Honoring my hard-working, healed heart ❤️‍🩹

An essay in response to a prompt

This summer, one of my creative projects is working (or playing, actually) with Suleika Jaouad’s Book of Alchemy. (You can see a previous post here.) I made the commitment to respond, react and write to the 100 prompts offered as gifts in this inspiring book.

FYI- in case you don’t know about this book, (how could you not?) here’s what Suleika says about it in her introduction:

“It provides tools to engage with discomfort, to peel back the layers, to uncover your truest, most laid-bare self— and in doing so, to distill kernels of insight, to dream daringly, to learn to hold the brutal and beautiful facts of life in the same palm.”

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m engaging those tools, one day at a time.

Here is my initial post about this project: Gratitude as a state of being, inspiration as an alchemical gift. The responses that have bubbled up in me as a result of the prompts in the book are turning into mini essays, so I’m sharing some of them here on Continuing Wonderment.

Here’s a recent one that came from the prompt below, given by Nell Diamond, from her moving essay “Tender and Strong”, p. 161.

“Think about a time you experienced a shift in your relationship with your body. What caused this shift? Did it last?”

Here is my heart in a field of flowers. (thanks, AI)

I took my heart for granted for most of my life. When it was filled with love, I rejoiced in the bliss. Then when it was broken, I succumbed to the sorrow. But I never really thought about my heart as a living thing. It was just— there.

Until, in 2019, when I was 66, it made itself known, loud and clear. It said, in no uncertain terms, “Enough! Pay attention to me!” I was diagnosed with aortic valve stenosis and an aneurysm, and told I need open heart surgery as soon as possible. And suddenly, my heart became the focus, the main event, the thing I had to pay attention to at the expense of everything else.

A record of our emotional life is written on our hearts. Fear and grief, for example, can cause profound myocardial injury. It’s been said that the heart is the seat of the soul. A physical thing, yes, but also a metaphysical one.

After a series of traumatic emotional life events some years before, I had put a barrier around my heart to protect it. It had became calloused, hardened, the way callouses form on fingertips from practicing guitar— the metal strings dig into the ends of your fingers, and eventually those fingertips become as hard as little pebbles, until the strings no longer have any effect on them. Unbeknownst to me, that was happening to a part of my heart, specifically the aortic valve, which controls the flow of blood into the aorta from the left ventricle as it beats. My aortic valve was slowly becoming calcified, hardened, stiffened, and the aorta itself was ballooning because the blood wasn’t flowing right.

It’s as if my heart had become wounded, and was building a shell around that valve, like a pearl forming around a grain of sand in an oyster. It was a self-defense maneuver. I think my heart was trying to protect itself. Whether my own personal trauma and emotional pain had initiated this disease or not, it happened. After years of protecting and wrapping up a wounded heart, that heart demanded repair. It needed to be opened. Literally.

Open heart surgery made me realize how precious and important the hidden parts of my body are. My relationship with my body, and in particular that hard-working organ that never stops beating, has shifted since that time.

I have a grateful, healed heart now.

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July 8th is the 6th anniversary for my heart and me. So far, so good. 🫀

What about you? Have you had open heart surgery? Are you reading The Book of Alchemy, or are you ready to? Are you inspired by my 100 day summer journaling project with it? Let me know in the comments….

Thanks for reading— it’s more appreciated than you know. Clicking on the 💜 means the world to me, sharing or restacking this post is even better, and leaving me a comment would make my day!