The Other Heart Health: How We Keep the Soul Circulating

A reflection on soul nutrition, holy fluid, emotional exercise, and the alchemy of the inner heart

Some hearts are not closed.
They are waiting for a kinder rhythm.

There is the heart we are taught to measure.

Pulse. Pressure. Cholesterol. Rhythm.
The visible heart. The biological heart. The faithfully beating muscle that carries us through each ordinary and extraordinary day.

And then there is the other heart.

The one no machine can fully read.
The one that holds grief in its chambers, silence in its arteries, old ache beneath the ribs, and tenderness in places we sometimes forget how to visit.

This is the heart that learns to survive.

The heart that closes because life once entered too harshly.
The heart that grows careful because openness once cost too much.
The heart that does not stop loving, exactly — but learns to love from behind a locked door.

So perhaps there is another kind of heart health.

Not the kind that replaces care for the body. Never that.
But the kind that asks: what keeps the inner life moving?

What feeds the soul?
What allows feeling to flow?
What strengthens our capacity to remain present?
What restores the energy we lose through pretending, pleasing, performing, and protecting?

Because the soul, like the body, needs nourishment, movement, fluidity, and energy.

But its food is meaning.
Its water is feeling.
Its exercise is honesty.
Its energy is presence.

Soul Nutrition: What the Inner Life Eats

Soul nutrition is what feeds the part of us that cannot live on productivity alone.

It is not merely entertainment, though joy and laughter have their place at the table. Entertainment can distract us from hunger. Soul nutrition answers it.

Soul nutrition is beauty that makes us pause.
A song that finds the bruise without pressing too hard.
A conversation where we do not have to translate ourselves into acceptability.
A walk where the trees seem to remember something we forgot.
A book that opens a quiet room inside us.
A prayer, a poem, a silence, a candle, a sentence that says: you are not mad for feeling deeply.

It is anything that helps the inner life whisper:

Ah. I remember myself.

There are things that fill time, and there are things that fill the soul.

We know the difference, even when we pretend not to. One leaves us more scattered. The other returns us to ourselves.

Soul nutrition is not always grand or spiritual-looking. Sometimes it is washing the cup. Opening the window. Saying no. Making soup. Sitting with the dog. Listening to rain like it has come to tell you something ancient and practical.

The soul is fed by what restores relationship — with self, with life, with truth, with the sacred, with the ordinary miracle of being here at all.

Holy Fluid: What Must Be Allowed to Move

If the body needs water, the soul needs flow.

This is what I think of as holy fluid: the sacred movement of feeling before it hardens into resentment, numbness, performance, or despair.

A tear can be holy fluid.
So can breath.
So can anger, when it moves cleanly into boundary instead of becoming poison.
So can grief, when it is allowed to pass through the room without being locked in the cellar.
So can joy, when we let it stay without apologising for being alive.

Holy fluid is emotion in motion.

It is the confession before the mask.
The trembling before the truth.
The softness before the shutdown.
The mercy that rises when we finally understand why we became so guarded.

When feeling cannot move, it thickens.

Unspoken grief becomes heaviness.
Unexpressed anger becomes bitterness.
Unfelt fear becomes control.
Unreceived love becomes suspicion.

And yet, the blocked heart is not a failed heart.

A closed heart may be a heart that once had to protect itself.
A numb heart may be old wisdom that has not yet learned it is safe.
A guarded heart may not be refusing love; it may simply be asking love to knock gently this time.

We do not shame the droughted place.
We bring water.

Slowly. Kindly. Honestly.

Emotional Exercise: Strengthening the Capacity to Feel

Emotional exercise is not forcing ourselves to feel everything all at once.

That is not healing. That is flooding.

Emotional exercise is capacity-building.

The way a body grows stronger through gentle repetition, the heart grows more resilient through small honest movements.

Telling the truth a little sooner.
Resting before collapse.
Saying no without preparing a courtroom defence.
Letting joy last five seconds longer.
Receiving kindness without immediately suspecting a hidden invoice.
Allowing grief to visit without handing it the whole house.

These are not dramatic acts. They rarely look impressive from the outside. There is no applause for choosing not to abandon yourself in a conversation. No parade for pausing before you people-please. No medal for noticing that your body has tightened and choosing to breathe instead of disappear.

And yet this is the work.

This is the quiet strengthening of the inner heart.

Emotional exercise teaches us that we can be touched by life without being destroyed by it. We can feel without drowning. We can love without vanishing. We can care without becoming responsible for everything and everyone.

It is the practice of staying with ourselves.

Not perfectly.
Not heroically.
Just faithfully enough to build trust with the parts of us that learned we would always leave.

The Energy of Energy: The Currency of Presence

Everyone talks about energy.

Good energy. Bad energy. Heavy energy. Healing energy.
But what do we actually mean?

Perhaps energy is the felt charge of life moving through us.

Attention. Presence. Emotional current. Nervous-system capacity. Spiritual atmosphere. The subtle signal beneath the words.

It is what we sense when a room feels heavy before anyone explains why.
It is the relief after a conversation where we did not have to perform.
It is the exhaustion that follows pretending to be fine.
It is the aliveness that returns when we stop betraying our own knowing.

Energy is not just “good vibes.”

It is the currency of presence.

Some situations spend us.
Some people drain us.
Some places scatter us.
Some truths return us to ourselves.

This does not mean we divide the world into pure and impure, light and dark, safe and unsafe with no nuance. Human beings are more complicated than that. We all carry weather. We all bring static sometimes.

But discernment matters.

A healthy inner heart begins to notice where its life-force goes.

What leaves me more whole?
What leaves me edited?
What invites me into truth?
What requires me to abandon myself to belong?

Energy is not something to hoard in fear. It is something to steward with reverence.

Because presence is not infinite when we are living unconsciously. It must be tended. Protected. Restored. Offered wisely.

“The soul, like the body, needs nourishment, movement, fluidity, and energy.
But its food is meaning.
Its water is feeling.
Its exercise is honesty.
Its energy is presence.”

Spiritual Alchemy: The Heart as an Old Alchemist

This is where the deeper work begins.

Because the other heart health is not only maintenance. It is transformation.

Spiritual alchemy is the quiet chemistry of becoming.

In old alchemy, the dream was to turn base metal into gold. In the inner life, the work is more tender and more difficult.

Survival into wisdom.
Grief into tenderness.
Shame into self-recognition.
Anger into boundary.
Longing into prayer.
Heartbreak into deeper seeing.
Silence into song.
Numbness into slow returning.

Spiritual alchemy is not turning pain into performance.

It is not pretending trauma was a gift.
It is not making grief look beautiful so other people can bear to look at it.
It is not rushing to extract meaning from what first deserves mourning.

Some things must be allowed to be terrible before they are asked to become teacher.

Alchemy does not bypass the wound.
It places the wound in a sacred vessel.

And the vessel is made of time, truth, tenderness, witness, and courage.

Soul nutrition feeds the fire.
Holy fluid softens what has hardened.
Emotional exercise strengthens the vessel.
Energy gives charge to the transformation.

And slowly, not because we forced it, but because life keeps whispering through the cracks, something changes form.

The ache becomes language.
The silence becomes boundary.
The grief becomes compassion.
The old fear becomes discernment.
The broken place does not vanish, but it begins to glow differently.

Not all gold shines.

Some gold is simply the moment we realise we no longer have to live as the wound instructed.

Returning to Circulation

So perhaps the question is not: Is my heart open or closed?

Perhaps the better question is:

What rhythm is my heart asking for now?

Some hearts need nourishment.
Some need water.
Some need movement.
Some need rest.
Some need protection.
Some need truth.
Some need permission to stop being brave for a while.

The other heart health is the practice of listening to the inner chamber before it becomes an emergency.

It is asking:

What has fed my soul lately?
What feeling has been waiting to move?
Where can I practise one small honest movement?
What restores my presence?
What quietly spends it?
What pain is asking not to be performed, but held?
What part of me is ready, gently, to change form?

The heart does not only break.

It remembers.
It guards.
It hardens.
It softens.
It waits.
It learns new rhythms.
It becomes a vessel.
It becomes a doorway.
It becomes a small altar where life returns, one careful breath at a time.

Some hearts are not closed.

They are waiting for soul food.
They are waiting for holy water.
They are waiting for honest movement.
They are waiting for the energy of presence.

They are waiting, perhaps, not to be fixed — but to be met.

And maybe this is the other heart health:

The slow, sacred art of keeping the soul in circulation.

A. J. Ashé
Being Human