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The heart of all matter

Bharat Savur

There is no greater happiness than when the heart sings, no sound sweeter than its strong beat, no peace as profound as when love resounds in its depths.

Billions are poured into researching its form and flourish, to predict its unpredictability. Mighty surgeons perform bypasses and balloon angioplasty with the precision of a watchmaker to hold every precious pacemaking second in this our fist-sized link to earthly immortality. For, the warrior-priest of a heart fights but to pray for life.

The heart's strength and beauty lie in its rhythm perfectly choreographed by the systole and diastole of blood pressure. Its beginnings, traced by seers, point to the universe as an almighty heart surging with the great forces of love, illuminated by a b urst of inspiration from which bloomed energetic fulfilment: `life' -- each letter depicting its genesis: L - love, i - inspiration, f - fulfilment, e - energy. And then, the energy combusted to `live' -- the `v' of vitality rhythmised.

Such is love's potency that, in physical terms, the energy the tiny heart generates in a day can heft one to six tonnes of steel, its beats channeled through the nerves controlled -- not by the conscious but by our unconscious' spirited will to live in u pliftment. In love, this will -- the soul's psychological thrust -- pulses lustily. In non-love, it abates, trips and stumbles and, yes, the heart misses a beat -- the rhythm of life interrupted.

Thus, the heart teaches: live with love -- it is the great rhythmiser. And rhythm is the will to live animated. The authors of the Upanishads saw the body-mind rhythms as ``rapture welling forth where all space is radiant with light'' -- the rise and fal l, the ebb and flow transformed by our emotions into moods, sentiments, sensitivity to joy (or pain). Emotions are said to be formative energy that enhance or disrupt our personal rhythm.

Such rhythmic disruption makes us feel `out-of-sorts'. If you report symptoms such as fatigue, weakness and depression and undergo tests only to be told by the doctor, ``There's nothing wrong with you'', know: it's your rhythm that is disturbed. Absence- of-illness does not always equate a state-of-wellness. And wellness is about rhythm.

The heart knows. Music-researcher-composers such as Dr. Steven Halpern are entranced by its singular preference and relaxation-response to compositions -- such as Baroque -- that follow its own natural one-beat-per-second rhythm. ``It doesn't matter whet her you like a particular piece,'' they say in awe, ``the heart does.''

Likewise, its agitated gallop slows to a steady trot when treated to echoes and reverberations. That explains why when we enter historical buildings -- the Taj Mahal, the Egyptian pyramids and Gothic cathedrals with their long echoes and reverberations - - we feel a sense of extraordinary calmness descend on us, says Dr. Halpern. Again, echoes too reflect a humming rhythm.

Native North American medicine-men likened the diaphragm to the horizon, and the areas of the heart to ``Sunshine Country -- a dawning of a new way of being where we are lifted from the domination of biological pulls to the higher rhythms of compassion, creativity, intuition.'' Thus, they applied rhythm as a remedy -- for example, the aspen leaf's trembling in the wind was observed to be like the anxious thoughts quaking in the mind. And its flower essence was successfully used to restore the mind's nat ural rhythm.

It follows that raw vegetables and fruits -- ``living foods,'' defines Rishi Prabhakar -- continually maintain or restore the body's rhythm. (The cultivated taste for processed, cooked foods numbs our sensitivity to our inner rhythm.) Simultaneously, rhy thmic exercise regularises; on a day when `nothing seems to go right' and you feel `scattered', pedal on a stationary cycle. In the 30th minute, you'll feel an easing, a sense of cohesiveness -- rhythm re-discovered.

Years before fitness became a science, Tagore intuited that we have enormous reservoirs of emotions that operate ``not on chemical processes but on our perceptual forces'' that have their own flux and influx: we are cautious in our defence, reckless in o ffence; thrifty in daily expenses, lavish at festivals; prudent in some relationships, volatilely giving with loved ones.

Our perceptual rhythms cannot be tracked as they are intensely personal. When they sync with the world of facts, we experience joy; when they don't, we feel pain. The latter happens because we live by the code of struggle, says Deepak Chopra. Not struggl ing releases enormous amounts of creative energy where ``fear becomes meaningless, replaced with immense relief at the true simplicity of life''.

The Maharshi puts it in a nutshell: ``Do not strain after your needs. Attend to your inner health, and happiness, fragrance draws all good things toward you. Allow your love to nourish yourself and others. This way, life proceeds naturally and effortless ly.''

For, love obviates toxic thoughts to send soothing reverberations through our system and the world without. And it's then that we realise that health is not just a perfect clinical condition but a mind and body rhythmised with love.