Heart Pain

There is a stabbing in the chest. Sometimes sharp, sometimes dull, sometimes like a hand wrapping around your heart and slowly squeezing. It comes in waves — or it stays, as a dull pressure that lets you think of nothing else. You place your hand on your chest, breathe more shallowly, and wait. And beneath the pain there is always this one question: Is it serious?

Medically, heart pain can mean many things — from harmless muscular tension to functional cardiac complaints to serious cardiological conditions. The psychosomatic perspective asks differently: What is happening in your inner life that puts your heart under so much pressure? What do you carry with you that weighs so heavily your chest can barely hold it?

Heart pain is not a coincidence, but the moment in which your innermost centre signals to you: This cannot go on.