This pandemic has provided unique problems for everyone. Every mother, father and lover worries about friends and family during trying times. Many hearts have been broken due to the death, gut-wrenching violence on our streets and financial ruin. Poets, authors and singers like Janis Joplin describe tragedy as losing a piece of their heart. It’s an accurate description of a real dilemma. Who hasn’t felt his or her heart hurt this past year? On the spiritual level, our heart and soul is essentially who we are. Our heart expresses love while we are alive, while a soul is essentially pure love. This article will provide suggestions for heart and soul maintenance.

Hearts pump love within our body and can caress others with elegance. Souls also express love, but on another level. A soul will not diminish itself to address different agendas like a heart frequently does. Souls will partition its whole self into each piece of pie. Unlike our heart, it has the ability to place it’s entire self in each piece to address multiple tasks. Since a soul has an unbreakable connection to divinity, it knows it will always survive. Sustained by source, it will wait forever until we collect all of our soul parts when we decide to return home again. Trauma can cause aspects of our soul to remain frozen in time, which is why therapists and many other spiritual traditions have soul retrieval practices for this very purpose. When we get frozen, what is really happening is that our soul holds the pure loving essence of who we are in place, until our heart is strong enough to release the illusions our intellect created in its attempt to survive the trauma.

A human heart often gets snookered and is a different animal than our soul. The phrases such as “a piece of my heart” and “a broken heart” are often used to describe a very real process. Hearts break and can be given away. They are mortal and fear death. A loving heart has the same courage as our soul however. People run into trouble if their heart tries to copy a soul’s imperviousness to suffering. Have you ever suffered after giving your heart away or allowed others or life to drain you dry?

The heart is a finite organ, which will die. In an average lifetime it will beat 2.5 billion times but often gets overwhelmed serving and trying to heal others. Trauma creates challenges to heart and soul maintenance. A heart can get frozen in time and get obsessive and compulsive. One way to know if you running into addictive problems is when you intuitively know you are obsessing or compulsively engaging in behaviors too often…and you can’t stop. Rigid minds and addicted hearts often attempt to pump life and blood into situations or relationships that are dead and need to be buried. On a positive note, our heart can remember the power of love’s source and our divine roots. Many hearts beat with this same courage and possess an absolute fearlessness as they help and heal others. We see this in our first responders and hospital staff around the world during this pandemic.

Heart and soul maintenance presents many challenges to overcome. Our challenge is to learn to nurture our own heart as much as our heart wants to nurture us, and everyone else. The following questions are worth considering:

Where and how do I express love?

Who do I love and do I do it responsibly?

How well do I take care of myself?

Do I love too much…or not enough?

The heart is a vehicle of love and an incarnate expression of our soul’s pure essence. They need to work together. Here is a list of do’s and don’ts.

• Love yourself, as you would want the divine to love you.
• Learn how to love yourself as you are without any conditions.
• Love your heart and nurture yourself as your heart nurtures you.

The heart beats in rhythm and varies under stress, loving conditions, etc. We need to listen to its’ rhythms. It is always beating out messages to let us know how it feels. Listen to your heart and give it what it wants and needs. Notice its feedback and what speaks to your heart. Indulge your passions. Recognize how your frequency rises, when your soul starts dancing with you. Whenever your heart and soul work together, a powerful loving combination forms.

When hearts and souls dance together miracles happen and happiness follows. This is how to embody your divinity. A heart will always let our biology know when we are on the right track. When we embody our dreams and heartfelt passion, our soul listens. When our body, heart and soul work together for our highest good…true power enters the picture. This is how love activates the mirrors of the universe to manifest the fruits of our joyful creation.

Loving others invites others to love us in return. They frequently reflect our love back to us like a mirror, which awakens our heart and soul to the frequency of love. Being reminded of our loving origins is always a good thing. The mistake that people make is thinking is that the source of love is from the other individual. Many people believe they can’t or don’t know how to do it for themselves. I invite you to consider that a good heart and soul connection is all anyone needs to meet one’s goals, find happiness, embrace your divine nature and remember your spiritual home. Other people’s love is nice but not necessary. You are a divine being and this is all you need to know.

In summary, listen to your heart. Its’ rhythms are designed to register, detect and provide feedback about the true nature of love’s frequencies. This helps us discern what feels loving or is an illusion. A human heart can’t be divided too often. It will attempt to copy the soul and split its love into many places. It always fails and we will suffer. Our energy diminishes if we are split in too many pieces for very long. We need to learn, what our heart really needs and go for it with a singular purpose.

Parents, lovers and healers frequently make the same mistake. Problems occur if our heart has too many masters or mouths to feed. An exhausted heart will let you know when to let others learn to fish for love themselves. It is not healthy to give our fish away to everyone around us and starve in the process. Please consider the following suggestions for heart and soul maintenance:

• Take care of yourself.
• Everyone has a heart.
• Teach others to use their heart.
• Never forget to take care of your own heart.
• Source will provide heart energy for everyone and fill the cracks.
• Take time for your heart, listen to it, and love it.

These suggestions will help your heart stay strong and serve you throughout your lifetime. Wisdom and pain are masterful teachers. Some people learn through wisdom, but most of us grow from pain. When fishing for love, trial and error are frequent companions. This is why taking another’s pain away when pain might eventually teach them how to fish for her or himself will always be a dicey proposition inviting a painful lesson.