Embryology of the Heart - How You Grew
Embodied Spells & Bedtime Stories - Series 1
Here’s me reading this story.
This stunning solstice day moved me to record this outdoors. If you’re unable to listen you may read below.
Videos are not my forte. But mistakes are good practice anyway, right?
This is a story about how your heart grew. Of course, your heart may have grown in it’s own unique way.
You don’t have to listen to this at bedtime. But if you’d like, have this be a love spell for your body before you go to sleep.
As I read this story, or as you read below, feel your body. Release your thinking brain and enter into your heart space.
Thank you to my teachers, Amy Matthews and Bonnie-Bainbridge Cohen for opening the doors for me into embodied anatomy and embryology.
Very early on, you are a cell to cell and cell to extracellular matrix of interactions, connected by relationship.
You are in movement. You bump up against your environment - that’s when you’re most creative! You live in a relational universe, constantly merging and becoming.
You’re pulled into shapes through spatial relationships with other cells and your environment. These interactions initiate a flow of information.
You are not separate. You are interweaving webs of connection. Vibration, resonance, information, and the timing of things.
Where will you go in this web of connection? Where will you end up?
You don’t have to do it alone. Being in relationship is all that matters. It’s about your location and who your friends are - who you are travelling with and your own potential.
Blood as our first organ…
Your blood islands begin to form. At first, you’re like a big swamp of fluid! Eventually streams flow from this swamp into a matrix of a web of vessels connected to each other. From a swamp, then a stream and then into a river.
You haven’t formed a heart yet. You are blood islands. You are a network, networking into the streams of your blood.
Folding of the heart…
At some point, you fold! You’re pulled into shapes folding from side to side and front to back. With all this folding of your edges, you come together to begin to form a heart. As your body folds, so does your heart.
Your forebrain bows to your heart. As your heart forms, your forebrain bows to your heart. Your brain is guided by your heart, curving and bowing… Your forebrain follows your heart.
Your heart develops before you have a brain and nervous system. Your cells know how to form before we have a brain and a nervous system.
Your heart begins in front of our mouth. Your mouth was at one point pressed against your heart.
Ted J. Kaptchuk writes that Chinese Medicine states,
“The heart opens the tongue, and the tongue is the sprout of the heart.”*
Heart tubes….
As you and your heart is forming, it’s doing a dance. Fusing, twisting, spiraling! Growing together in the back and the front, looping and bending. Transforming into something that eventually looks like the spiraled heart shape that we are familiar with.
Lungs hold the heart…
Other parts of you are growing along with your heart. By week 3, your lungs join the dance! Your developing lungs wrap around our heart. Your heart slides in between your lungs.
Your lungs and heart continue to have a relationship. In the present moment, your heart is nestled within the wings of your lungs, sliding and gliding in between. Your lungs hold your heart.
Your Circulatory System…
By about day 35, your circulatory system is beginning to form. Your heart remains connected by a entire closed loop circulatory system. Blood islands moved into streams and rivers and now looping away and towards your heart.
Your heart is nourished first. Your heart feeds itself first.
Your spinning heart…
Your heart doesn’t pump, it spins from the shape it became after it danced in curves, loops and bends. Like a concha shell wound upon itself, filling the sea water of life inside and without it. Your heart shape spins blood from the chi within and without.
Remember you formed from relationships. Remember, your cells formed before you had a brain and a nervous system. Folding in, you bring your brain with you. You danced into form. You are connected in the sea of blood and chi from within and without.
*From the book The Web That Has No Weaver, by Ted J. Kaptchuk, O.M.D.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share with you some embodied spells, embodiment practices and rituals for engaging with your heart.
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