The Season of Heartbreak

I think everyone has experienced suffering and heartache around the holidays and new year. It is so very difficult to face the daunting prospect of a new year after ending a year of stressful and often tragic events. What is very clear in my practice is that the beginning of the year is a time of heart-related ailments that walk through my door. A-Fib, heart palpitations, paroxysmal tachycardia, congestive heart failure, heart murmurs, heart attack .... all of these seem to appear at the beginning of every new year.

The reason for this is that the body's emotional experience is interchangeable with its physiological experience. Heartache and grief will manifest as chest pain and irregular heartbeats. Our body cannot tell the difference between the agonizing pain of grief and the pain of poor coronary circulation. Interestingly the people who seem to especially face these types of conditions are caretakers - therapists, health care workers, chiropractors, teachers - really anyone that pours themselves into other people are prone to heart-related ailments because of the volume of sadness, loss and grief that they watch others go through. It is virtually impossible to watch sadness and not feel sadness.

More and more we need to protect ourselves from losing too much of our own emotional life in the caring for someone else. We also need to protect ourselves from the overly graphic images that are forced upon us through media, YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle. There is only so much sadness and loss that we can face. Historically we only were aware of loss within our local community. Now we are made aware of constant stories of loss with every broadcast. It is too much to bear and creates a stress on our heart that is not our own.

For this reason, it is important to check in with ourselves at least once each day to see how we are feeling and to reconnect ourselves to our own experience. In this way we are reacting truly to our own daily experience instead of blending in the emotions that we have taken on from other people and events. This is an essential way to protect the heart and to reduce heart-related stressors.

I also recommend some great remedies to my patients to help them peel away the layers of emotional heartbreak so that they become attuned to their own heart experience. One key medicinal I use is the homeopathic Heart's Song Milieu, a wonderful spray to restore the harmony of the heart. I provide this along with a topical essential oil blend specifically to harmonize the energy of the heart with your own energy. The homeopathic Heart Fatigue is another great remedy for when the heart becomes overwhelmed by the recovery process from loss. But by far the best overall remedy is the herb Hawthorn, known as "the nurse for the elderly heart". This isn't just for the heart of an elderly person, it is for when the heart acts as though it is worn out, tired, overwhelmed ... which is actually the definition of Congestive Heart Failure.

Now if you look closely, conventional medicine discusses every heart condition as either a structural problem or a functional problem. Functional problems are often of unknown cause and it is exactly these types of situations that are related to the emotional distress that heartbreak creates. This is the reason for the test known as the Heart Sound Recorder test because we can separate structural issues involving the valves of the heart from functional heart issues and the emotional experiences that can bring them about. In this way, many heart conditions can be turned around.

So check in with your emotional life for a few moments and think about the things that have affected you recently, especially if you have begun to experience heart-related symptoms. Starting to create daily separations between self and non-self can do wonders to limit what you inadvertently take on. We cannot avoid heartbreak, but we can limit our heart's experience to our own and find ways to mend our heart, even after it has broken into pieces.

Karen Clickner, ND is a nationally registered naturopathic physician with 30 years experience, specializing in Lyme, Infertility and Autoimmune Diseases. She is also the owner of Conscious Body Natural Medicine with locations in Holden and Westborough, MA. For more information visit www.consciousbodynatmed.com