Engage your Heart-Mind
Please see our entire May e-newsletter, Reversing Heart Disease, here.
by Carol Belanger, BA, RM, BHS
Our heart can be both the strongest and the most tender organ in our body.
On the strong side of things, according to standard calculations the entire volume of blood within the circulatory system is pumped by the heart each minute (at rest). During vigorous exercise, the cardiac output can increase up to 7 fold (35 liters/minute). That means a healthy heart pumps about 4-5L of blood through approx. 97km of blood vessels in our body in about 1min. The heart is responsible for keeping activity happening in a crucial way and needs to be kept functional and tuned-up. The brain uses approximately twenty percent of the body’s blood and needs twenty-five percent of the body’s oxygen supply to function optimally. Rejuvenating activity helps keep blood oxygen levels up.
On the tender side of things, our heart is exposed to every strong to nuanced emotion that passes through our body, that changes our hormone levels, nervous system signals, influences how our organs are functioning, how tense our muscles are etc., and how our heart is responding to it all. The heart, and more accurately, the heart-mind, is the epicentre of us. It’s just that we give more of our attention to our minds, mistakenly believing that it alone is ‘running the show’.
