Re: My heart is full

Posted by Pamela on June 15, 2006

In Reply to: Re: My heart is full posted by Smokey Stover on June 15, 2006

: : : : my heart is full
: : : : what exactly does this mean?

: : : The person is experiencing strong feelings. Good feelings.

: : :
: : : WHY DO WE THINK OF THE EMOTIONS AS BEING CENTERED IN THE HEART? The emotions are centered in the brain of course. But when we experience a powerful emotion - fear, anger, grief, love - adrenaline pours into the blood, increases the blood pressure and accelerates the heart. So it makes perfect sense to think the heart controls emotion. Otherwise when we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we'd have to put our hand on our forehead." From "Why Things Are: Answers to Every Essential Question in Life" by Joel Achenbach, Ballantine Books, New York, 1991.

: : Do the feelings need to be good? If someone was crying and saying "my heart is full" then I would know that it was full of sorrow. Hearts can also be full of bitterness or vengence and so on. Pamela

: In previous discussions it has been remarked that our bodies present us with sensations that seem to go with out emotional states, like "my heart was in my mouth." If you have a heavy heart, or your heart is "full," you may be feeling as though there were a weight on your chest or some similar feeling. My belief is that "my heart is full" is a poetic, nay, touching, way of saying I feel a constriction in my chest. The reason it doesn't sound odd to us is that we, too, have had such feelings.

: No doubt you have heard of an incubus sitting on someone's chest. During nightmares, which are genuinely frightening experiences, not in the same league with bad dreams, a common effect is the inability to draw breath for what I trust is normally a short time, although it seems long. During that time one feels exactly as though someone were sitting on one's chest. You have no doubt read that people have died from nightmares. Failure to breathe could certainly be a contributing factor in these cases.

: I do not intend to try to explain succubi here, although I wish someone else would.
: W Z

I can't explain succubi here or anywhere else, but here's a picture of what could well be one in the process of causing a nightmare. Pamela http://encarta.msn.com/media_121627059_761573163_-1_1/Fuseli%E2%80%99s_The_Nightmare.html