Embryology of the Heart - Part 2
Continuing on from Embryology of the Heart - How You Grew a bedtime story, here’s some more about how you grew.
Some of these words will probably be new. I chose not to elaborate - there’s always google!
What I am sharing is a part of a process of embodying your anatomy and the structures from which you grew from. I’ll write more about this in the weeks to come.
In the extra-embryonic mesoderm (part of the embryonic disc) is where our blood vessels start. They start as pockets that are called blood islands. We can think of our blood as our first organ.
Your hearts folds in. By about week 4, you fold from head to tail and your heart rotates about 180 degrees! Rapid growth causes the tube to bend and twist backward, beginning the formation of the familiar heart shape. The two endocardial tubes fuse together in the front and the two dorsal aortas fuse together in the back.
Some of the embryology literature around the folding of the embryo says the other developing organs follow the brain. The culture I exist in tends to be very brain oriented. One perspective through looking at how the embryo folded is that when your heart folds, your brain is carried with it. In Body-Mind Centering® and Yoga, we can explore this in movement and how our forebrain bows or curves to our heart in development.
Our esophagus also has a special relationship with our heart. With the folding in of our heart, that moves our esophagus back to lie right in front of our spine. Our heart can feel like esophagus and vice versa.
Your heart develops before you have a brain and nervous system. Our nervous system creates maps of what is inside and outside our body. Through our organ of perception (what my teacher, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen calls our nervous system), we are perceiving and making sense of our inner and the outer world.
By about day 35, our circulatory system is beginning to form. Our heart becomes a place where things come in and get redirected.
The development of our lungs begins during the third week, with the appearance of a respiratory diverticulum as an outgrowth from the ventral wall of the foregut forming the lung bud. Our developing lungs eventually wrap around our heart. Our heart slides between our lungs.
Our heart is not a pump - it’s a blood spinner! Our heart is shaped like a concha shell, wound upon itself. Gil Hedley has a great video about this.
Our heart and diaphragm are also intimately related early on. Our septum transversum becomes the central tendon of our diaphragm. It is located above our heart. Our septum transversum then also rotates approximately 180 degrees as our heart does, and it is carried under our heart.
What I love about this “how we grew” information is it’s like I get to view the plant from the perspective of the seed, and the shapes that it formed while it was bursting out of the soil!
We all formed from this earth, and our carriers and ancestors. We survive through the interconnected and interdependent web of relationships we live within.
May we remember this and come back to our tender animal bodies often.
Body-Mind Centering® used with permission.
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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