America is a country of broken hearts. Since the beginning of the 20thcentury, heart disease has been the number one killer of men and women. A few years ago, it was the cause of one in four deaths, now its one in three and the cost has soared to over $400 billion per year. The American Heart Association reports that more women die from heart disease each year than from all cancers combined.
And only in America do we have a month or a day to celebrate everything from Hug a Ginger Day (a redhead) on February 22 to Valentine’s Day to American Heart Month. Did you know there is actually a calendar available that lists the day, week or month that we celebrate, or should I say, try to make you aware of, more than 100 diseases/infections/problems, called The 2019 National Health Observances Calendar! Today is National Donor Day, last week it was Congenital Heart Defects and next week it’s National Heart Valve Diesease.
But back to the Heart….
Open Your Heart. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. Total Eclipse of the Heart. Unbreak My Heart. My Heart Wasn’t In It. Broken Heart. Heart Attack. Heartless. Faint of Heart. Anyone Who Had a Heart. The word HEART is used in so many songs, expressions, slogans that we’ve almost become immune to its importance.
We’ve become a country of not just physically broken hearts but of emotionally and spiritually broken hearts.
Since Hearts are getting lots of attention this month and especially today, I thought it would be appropriate to work on opening my own heart and not just that pulsing, pumping muscle in my chest.
And just how will I do this? With deep listening and with mindful breathing.
The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. Buddha
Thicht Nhat Hanh wrote in True Love, A Practice for Awakening the Heart (1997), Breathing in, I am aware of my heart. Breathing out, I am smiling at my heart. Breathing in, I know that you are there; Breathing out, thank you for being there.
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