February is Heart Month. The need to maintain a healthy heart is obvious to nearly everyone. What may not be fully appreciated, like in all matters of health, is that a healthy heart requires the well being of the entire organism including the mental and emotional selves.

The research clearly shows that stress is a significant contributor to heart disease. One study, for example, indicates that the risk of developing heart disease significantly increases for people who repress anger as well as for those who intensely and habitually express it. Under such emotions the heart rate becomes erratic. This interferes with the passage of information throughout the body along its neuro pathways and taxes other organs. Other research shows that people who manage their stress lengthen their lives.

There are two main emotions: love and fear. Emotions such as appreciation, inspiration, caring and empowerment are love related. Emotions such as worry, hate and contrariness are related to fear. Heart health requires that we maintain a positive attitude together with loving emotions. It is also necessary to manage our negative emotions so that they don't become chronic and overwhelm our minds and burden our bodies.

The following are suggestions that can help you increase loving emotions in your life and minimize the effects of emotions of fear.

1. Increase your opportunities to experience positive emotions such as listening to inspirational and soothing music, spending time in natural settings, watching emotionally uplifting movies, reading enjoyable and inspirational material.
   
   
2. Being in the presence of loving and enthusiastic people. Be an inspiration to people who are fearful and disheartened.
   
   
3. Avoid indulging yourself in negative emotions.
   
   
4. Recognize that fear based emotions have a limited positive function. They are signals to the mind from the body that something is amiss. They are a call to action. The first action is for you to become mindful of the emotion rather than merely experiencing it by reacting impulsively or preoccupying yourself with it. For example you become angry with a friend for breaking a promise. Become mindful of the feeling of anger. Take time to reflect on why the action of your friend arouses this emotion in you. Knowing the answer to this will lessen the charge of the anger. You will then be able to be more understanding and open to your friend's circumstances for breaking the promise no matter what they are.
   
   
5. Set some time at the end of the day to review the emotionally charged situations you experience. Are there any lingering negative emotions? Make an effort to clear them by reflecting on what they mean and what they are trying to tell you. About yourself.
   
   
6. In the event you suffer from chronic negative emotions and attitudes seek out a professional healer who can help you resolve the deep-rooted issues associated with them and to help you develop positive response patterns in your life.

The heart sits in the center of our energy bodies. In addition to its physical function, it has been given the task of balancing our spiritual energies and the lower vibrations of our bodies. To fulfill this function requires intelligence, compassion and understanding. In fact, the heart is our earliest brain and orchestrates the development of many other organs. It contains 40,000 brain cells grouped together.

Spiritually, for our well being, it would be better if the brain followed the lead of the heart mind. It keeps the flame of our true essence alive while we are in physical form. If we look after it, it will look after us in ways we have forgotten and that will amaze us when we begin to remember them.

Manifesting refers to the process of bringing things or conditions into our lives that we desire. There are a number of practices that are used to manifest such as: prayer, rituals, intentional action and even magic. Herein I want to focus on prayer. Many have been taught from a very early age to pray for what we want. Our prayers seldom manifest what we desire; Often when they at first seem to do so, the thing requested does not pan out the way we had wanted. This article will look at manifesting from a spiritual perspective; what is it we need to manifest and how can we become good manifesters.

The vast majority of us believe we are not perfect and that we need to gain perfection. As a result of our conditioning we have been attempting to become perfect by gaining stature, chattels, and even supremacy over other people. Of course all these things are themselves imperfect. Nothing in this physical world lasts indefinitely and therefore cannot bring us perfection, including our bodies. But we hope they can; and so we maintain our belief in this illusion. As long as we have this belief we try to manifest in our lives what is bigger, better, more beautiful and more powerful to make us perfect.

The things and changes we try to manifest result from our desires. Desire is what spurs us to interact with our environment and one another. Desires themselves emerge from 2 main inner sources: love and fear. When our desires come from fearful emotions, such as greed and envy, then we have a belief that fulfilling the lack will make us complete. Since such requests are usually void of love they also tend to separate us from others.

The fear based requests carry a "negative" emotional charge in us. God responds to them in a loving way as he does to all petitions. He does not acknowledge the fear because He does not know fear. His responses seek to maintain harmony among all his creations and fulfill their needs. What blocks or distorts the loving response from God is the petitioner's fear. When a person is in a state of fear he cannot know love. It is important that we strive to be clear about what we ask for in terms of source and desire in order to know the answers we receive to our requests

Lets take an example. My neighbor buys a new Mercedes. Up until then I had been quite satisfied with my Honda. The thought of a new car was the furthest thing from my mind. Seeing his new car makes my Honda seem inadequate and I somehow feel a lesser person than my neighbor. My desire becomes to have a Mercedes and; the source of my desire are envy and my threatened identity. I petition God for a new Mercedes. God hears my request and responds to it. He knows, from His perspective, I am equal to my neighbor. He does not see my underlying misperception of being unequal. He answers my request with the Mercedes. Receiving it, however, does not release my negative emotional charge. That charge will likely jeopardize my enjoyment of the car.

The Mercedes turns out to be a lemon and causes me financial hardship and frustration. Remember, the universe seeks harmony. The not so enjoyable car becomes an opportunity for me to learn about envy and self-esteem to restore balance in me.

Our new spiritual energy is trying to move us quickly into becoming aware of what we really are as spiritual beings. Many are being challenged to respond to this energy from our inner source of love. The things of the world are increasingly fleeting in an effort to make us aware that what is most real are those things that originate in our hearts. This is not to say we should not need and desire physical things. It means rather that our passion for what we request needs to come from a position of strength and trust. That is to say, we need to ask for what we can know, experience and is already provided us.

We were created spiritually in God's image, complete and perfect. To understand this I like to think of God as an ocean composed of countless drops of water that He created to share in his creation. Each drop is in essence water like the entire ocean. Each drop can be neither more nor less than the essence of the ocean. Every drop of water is already perfect and complete. The drops cannot be anything else nor can the ocean.

Like the drops of water we can be neither more nor less than our essence, perfect love. We in this world, at some point after our creation, chose to believe we could be more than our essence. When we attempt to create more than what we are with God we discover we can't create beyond the perfection we share with Him. Instead we create illusions that make it appear we can. Illusions quickly fade and we soon require new illusions. The more illusions we create, the more separated we became from our real identity, the more fearful we became and the more illusions we create to overcome the fear.

God created us with free will like himself. We can choose to restore our true identity at an time. Once we do, our prayers become requests for fulfillment: to know who we truly are and for guidance about how to manifest our spiritual identity in the world by loving God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves. Living in such a way can be difficult because it involves dissolution of ego: loosing fear for love, choosing acceptance rather than judgment and seeking joy in action rather than worry about outcome. Below are guidelines that can assist you to this end:

1. Take stock of your beliefs. Consider discarding those without value in your life.
2. Regard any apparent lack gratefully because it is an opportunity to know you are already perfect and lack nothing.
3. When you manifest, know if the source of the desire is fear or love.
4. Heal your negative emotions. Doing so will restore your heart to its rightful place in your life.
5. Have no attachment to outcome for what you seek to manifest. Remove judgment from the answers to your prayers. Set the intention and trust that no matter what follows your actions is in your best interest because it is from God.
6. Begin to be or practice the change you want in your life. For example, if you want to be a forgiving person forgive those whom you pass judgment. Forgive yourself for your beliefs that interfere with seeing the other's spiritual perfection.
7. Give thanks daily for all that you are and have. Gratitude is the key to awareness that you are the perfection God created and all that you need is already with you.
   

Frank Vircillo
Hypnotherapy Unlimited