Heart Energy and Your Child

The heart is a wonderful and mysterious organ that keeps working for the duration of our whole lives. Your child's heart energy system is complex and multidimensional, meaning it has correspondences with many different aspects of your child's life experience.

We are only beginning to understand how this important subsystem functions not only as a pumping mechanism for blood circulation, but as an endocrine gland, a part of the nervous system, and as an energetic signal producer for the whole body.

Remember that from an energy perspective, everything is interchangeable and dynamic, meaning the underlying system will seek to balance out all of the energy expenditures.

For this section, we will focus in on the heart energy, but keep in mind there is no strict demarcation between the heart, kidney, bladder and small intestine meridians. They are all equal parts of one continuous subcircuit within your child's energy system.

According to the Chinese medicine system, the following functions are most closely associated with your child's heart energy circuit:

So when a child presents with any or a combination of the above symptoms, it makes sense to gather together as much relevant information as possible.

What I have learned is that this method of framing the set of symptoms in the context of the heart energy and its related functions is a key differentiating factor. The first step is to explore whether or not there are other historical inputs that may have an influence on the above jobs that the heart energy circuit is in charge of, keeping in mind the contiguous relationship it has with the other organs and channels.

Let's look at the common example of a child with a history of insomnia and sleep trouble.

The first question I would ask is the time of onset and the duration of the sleep problem. The age that a child is when sleep problems start can give us clues as to what may have caused it. The duration or chronicity tells us how long the child's system has been trying to compensate and leads us to ask questions that pertain to the other subcircuit components: the kidneys, bladder and small intestine.

Quite often there will be some sort of trigger or event or experience that coincides with the onset of the sleep problem.

We just have to be diligent about investigating and asking the right questions to uncover it. This is where the Chinese medicine system and the energetic approach comes in very handy.

By not restricting ourselves to physical causes only, the possibilities are more numerous and this increases our chances of finding the underlying trigger or cause.

Once we identify a coherent explanation for why the sleep has been disturbed, like moving to a new room or house, starting school, suffering a fall or accident, or a parent going back to work, then steps can be taken to reassure the child's energy system and lead them back to their normal sleep cycle pattern.

The usefulness of this method of evaluating the whole picture of what's going on with your child is the reason I am so motivated to get this information to you.

It is imperative that you understand this, so that you can in turn pass along this understanding to your child and take the steps necessary to find balance and resolution for your child's sleep problem.

In this way, not only are you able to treat the symptoms, but you can gain the information you need to alleviate what caused the sleep problem in the first place.

Sleep is such an important way for your child to replenish their own energy which they need on a daily basis. It makes sense to do everything possible to help your child get back to their normal sleep pattern.

If you keep an open mind and become aware of what could be contributing to your child's sleep problem, your chances of alleviating and solving the problem goes up exponentially.