There’s a mystique about the human heart that goes way beyond its apparent physical function. The word “heart” is accepted in common speech as metaphor for emotional experience, even in our supposedly secular and unsuperstitious day and age. In truth, I find it hard to argue that the seat of a person’s feeling-self is centered in the middle of the chest, right around where the heart organ is. That’s how I experience my feelings, at least.

In Chinese medicine, the classics describe the heart as a monarch governing the rest of the body. Not only does the duty of regulating blood flow go to the heart, but also the activity of the five senses and of the mind itself. Indeed, for disorders of the psyche and loss of consciousness in Chinese medicine, treatment principles are traditionally aimed, not at the brain, but at the heart.

This has been on my mind lately because, in my investigation of my own needs, I’ve determined that my heart is weak. It lacks nourishment. My shen (spirit) is agitated, disturbed. It is without root.

And I’m certainly not alone.

It can be thought of as perhaps the most widespread epidemic that nobody cares about. A sickness of the heart, a lack of root, contributes to so many other ills of the world. But it is silent, invisible, merely a vague psychic ache in the chest, and we push it aside and carry on with earning our daily bread or whatever other tasks we must accomplish to fend off disaster. So we forget the needs of the heart.

The pumping action of the physical heart is organized by an electrical impulse that spreads across the surface of the heart muscle, and issued hierarchically, that is, from a single source: the sinoatrial node, the body’s natural pacemaker. If this coordination doesn’t happen, then the heart goes into fibrillation, can’t figure out whether it’s contracting or relaxing, no blood gets pumped, and you die.

Seen more broadly, this involves the body’s ability to create structure and maintain rhythm.

But the heart’s rhythm doesn’t exist as a separate entity. The electrical impulse carries on regularly, of course, but the rate varies, for instance, according to whether you’re being attacked by a bear or resting comfortably in bed. It varies according to the environment.

But the heart responds to far more subtle variations than that.

When I tune in to the needs of my heart, I find it constantly agitated by the daily activities of modern life. In Chinese medicine they say that overexcitement scatters the energy of the heart, and I feel that to be true. When I look at my daily activity through that lens, I wonder at all the entertainment I seek out from boredom, the thrilling movies I watch, the random bits of excitement I find on the Internet—all those things that make me tense and shorten my breathing. I wonder at all of the stress, the push to work five days a week even when the body says to stop, the pressure to make money and provide for family, all pushing the heart to keep pumping away.

When I tune in to the needs of my heart, I find its energy constantly scattered, from the stresses and dramas of daily life, from the real or imagined critical voices of others, the demands placed on me come hell or high water.

When I tune in to the needs of my heart, I find a lack of support from anything other than what’s in my own bodymind, and I feel alone.

These things deplete the heart. What, then, nourishes it?

I find that the experience of the heart being nourished comes, for me, only when I myself tune my awareness and align my senses to the appropriate frequency, like tuning to a radio station. The “frequency” of excitement or entertainment or stress feels rough, fast, high. The “frequency” that nourishes the heart is slower and deeper. This vibration is one that supports the heart’s needs of rhythm and structure, that gives it a solace from the overexcitement of stimulating entertainment or punishing stress.

When I tune to that place, I find that it is nothing other than the rhythm of the earth around me.

I used to read Greek myths when I was a kid. One story that stuck with me is the story of Antaeus. Antaeus was a giant who fought Heracles (Hercules), and Heracles, despite his great strength, could not beat Antaeus, until he noticed one thing. Whenever he thought he was gaining an edge over Antaeus, but the giant was thrown to the ground, he would regain his strength.

So Heracles held Antaeus up so that he was no longer touching the ground, whereupon Antaeus lost his strength, and Heracles crushed him to death.

Oh, and interesting thing, Antaeus’ mother—her name was Gaia.

There is some esoteric relationship between the rooting of the heart in the self and the rooting of the entire being in the earth. What the entirety of that relationship is, I can’t say. All I’m going on is what my body tells me. But my body is telling me that in order to restore balance to my heart, in order to give it the solidity and regularity it needs to thrive, it must be attuned to something broader and deeper than exciting stories. It must be attuned to a living, breathing, oscillating energy, a rhythm whose speed is not the speed of car chases but the speed of the sun moving across the sky, the speed of the circulation of tree sap, the speed of the breeze moving the clouds.

Tuning in to that level, my heart feels stronger. Antaeus putting his feet back upon the Mother.

When you attune to that level, things are no longer simply animate or inanimate objects. Everything has a rhythm and a vibration, and so everything lives. Everything can be listened to and attuned to in a different and separate way. Every single thing has the potential to be communicated with.

But. I’m not there yet. My interest right now is just in restoring my basic ability to function in the world, and more and more, I’m discovering that my physiology is unstable without a rooting in the authentic rhythm of the world around me.

I do wonder about the artificial rhythms that our technology has introduced—the electrical lighting that has allowed me to stay up late into the night writing this blog post, the heating and cooling that lets me completely ignore the seasons, the international food market that lets me have summer food in winter and winter food in summer. I wonder about living within a city-entity that “never sleeps” like they say about New York City. I wonder what that does to a person. The effects are so subtle as to be barely noticeable. But so much is built on the heart’s rhythm, on the soul’s rhythm.

Our lives and our connections to the vibrations that the earth emanates are interrupted by our habitual, harmful ways of thinking and talking and walking, and by the electromagnetically toxic environments we live in. It is always a struggle to attune to the earth in these conditions.

I don’t have all the answers. Still, I think this one answer is an important one.

As I work to repair my soul from the damage done to it by living life, I find that the life of the human heart and the life of the earth are not so far apart after all.