Last month’s blog was about using Summer’s healing gifts when our heart is in relatively good shape. This blog looks at Summer’s gifts for healing serious heart hurts.
As lovely as Summer can be, it has a tough side, too. There are obvious risks like dehydration, sunburn and other forms of burnout from too much of all that comes with this season.
Other challenges of Summer are less obvious – and far riskier. This Season of the Heart comes with lows as well as highs.
Our Tender Hearts
Our hearts are a bit more open and vulnerable now. If you’ve been feeling more affected by news or events that ‘pull your heartstrings,’ you are not alone! Has anyone else found themselves humming lullabies with immigrant children in mind?
Summer provides much of what our hearts need to heal. But we’re not always able to access these healing gifts. Laughter, love, beauty, spontaneity, play, trust and touch can ‘show up missing’ as we say in my work. Painfully so, when much around us is blossoming!
Our hearts may be ready for Summer. Or not. We may catch just the spark we need for our hearts to open gently, like a rose, peeling back delicate petals to reveal our lovely live center. Or we may open up less gently, more like bolting awake from deep sleep, reeling, feeling dizzy, over-exposed, panicky. Or we may feel too unsafe or heavy-hearted to open up in any way.
Sometimes we flow freely with the ‘the living is easy’ of Summertime. And sometimes life doesn’t feel easy at all. Some of this we can absolutely control. And some we absolutely cannot.
Flare Ups of Old Injuries
When we feel weighed down or uneasy all through the Summer, we are in a very risky place. Our heart is in trouble. This may be due to a recent heart injury, heartache or heartbreak. Or it may be an older traumatic injury that has impacted our heart. We often survive traumatic injuries without fully recovering.
Unhealed heart injuries tend to show up more clearly – and painfully – come Summer. They can simmer for years under layers of scar tissue before flaring up one sunny Summer day.
Attention lapses, memory glitches or difficulty sleeping can be early signs of a heart in need of healing. All the things you remember experiencing the first time someone ‘broke your heart!’ We may also feel easily startled, joyless or have a hard time relating to others. These will persist if the heart does not heal fully. Over time, patterns of anxiety and depression can arise. Eventually, a variety of unexplained symptoms, including persistent pains that defy both diagnosis and pain killers.
We are starting to hear a lot in the news about the longterm effects of trauma. In Asian Healing Arts this is not news. Much of our healing work involves freeing up our circulation in places where trauma has essentially locked it down.
Effects of Trauma
Here’s how it works: Any shock or trauma affects our heart. In the presence of any threat or injury, we reflexively tighten. The more startled or overwhelmed we are, the more our heart orchestrates an over-all clench. This can actually protect us – in the moment. The tension creates a container in which we’re a bit safer – for a moment. It contains whatever damage is occurring – for the moment. For instance, it can stem blood flow and minimize loss of our lifeblood.
After a traumatic injury, the heart quickly starts beating again. But some part of us usually stays a bit clenched. This impinges some part of our circulation. Over time, various functions can be compromised. Traumatic injuries cast a long shadow by cutting some part of us off from our capacity to connect fully with the love and warmth that circulates with our lifeblood. This goes double for traumas in childhood!
In Asian Healing Arts, we see the heart as the ruler of every other function. Sort of like an emperor. A good emperor’s peaceful presence helps the entire kingdom prosper. People come and go from all over the kingdom – just like our blood comes and goes from our heart to all our extremities. Everyone leaves their audience with their emperor clearer, calmer and more fully engaged. They carry those blessings to the farthest reaches of the kingdom.
(This may not sound much like leadership as we are experience it at this juncture of time and space – if the thought of this let you breathe a little easier for a second, try daydreaming about what this might be like. It’s good exercise for your heart!)
If we experienced some peace early in life, we’ll find it easier to recover this when it goes missing later on. Heart health begins with being held lovingly. Without this tenderness an infant will ‘fail to thrive.’ How much we get of this varies. And all of us eventually have other experiences in life, some of them injurious.
Steps Toward Healing
Cynthia Zanti Jabs, L.Ac, shares two Qi Gong movements that are particularly beneficial for the heart.
Cynthia teaches Qi Gong as part of her acupuncture practice.
Follow Ruscombe for more tips on healing with the seasons.
The first step in healing any injury is to recognize that an injury has occurred. This can be challenging with heart injuries as our minds play tricks on us to ease the pain of trauma.
Anyone jarred by trauma can feel like they’ve been bounced right out of the driver’s seat of their life. My mother-in-law described this best shortly after the sudden death of my father-in-law: ‘There’s a ‘before’ me and an ‘after’ me and I don’t know which one will show up when I open my mouth.’
People are rarely so conscious of this split. They are more likely to simply swing wildly from one version of reality to another. The internal battle that ensues wrecks some serious whiplash. A person can become their own worst enemy – and suicidal. Or they can become public enemy number one if they project some part of their internal battle outward. External defenses (walls and weapons) sometimes bring temporary relief to the pain of this internal dis-integration. We all experience some of this at some point on our lives.
Healing from trauma starts by gently easing the lock-down that occurred in the presence of whatever overwhelmed our defenses and took away our sense of control. In safe and caring context, we can gradually re-integrate our ‘before’ and ‘after’ selves. This IS doable. But we can’t do it on our own.
Partnership is Key
Partnership is key to healing any heart injury. Isolation is very risky when the heart is healing. By ourselves, our ‘emperor’ cannot regain the control that was lost in the crisis. Even close-in friends and family members can’t always penetrate protective barricades we build around our injured hearts. Our brain chemistry lines up to reinforce our need for whatever ad hoc defenses we came up with, even when they threaten our life.
We need to find a context where we feel safe enough to experience our helplessness and accept our vulnerability. When we can see our injury for what it is, we can begin to see beyond it. Gently, gradually, we can start to let go of the clench and all the makeshift barriers we layered around our heart that we thought we needed to survive.
Growing medical understanding of the role of brain chemistry in these patterns are giving us better tools to work with all this. Insights about opioids are starting to limit their use. Meditative practices are being used more widely and effectively, as by children trapped in the cave in Thailand. And practitioners of various professional healing arts offer partnership in this process. Most, like Asian Healing Arts, get that body, mind and spirit are all involved so they can partner on all these levels.
I believe the increasing frequency of jolting experiences and our failure to recognize their impact causes much suffering, not to mention a whole lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. Our challenge is waking ourselves and others from the nightmarish state of a human being shredded by unhealed trauma.
Being whole-hearted means being fully present in the moment, from moment to moment. May our hearts bear what they must to get to our next moment. And here’s wishing each of you all the tender loving care you need to heal your heart this Summer.
Illustration by Amanda Bomster-Jabs.
Cynthia Zanti Jabs, L.Ac., has practiced Acupuncture and Medical Qi Gong for two decades. She can be reached at her Ruscombe Mansion office by calling 443-226-6626.