Hi there, come on in. This is Seriously Yourself, the podcast and I'm Ingrid Helander. 

Hey, hello, come on in, how are you? I am glad that you are here and I hope you're feeling well. Today I'm talking about heartache, ouch, heart ache. Have you had that experience heartache? I don't know if it's exactly the same as feeling a broken heart. I kind of feel like that's different, That feels more acute, you know, like someone has just slapped you across the face and said, I never want to see you again and oh my heart was just broken where they said something really cruel and I had a broken heart, I guess that's similar. 

And I'm talking about like when you focus on your breathing and you notice your heart and you might or might not have the sensation of heaviness or aching or kind of pain like. Do you know what I mean? Do you ever feel that way? I think I carry a lot of feeling in my heart. I know what I'm working with clients lots of times they're feeling will go right to their gut. They'll say, oh I just feel almost nauseous right now and I know that feeling too. And perhaps you do as well, that might be a more predominant sensation. 

But for a lot of people, when I ask, how do you feel, they'll point to their chest square in the center and they're like, it's always right here. And it can reverberate and be all around their chest sometimes up into the shoulders and down into the belly. That area of our anatomy, sure does carry a lot of sensation. When I first started doing internal family systems model, which is a more somatic model of therapy where you do pay attention to what your body tells you what your body feels like. We were all sitting in a circle and the man who created the model, Richard Schwartz was guiding us to pay attention to our hearts with curiosity and I got to tell you my heart was aching, so bad. It felt really like if you could just, if if you're in a seated position, you just, your your heart was so heavy that you just folded down onto your knees with this aching feeling like, ow ow ow.  And we were probably 40 of us sitting around in a circle listening to him, you know, ask us to be curious about this different kinds of sensations from the heart. And another part of me was sort of thinking, "holy cow, I wonder if I'm okay. This really, really hurts. Like maybe though I'm curious and we're doing this exercise and it's all perfectly fine and we're supposed to be just curious and interested. Maybe I'm having, like a coronary, you know, like maybe this is a heart attack" and I'm just sitting here going, huh? I wonder what's happening. I wonder what my heart wants me to know when maybe the heart wants me to go to the emergency room. Now. Now, as it turns out, I have a very healthy heart and my heart was not advising that I go to the emergency room, but I wasn't used to paying a whole lot of attention to what my heart felt like, right? Unless it was basically jumping out of my chest in some weird arrhythmia, which I had often as a kid and a young adult, or it was pounding unnecessarily hard or necessarily hard from exercise. I didn't really notice it, I didn't pay much attention. 

But boy, in that moment when we were sitting in that circle and we were paying attention, I recognized there was a lot going on there. It really hurt. It felt heavy, it felt like a squeeze almost, but not the good kind that you get when you get a hug, but like the squeeze of a fist, maybe the kind where your fingernails dig into your palm, was that kind of a feeling. And the more I focus toward my heart, the more I was trying to get it to relax a little bit and the more I was trying to get it to relax a little bit, the more it actually tightened and hurt and sent out feelings of yearning and frustration and confusion and sadness and grief. 

You know, our hearts are a little brain. I don't even think they're a little brain. I think they're quite a sophisticated and magnificent part of our mind and they hold so much information if we just are quiet enough to listen. And honestly brave enough courage comes from the word heart and I think you need courage to listen to one's heart. It's not easy and it can feel really terrible, like maybe you're having a heart attack. 

What I discovered in that first time listening and paying attention to my heart was that I had stored up a lot of hardship. You know, just parts of me taking on the pain of life, like we all do ,honestly, like we all do. And my heart wanted me to know memories and concepts that were hurting me that were holding me back that were making me feel kind of lousy and as I was able over time to breathe to shift my focus toward the information coming from that pain in the heart, I was able to help it. You know, you don't have to just walk around with a big heavy heart all the time, acting as if you know you have a chest full of butterfly right? We we often have a heavy heart and it's okay to look at it. It's okay to listen to it. It's okay to not talk at it for a minute. It was really funny when I'm working with people even when I'm working myself and the request will be to focus toward what you're feeling. Just focus on it and be with it for a minute and ask it, you know what's going on. And often within seconds, either my client or sometimes me are talking at this sensation, you know demanding that it step back or demanding that it change you're demanding that it tell us what's going on with you. And it just doesn't work that way. So the idea of listening with an inner voice or an inner ear to these inner voices is really confusing and I get it's really tricky at first. But it is how we are we are set up to be able to do it. I don't know if it comes from sort of just basic instinct that we've forgotten along the way. As our brains have become kind of the the you know, ruler of the body or what, but we really can listen into what our feelings are and especially those of our heart. I think the heart in particular is so full and rich of the neurons that communicate that if we just wait a minute, we're going to get impressions and sometimes images and sometimes words or sensations or memories and they come and you can't make this stuff up. I'll tell you right now, you cannot make it up. It surprises me every time and it surprises my clients every time. They'll go, oh my goodness, where did that come from there? It was if you've lived a life, you have stored info right, that's how we survive. What if we didn't store any information, can you imagine? Right? 

We really take for granted that we can store information that we need to live right? Like people with memory of disability. They can't do a lot of things right? They can't drive often because it wouldn't occur to them to hit the brake or to know what a stop sign was. Right. But we take for granted that we can do all of these things because we have memory in the brain that our brain holds this like a little you know roller decks little card. That is not an updated image. I recognize it's like a computer hard drive. How's that? Right? It's the memory bank but I really want us to remember that the body too holds memory, it holds insight, it holds images that we need for living. We need these for living. 

So take a moment even now even now as you hear my voice take a breath and send it towards your heart and actually as I do that right now my heart calms. It really feels rested and like ah you said what you wanted to say I get you. But take a minute with some curiosity and some compassion and just notice your heart, you know that beating thing in your chest and all the surrounding sensations maybe up high into your throat, maybe down lower towards your diaphragm all of that. I think you're going to find it if you haven't done it lately it's kind of amazing. And maybe if you're committed to just doing it a little bit more. You know, maybe before you make a decision, or if you're feeling some kind of confusion in your mind, you take a minute and you recognize I've got another resource here, hang on. And you take a breath and you breathe into that beautiful beating heart space. Ha! And hopefully like me, you won't feel like you're having a heart attack and perhaps you should call 911 though. If you do and you are then do. But in my case, I was fine. I'm gonna hope that in your case you're fine too, have a wonderful week. I'll talk with you next time and in the meantime, notice that heart, be a little more seriously yourself in your heart space, right? And let me know how it goes for you. I really look forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much for being here. Talk to you soon. Bye bye. 

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Seriouslyourself. To help treat yourself well each week, go ahead and subscribe to Seriouslyourself wherever you listen to podcasts, and please share this link with anyone you love who might be seeking a little more truth and delight in their lives. 

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And thanks to those who make Seriouslyourself special: our wonderful music is Midsummer from the album Flood by the fabulous Joel Helander. Seriouslyourself is produced by Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, Executive Producer. The ideas and inspirations come from beautiful humans like you, that I feel lucky to know. And I'm Ingrid Helander. Take good care of yourself. See you next time.