A healthy heart means that you appreciate and enjoy heartfelt connections with friends or family, can experience the emotions of love gratitude and grace, you can find joy, and can feel a connection to something greater than yourself.

It is very common when navigating a life challenge that our heart health suffers. We start to isolate ourselves from others as we commonly feel misunderstood in our grief or our loss. The depleting emotions that circulate through our heart space means we have difficulty finding gratitude or joy. And as for finding a higher purpose or something greater that can become an impossible task!

If you are experiencing a life challenge, grief or loss there are some small but essential steps that you can make to build on your heart health pillar.

• Label your emotions. This simply means tuning in at regular intervals throughout the day and asking yourself “how do I feel?” and simply label the feeling without the story. It is very common when navigating a life challenge for the brain to ruminate over the story that has led to your heartache. However neuroscience shows that ruminating endlessly on “the story” in actual fact does not help our mind or heart health. Simply naming the emotion that you feel can be without expanding into the story can be one way to start taming your emotional reactivity and calming the heart centre. Simply labelling how you feel in one sentence and allowing yourself to sit with it, and allowing it to pass of its own accord is one first step in building a healthy heart space.
• Learn Heart Math breathing techniques. If you sit somewhere quietly, close the eyes down and turn your attention towards your breath. Take slightly longer, slightly deeper breaths than normal at a pace that is comfortable for you. Imagine your breath simply flowing in and out of the chest area or heart space. Continue this process for a few minutes. This simple but effective Heart Math breathing technique is shown to improve our heart rate variability and our emotional health.
• Find Joy Write down times in your life when you’ve experienced joy. What activities make you smile? It could be patting your dog. It could be being creative such as cooking or painting. It could be with certain social situations such as dinner with friends or family. Or maybe it’s dancing or music. Each person has individual activities or occasions that bring them a sense of joy. Can you dedicate a small amount of time each week to allow yourself to simply experience that? That might mean that you put on your favourite music and dance in the lounge room. It might mean that you take time out for coffee with a friend. Or it might mean being creative. Time each week dedicated to this can help improve restore depleting emotions into feelings of renewal.
• What went well? A very simple but effective exercise at the end of each day is to simply ask what went well? Too often at the end of each day we reflect with friends or family and off load all of the problems occurred during the day. It is important to discuss your problems with loved ones, however can you also discuss what went well?

Exploring all that helps nurture our heart health is an essential part of our Rise up women’s wellness retreats. Navigating a life challenge? Find out more about our retreats here!

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