Your heart and cardiovascular system work together to deliver oxygen, nutrients, and hormones to every cell in your body while carrying away waste products. Your heart, blood vessels, and blood continuously work together to support energy, movement, healing, and the normal function of every organ and body system.

A healthy cardiovascular system plays a vital role in your overall well-being. Learning how your heart connects with your lungs, kidneys, brain, hormones, muscles, and other body systems can help you better understand the importance of supporting lifelong heart health.

Heart health is influenced by many everyday factors, including nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management, hydration, blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, medications, aging, and other health conditions. These factors can affect circulation, endurance, blood vessel health, and your overall quality of life.

Joy • Peace • Love • Emotional Harmony

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Heart is associated with the Fire element, summer, joy, and the Shen (Spirit). TCM describes the Heart as having an important relationship with consciousness, thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, and inner peace. 

But the emotional connection goes much deeper than joy alone. TCM World describes the Heart as a central place through which emotions and consciousness communicate. Excessive excitement or joy may disturb Heart Qi, while sadness can affect both the Lung and Heart. Stress, anger, frustration, worry, and fear may also influence Heart harmony indirectly through the interconnected relationships among the Liver, Stomach/Spleen, Lung, Kidney, and Heart. 

These are traditional TCM concepts and should not be interpreted to mean that an emotion causes cardiovascular disease.

In Reiki and other energy-wellness traditions, the heart chakra is associated with the heart/chest region and emotional themes involving love, compassion, relationships, emotional connection and the processing or release of difficult emotions.

Reiki practices may incorporate the heart chakra when working with emotions such as sadness, anxiety, anger or emotional distress, with the intention of supporting relaxation, emotional balance and overall energetic well-being. The International Center for Reiki Training specifically describes placing the hands over the heart chakra and solar plexus chakra while using Reiki when uncomfortable emotions arise. 

Reiki is a complementary wellness practice and is not a treatment for heart disease or a replacement for cardiovascular medical care.

Supporting your heart begins with healthy daily habits. Staying physically active, eating a balanced diet, getting quality sleep, managing stress, staying hydrated, avoiding tobacco, and working with your healthcare provider to manage chronic health conditions all contribute to a healthy heart and cardiovascular system. 

Small, consistent lifestyle choices can have a lasting impact on heart health. Building healthy routines today helps support healthy blood pressure, circulation, endurance, and overall cardiovascular wellness while improving your quality of life at every stage of life.