Heart space

Mediastinum: the space around the heart

Notice the intimate relationship the heart organ has as it is nestled between the lungs and the respiratory diaphragm. One can quite beautifully see the arch of the ascending aorta and pulmonary trunk bending up and out into the subclavian and pulmonary arteries like the roots of a tree. Between the outer wall of the heart known as the pericardium and the adjacent membrane of the lung, known as the visceral pleura, we have the pleural spaces which are not really spaces at all but glide plains that are slippery like kelp. Allowing for smooth efficient movement of the heart against the lungs as we breath, bend and twist our bodies throughout our lives.

video of heart and lungs breathing

 What the movie image doesn’t show is how the heart folds and spirals in on itself creating the ventricles. It also doesn’t show the three dimensionality of the heart’s relationship to the lungs or how the heart is suspended from fascial fibers that travel up into the neck on the front of the spine. Notice the striking view of the fascial anchoring to the respiratory diaphragm and how the heart leaps into a stretch at maximum inhale. Good thing we have a sturdy breast plate we call our sternum and the ribs that wrap from the front all the way around to back to protect the bellows of our lungs and the life pumping organ that is our heart. I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the cardiac fibers of the vagus nerve that travel from the cranium in rhizomatic fascion down to the heart, wrapping around the esophagus like a lattice on its way to the stomach and the majority of our abdominal organs. The gut Brain axis is often mentioned but I like to think of it as the gut-heart-brain axis. And yet, to reduce my body down to anatomy and physiology feels insufficient to my own experience as a human being—that is to say a spirit or consciousness that is inhabiting a body. I experience myself as a multidimensional, omnidirectional being. 

Ah I digress, I wanted to sit down to write about the space around the heart and what happens to it as we live and experience the many hardships of ordinary and not so ordinary human growth and change. 

If our being perceives a threat our body will often contract in defense, a preparation to fight, flee, or freeze. Our bodies also have other strategies to keep ourselves safe such as the fawn response which I will not get into here. Often the state of contracture we find ourselves in becomes chronic. From the outside point of view this can look like many different things but will often take the form of excessive curvature of the upper back and a loss of dimensionality through the chest from front to back. The shoulders will slide up and forward around the rib cage hanging off the neck rather than being supported from the ribs below. The neck will have to intensify its own curve to find a more functional relationship with the upper back and in turn this will create a jutting forward of the chin and tipping back of the head. It’s almost as if we are a long necked turtle that is contracting the back of its head back into its shell. 

As someone who has historically lived with this posture let me share what it can feel like. One can often feel a sense of heaviness or flatness through the chest; there may often be a sense of tension or stiffness in the upper back, ribs, shoulders and neck. There may be the proverbial experience of feeling like the neck or rib is “out”. This experience may also be accompanied by  feeling constriction through the throat, nasal congestion or headaches. One might feel like it’s difficult to take a full easeful breath in, and it can feel near impossible to find any sort of back bend through the spine. 

Now it’s important to recognise and honor that our body is always seeking safety and comfort and the shape our body prefers to rest in is often a strategy to find it, even if in the long run it may not ultimately serve us. 

As I work on my clients I find myself working with the space around the heart more and more these days as I help my clients on their somatic integrative journeys. This work was preceded by my own dive into my heart-space exploration. I have found as I find presence with myself, and my own heart there is a multi dimensional groundswell that unfurls from just behind my heart down into the center of my pelvis and the space below my navel. Or what is called the lower “Dantien” in Daoist practices, it can be translated to english as the elixir field. The spaciousness I feel allows me to notice the anatomical relationships within my chest as they relate to themselves and the rest of my body. Allowing me to feel both where there is movement available and also where I would still like capacity for movement. There is also a subtle spherical current of energy that emanates from my heart that travels outward through my shoulders down my arms through the palms of my hands and out the tips of my fingers. The buoyant quality I feel through my heart space might well be overwhelming if it were not rooted in my dantien and supported by the foundation of my pelvis, feet and the ground. This quality of being rooted through the core in this way, is still, and will be an ongoing practice for me.

Now imagine that you are a child or teenager and you find yourself in a position where you perceive someone is threatening you. This could be as much as someone raising their voice, physically restraining or attacking you, or it could be something less obvious like having someone speaking to you in a condescending tone or simply ignoring your own rightful human dignity that exists just because you are alive. I often name these less noticeable, more insidious types of experiences as “ordinary violence.” I will tick off some memories of my own: being tickled until I cried or peed myself, being dunked and held underwater by a kid that was bigger than me until I was gasping and choking on water, being kicked or hit in the head by an older brother who did know his own strength, being held down so I could be pelted with snowballs and snow ground into my face by an adult man all in the guise of play. 

These sorts of experiences are often couched in phrases like “boys will be boys.” Unfortunately some of those boys never stopped being little boys and have now grown into men...

Now consider the heart space, not only is it a blood pumping, omnidirectional life force emitting center, but also what Judith Blackstone refers to as the “ground of emotion,” the place where all of our capacity to feel the multiplicity of feelings arises. It’s no wonder we go to such great lengths to protect it. To have an emotion, by its very nature is to have a somatic experience. If we do not feel safe as we are developing throughout our life, we humans unconsciously shape ourselves into postures of protection. And sometimes we may then get stuck in that shape, finely felted together with extra collagen fibers from the inner layers of our plural glide plains, out to the layers of our myofascial and neurovascular relationships, even our skin can be recruited to contract into our protective, postural positioning.

In my work as a somatic integrative practitioner I use my hands, my voice, and my presence to make gentile contact with my clients inviting the layers of their body to disentangling, delaminate disadhear from one another, so as to open up the possibility for free flowing functional movement. Restoring a sense of safety, agility and grace for my clients or a state I like to refer to as dynamic stability. The word poise comes to mind, that place of ease where one is inhabiting their equilibrium and resting into the feeling of being at home within their body but also a sense of readiness and receptivity.

I have found that solely reducing someone down to structure has limited results. I welcome clients as whole beings as they walk through my door. I pay special attention to their emotional tone and nervous system state. I get curious about what their relationship to their heart is like, and how they are finding support. And of course, I notice their breathing. While we work together I track multiple threads of their story so I am able to fully see them, hear them and reflect their own humeness back to them. Sometimes this is done with words, but it is often done with contact and presence.