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Introduction:
Start at the Heart
This book was written to provide you with awareness, knowledge, and tools to ensure you live a longer, happier, and healthier life. What you learn and integrate from this book will begin to stem the spread of the raging epidemic of heart disease, starting with you and your heart and extending simultaneously to those you love and their hearts.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Heart Federation (WHF), and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), heart disease is now killing more people every day than all other diseases, accidents, murders, and wars combined. Every 20 seconds, someone in America has a heart attack. Every 30 seconds, someone dies of a heart attack.
No matter what your age, sex, or race you either have
heart disease yourself or love someone who does.
Heart disease is among the most widespread and costly health problems facing our nation today, but it is also the most preventable. The good news is that if all types of major heart disease were eliminated, our life expectancy would increase by nearly 7 years. No amount of money can buy time, but knowledge can.
Much like the spreading of a virus, the things we say and do affect others. People repeat what they have heard and add their own filters of judgment, often making it even worse. Unfortunately, people like to repeat the bad news of the day more than the good. Many people watch the news just to have a trauma-drama to share with co-workers, family, and even complete strangers. “Hey! Did you hear about the ______ ?”
Often the response is, “Oh, that just makes me sick.” In many cases, such spreading of bad news does make people sick, both figuratively and literally. It’s not good for any of us to continue on our current path of life choices. The choices we’ve been making have led us to our current health crisis.
Choose to Choose Different
You can learn and implement better choices for better health. You can begin to pay attention to thoughts you think that don’t feel good. The more you pay attention to your thoughts, the more likely you are to choose thoughts that will feel good to your heart, your body, or your mind. Your increasing awareness that the choices you’re making don’t feel good will lead you to make choices that feel better. With each new choice, you will appreciate feeling better.
As your appreciation grows for the connections between your thoughts and feelings and how your body feels and performs for you, you will become more aware of choices as they evolve so you can make them sooner. Ultimately, realizing what you don’t want leads to realizing and choosing what you do want.
Change Your Thoughts
As your awareness to the connection between thoughts and choices expands you’ll find yourself choosing between such things as:
• what to eat or drink
• how to spend your time
• who to spend your time with
• where to live, work, or play
• when to work or rest
• why to spend your money or save
• whether or not to continue or instigate a new habit
With each choice you make with awareness and intent, your life will change accordingly. This book provides several levels of information for the most advantageous enhancements to your health and well-being.
Finding your path to Living HeartWise begins with the reassurance that if one person can find a way so can you. When I started writing this book I had to go both far and deep into my past. It wasn’t always comfortable to look back and see the mistakes I had made, but it was reassuring to discover that I have learned a lot and am making better choices now.
My research back in time made me even more uncomfortable. I often felt my heart clutch in my chest as I relived major events. Just remembering these events hurt me, and living them marked us all. Like tree rings or sedimentary layers reveal the past, our heart health reveals how our thoughts and emotions have, over time, defined our lives. Our past does not necessarily doom us to die from heart disease. Every dawn brings a new day and a new opportunity to change our lives by making different and better choices.
Everything Can Change
This book will show you that everything in your life counted towards bringing you to here and now, in this state of health. It will also show you that while everything you observed or encountered affected you, you can now choose to alter or shed beliefs to improve your lifestyle. You can choose to believe, act, and feel differently. As you do, your life will change.
Living HeartWise provides mindsets, meditations, exercises, and action steps specifically designed to help you become aware of deliberately choosing thoughts and activities to benefit your heart, to feed your mind positive thoughts, and to live in and appreciate the moment. You will discover that where you are actually affects and reflects your thoughts, and you’ll find out how to use that discovery to your benefit. Further, you will learn to have faith in yourself and in life, a lesson sometimes hard to come by, but always needed.
Have Fun While You’re Here
You will learn to appreciate just how miraculously powerful and wise you truly are. You will find ways to stretch your personal beliefs to accommodate good stuff about you. I encourage you to refuse to relinquish your beliefs for anyone except yourself. You will learn how and why to forgive yourself and others out of self-love instead of duty. You’ll get specific support and suggestions for self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others.
Living HeartWise feels good. When you appreciate yourself you take good care of you. The results of that self-appreciation leads to your appreciation of everyone in your life. As your heart heals, so will theirs. And that healing will be contagious as a smile.