The Impact of a Heart
Your heart is where you hold your love, your emotion, your anxiety, your dreams and your memories. It’s is the keeper of peace, the symbol of tranquillity and safety; the giver of support and hope when used in conjunction with words from its centre. It’s the muscle that beats blood around your body and allows you to physically live.
When you are surrounded by the love of a good heart, your own becomes full and bright; life becomes effortless, your confidence is gently brought up to a level where you can feel so amazing.
The capacity for love within a heart is huge and limitless. The compassionate heart will always be available to you, surrounding you, supporting you, willing you to be the best you can be.
In life, this rich tapestry, this reality we create for ourselves and learn from with every new adventure and opportunity we are given, we are offered our fair share of moments to reflect, so learn and to grow.
When the heart is broken, the muscle will continue to beat; to all intents and purposes, it will continue to function on a practical level, but the spark, the electricity, the tenacity it had to be excited and open to life and its experiences, may take an unexpected turn or grind to a halt for a while.
Grief impacts the heart on a physical level, just as much as an emotional level. Your whole body can erupt in aches and pains you’ve never experienced before. Moments you thought you could handle, simply take your breath out of your body and leave you winded for days, weeks and months at a time. Instinct can leave you needing to escape to a safe place away from crowds and people, where you can feel how you want to, without being asked how many children you have or how you might be feeling in general on a day to day basis. Sometimes you just want to have the freedom to be; be the person you used to be before that heart break, before the grief, the storm, the thunder, the hand grenade, that obliterated the life you had and broke your heart to smithereens.
Anxiety in grief, can be without boundary and sometimes, it can help to just sit in the helplessness of it all and allow it for a moment to really consume you. It can feel frightening and upsetting to let your heart race and race, trying to rush to a place of calm, when it’s simply impossible to find that place.
But your heart is within you. It is such a powerful, beautiful muscle and symbol of infinity. Infinite love … infinite. Unending. It’s incredible, isn’t it? To think that love can be infinite. When I first held my first baby, Ella, I was overwhelmed by love. I was and remain in awe. To me, becoming a mother was and remains an incredible blessing and privilege. The love I feel for my children has no end and life and loss has taught me that by way of grief.
The heart, although weakened at times by illness and life events, never loses the power to love.
It was Ben’s birthday this week. He would have been fourteen years old. While my husband was immersed in a drum retreat, something he needed for his own heart, my sister spent the afternoon with my girls and me and we chatted, giggled, made a lemon drizzle cake; Ben’s favourite. We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and blew kisses to the sky. A random bee even hovered around us all, before landing on the cake to check if it was the right flavour, before buzzing away into the blue.
We walked the dogs in the sunlit woods and chatted and reminisced about all that has been good and continues to be good.
I find that forgiveness helps to heal the heart.
I forgive cancer for breaking my family; simply because I want to be free of the pain and free of the illness that tried to define my son and our family. It will never do that.
I think a lot about how much Ben loved birthdays and celebrations and I think he would have really enjoyed the gentleness of yesterday, knowing how much we love and miss him and his sharp wit.
I think about my girls and how much I love them, with the heart of a lion; and how proud I am of the people they are becoming, through this awful tragic set of circumstances beyond theirs and their brother’s control. They are so amazing.
When I think about my heart and the way anxiety impacts on it now, making me slow down, reflect and acknowledge the need for meditation and Qi Gong in my life, to allow more balance, I am grateful for my heart and the love it contains. I am grateful for the privilege I have been given to be my children’s mum and the love that has always held our family of five together.
I am so aware of the impact of one heart to another and the infinite bond of the love a heart can have for another; the impact of love that can transcend beyond life.
The impact of a heart is love and love will always be infinite.
