And that's the way the universe was made—perfectly, to work together in perfect harmony. We've understood that for hundreds of years. Back in the 18th century, it was discovered that scurvy was caused by insufficient vitamin C in the diet: something as simple as not eating enough fruits and vegetables could lead to bleeding gums, loose teeth and bleeding under the skin. The many and various discoveries of symbiosis haven't stopped since, n or will they.

In her article "Improving Heart Health: Lifestyle Metrics to Prevent Heart Disease," Sheila Julson takes a deeper dive into the subject beyond the twin pillars of diet and exercise, and even suggests that less exercise is more. I love that she points to the American Heart Association's confirmation that mindfulness and meditation practice can lower the risk of heart disease. Our friend Dorsey Standish, CEO of Dallas-based Mastermind Meditate, also espouses mindfulness for heart health, and she helps us understand more about the heart-mind connection and how the heart accesses feelings.

Not to be shortchanged, the heart-health pillar of diet and nutrition gets some local love, too. We rounded up several North Texas registered dietitians to inform us as to what they tell their clients about eating to love their hearts. And forgive me for saying so, but our "Cardiac Cuisine" recipes are to die for. All this good stuff will keep the body's master switch in top shape to do what it does best: love.

As always, this issue is chock full of information to help you along your journey to a healthier life on a healthy planet. Please email us at [email protected] to let us know how we're doing.

Blessings until next month,