EMOTIONAL TRAINING

The heart is the most important muscle in the body. Its role is to keep you alive. A strong heart gives you a lot of strength in life. The heart is a blood pump and has the role of distributing oxygen and nutrition throughout the body. Also, the heart is a generator of emotions and feelings. Physically, it moves your blood and emotionally, it moves your emotions. The heart also has neurons like the brain, only the heart communicates through feelings and emotions, and the brain communicates through thoughts and words.

To have a loving, beautiful and healthy life, we need a loving, beautiful and healthy heart. The way our society is developed creates a lot of trauma for people, and most of them end up shutting down emotionally or being used to low feelings. Most people live in a constant state of stress with some moments of love, happiness or contentment. Few are those who live in a continuous and stable state of love, happiness and contentment. And these people work regularly to maintain this always positive inner state.

We as humans are drawn to having this positive inner state because it is basic human nature. Man is essentially good and wants both himself and those around him to feel good and enjoy love and happiness throughout his life. This positive natural state of man is seen in children. Children are closer to their true and pure source and express it through a state of innocence, kindness and love. Problems start to appear once the stress from their environment (parents, family, friends, teachers, etc.) starts to take its toll. Every conflict, trauma or unpleasant experience lowers his mood and weighs down his heart with unpleasant emotions and feelings. If there are many situations like this, the heart will end up closing down and will no longer be able to feel feelings of love, happiness and contentment.

Like any kind of muscle, the heart can be trained to become stronger. There are two ways to train our heart: one is physical, through effort and breathing, and one is emotional, energetic, through meditation, where we focus on positive emotions. Our goal is to make the heart a stronger muscle and a stronger positive emotional generator.

Physically, we work the heart through weight training in the gym, where we want to stress the heart as much as possible by using as much weight as possible (as much as the body can carry). Another very good training for the heart is HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) where we want to use the heart at 100% capacity during the short times of maximum intensity of the chosen exercises. Aerobic training and jogging are also good, even if they do not require the heart to the maximum. Everyone finds the type of training and the intensity according to their physical condition, experience, health and vitality. Some can do more and some less. The competition is with you, not with other people.

Dancing and sports are good and fun forms of exercise that train your heart. In addition to the physical effect created on the heart, there is also the pleasure effect created by the joy of dancing or practicing a sport. Any kind of medium or high intensity movement creates a general feeling of well-being in the body from the endorphins secreted by the brain. Movement is a very good form of therapy, where a general state of relaxation and inner peace is created.

Another very good form of heart training is the Wim Hoff Breathing Exercise. He is nicknamed the Iceman because he is the most resistant man in the coldest temperatures. He has many world records related to resistance to very low temperatures. He was able to last 2 hours covered from neck to toe in ice. He created a workout that can be practiced by anyone and in this way, any person can become resistant to the cold, so that they can bathe under freezing water.

This practice brings many benefits to the heart and the cardiovascular system. This training uses deep, conscious breathing, mental focus, and exposure to cold (cold showers, cold baths, ice baths). A workout starts with 3 cycles of 30 repetitions of deep abdominal and dynamic breathing. Between cycles, after the 30 deep breaths, hold the breath after exhale (without air) until the body can no longer and then take a deep and complete breath and hold the breath after inhale (with air in the body) for at least 15 seconds, then start the next cycle with 30 breaths. After the breathing practice, observe for a short time how the body feels and then practice some yoga postures by stretching the body. Then enter the shower and expose the body to cold water. Everything is done gradually, first you start with warm water and at the end 15-20 seconds with cold water. Then you keep increasing the duration of exposure to cold water until you can take a shower with only cold water. With time you keep increasing the duration of the shower until you can stay 10 minutes under the cold water, then you can switch to ice baths.

This practice is very beneficial for health, there is no need to go to ice baths or climb snowy mountains in boxers, it is enough just to take a shower with only cold water from time to time and you will have many benefits for the heart, circulation and vitality. It is also very good for concentration and calming the mind. The fact of being able to maintain a state of calm and being calmer during the day helps a lot to make the heart more relaxed.

We need to train our hearts physically, but the best heart training is emotional heart training. First, we must always become aware of how we feel in the present moment, if we feel positive it is good, if not, we must somehow make ourselves feel good.

A good way to relax is EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) which aims to release the negative emotion felt. More information about EFT can be found in the Therapies section.

Even if we do not feel negative, the practice of Meditation with Positive Feelings (love, happiness, contentment) helps the heart a lot. To meditate is to keep your unbroken attention (concentration) on only one thing, in our case only on one feeling. For example, we can practice a Self-Love Meditation every morning. We take 20 minutes every morning and focus continuously on feeling love for ourselves. In this way, we remain attentive and present only to the love we feel for ourselves. This is the most important feeling, Self-Love, not Partner or Family Love. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love someone else and you can’t receive love from someone else, no matter how much they love you. The habit of loving yourself every morning through meditation will program your heart to feel more and more and more strongly the feeling of self-love. This feeling will open your heart more and more and give you the possibility to love yourself more, to love the rest more and to receive more love from the rest.

Through Meditation, we can train the heart to cultivate many emotions of love. We can meditate on love for loved ones, we can meditate on love for our projects and dreams, we can meditate on love for the Universe and Divinity.

We can choose any emotion we want to feel more and more and meditate on it. We don’t need something external to create that emotion, we can create it from within. The more we stay attentive to how that emotion feels in the heart, the more it will grow in our being and in our life. In time, this desired emotion from within will materialize externally in the form of people, things and experiences.

We can meditate on feelings of gratitude, feelings of happiness, feelings of pleasure, feelings of ecstasy, feelings of confidence, feelings of courage, etc. We can meditate on whatever we want to feel. There are some people who can’t easily feel some positive feelings because they haven’t felt them before and don’t know how they feel. For example, there are people who cannot feel confidence in themselves. They must communicate with their heart as they would with a person and ask their heart to show them what self-confidence feels like. At the same time, they can visualize or imagine situations where they take actions where they feel confident. Regular repetition is the key to success. At first, it will be more difficult to awaken this feeling, but with time, with dedication and with a constant meditative practice, you will reach the awakening and activation of this feeling in the heart, which will be felt much more in everyday life with day. Through this practice, the heart and subconscious become accustomed to automatically react with confidence.

With time, it will be noticed that the heart has a continuous and stable state of positivity, and the person can enjoy life much more and more easily and will no longer be so easily affected by life’s difficulties and challenges. A life of love, happiness and contentment is accessible to all when they turn their attention within. Deep within us, we have a very large resource of love, happiness and contentment and through meditation we can access it. If we wait for the outside to give us what we want and remain influenced only by it, we will end up experiencing many disappointments that bring negative emotions and feelings that end up weighing down and closing the heart.

I hope I have inspired you to start exercising and meditating. In this way you will have a loving, happy and healthy heart.