The subject of heart disease is close to my heart, pun intended. 

My father’s side of the family has a long history of the disease. He passed away from a heart attack at the age of 58. Many other family members have had heart attacks as well. My youngest cousin suffered a heart attack in his 40s, and my second youngest cousin passed away from a heart attack a couple of years ago. 

But my family is hardly alone; heart disease is the leading cause of death in America for both men and women. 

Thus, our lead article this month is about improving heart health, and our Conscious Eating article also addresses the topic. The Fit Body piece introduces the concept of heart rate variability (HRV), a key measure of overall health. Heart Math Institute, a California-based nonprofit, has long studied HRV, and a former CEO, Bruce Cryer is the subject of our Wise Words article.    

Conventional wisdom says one can slow the progression, and even stop the advancement, of heart disease. But can people reverse it? That’s certainly implied in our lead article, which says, “There are natural ways to control and reverse heart disease…” 

Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. absolutely assert as much. The former published Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease, in 1992, while Esselstyn published Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease in 2007.

Esselstyn’s program is all about diet, whereas Ornish’s program also includes exercise, stress management, and loving, supportive relationships. Esselstyn’s program gives me pause. He summarizes it this way:

That’s a lot of “nots.” Ornish’s dietary guidelines are nowhere near as strict, but there are the three other aspects to his program. Then there’s the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Life’s Essential 8, mentioned in our lead article. In addition to diet, exercise, and stress management, the AHA adds getting sufficient sleep and eliminating tobacco as significant factors in heart health.

The one factor that stands out to me, however, is love and support. “There isn’t any other factor in medicine—not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery—that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes than loneliness and isolation,” says Ornish’s website. 

An article on the American Psychological Association’s website states: “Strong social relationships increase the likelihood of survival by 50 percent regardless of age, sex or health status, according to a meta-analysis of 148 studies on mortality risk by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D., of Brigham Young University, and colleagues (PLOS Medicine, Vol. 7, No. 7, 2010). They found social disconnection is at least as harmful to people as such well-accepted risk factors as obesity, physical inactivity and smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.” 

While I do not believe that the physical heart is the source of our feelings of love, appreciation, and compassion, it is true that when we locate those feelings in our bodies, we point to our heart center. Our physical heart does not require our conscious mind to intercede on its behalf to continue beating, but our metaphorical heart, in most instances, does require conscious thought to generate loving feelings towards an individual or group, particularly towards those with whom we have antipathy. 

As with all things that can be improved, practice is key. Though no reader should take the following as medical advice, I do “prescribe” exercising the metaphorical heart to enhance the physical heart. A simple and beautiful practice is metta, or loving kindness. To do that, recite the following prayer from the New Kadampa Tradition while imagining love, in the form of green light, pouring out of your heart in all directions, toward all living beings: