February is National Heart Month and most of us know how to take care of our heart’s physical health. We hear it all the time: eat right with a minimum of saturated fats, exercise at least three times a week, and get eight hours of sleep a night. But what about taking care of your emotional and spiritual heart?

EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL HEART HEALTH

How can we apply the same self-care that we apply to our physical heart health to our emotional heart health? What do we need in our life to feel that our hearts are healing? Are we able to ask ourselves these questions to find our own unique heart health?

SELF LOVE

One of the most neglected principles of spiritual and emotional hearth health is self-love. So often – and we usually don’t realize it – we look to the outside to fulfill our hearts. Whether it’s a friendship, work relationship, or love relationship, we may get so caught up in the opinions and thoughts of others that we push our own self-love right out the window. But self-love is one of the most important ways to keep the heart truly healthy. Through self-love, we can experience our own self worth and find the strength and imagination to accomplish our goals and dreams.

SELF EXPRESSION

Recently, my friend’s little boy was playing with a little plastic heart from a toy doctor’s kit. (Little Surgeons of America, anyone?) Anyone who has spent any time with toddlers or little kids knows that their toys take a beating and this toy heart was no exception. When we deny ourselves our honest words and our self-expression, our hearts can feel just as jagged and beaten down as that little boy’s beat up toy heart. But if we find ways to express ourselves, whether through art, writing, dance or even honest conversations with people we love, we’re well on our way to healing our hearts and breathing life back into them.

Photo by by AlicePopkorn