If your heart is truly open then all of nature, life and experience is the mystery of interconnection and opportunity for communion.
— Anonymous
The Heart – More than a Pump
The heart? What is the heart? It is much more than we think.
If we ask of traditional western medicine, we would get a scientific and Newtonian answer. The heart is a mechanical pump, and the body is a composite of mechanical parts, connected by arteries, and that can be replaced like you would replace a part in a car. Each part is standing alone. Removing them or replacing them has no effect on the other parts of the body or on the soul that the body is hosting.
The leading cause of death in the world today is heart disease or heart attacks.
The medical profession associates heart attacks with Type-A personalities, stress and depression where the body produces an excessive amount of adrenaline in response to worldly pressures. Adrenalin is a stress hormone and is associated with the flight or fight response. We have also associated too much adrenaline release in the body with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia.
This perspective is now being challenged by several scientific sources. Science once cut off from the spiritual and mystical traditions and now finding its way back home. Scientific evidence supports what many mystical traditions have been saying for millennia. In fact, in some of the earliest recorded civilizations, including the Greeks, Mesopotamians and Babylonians, there are references to the heart as harbouring intelligence that is deeper than the brain.
The Heart has a mind of its own
In the last 20 years or so, several scientists including Doc Childre, founder of the Institute of HeartMath®, necrologists like Dr Gary Schwartz and Dr Linda Russek, Dr Paul Persall, have presented startling and significant scientific evidence to support that the HEART has a mind of its own and is far more intelligent that the brain.
This research is finding increasing evidence that the heart is thinking and informational carrying energy system in the body, and that this system has a connection to every cell in the body.
For example, IMH is a research and educational organization that is looking at the role of the heart on our stress level. The mission of the Institute of HeartMath is to help establish heart-based living and global coherence by inspiring people to connect with the intelligence and guidance of their own hearts.
They found in their research that the heart had a “mind of its own”. The heart has its own intelligence and that this intelligence had a profound impact on how we perceive and respond to the world.
We saw negative emotions to create an increased disorder in the heart’s rhythms and in the autonomic nervous system. Positive emotions created increased harmony and coherence in the rhythms of the heart.
It is the heart, not the brain, which is the major energetic organ of organization and integration of the human body. The electrical courant of the heart is 50 times stronger than that of the brain. The electromagnetic field of your heart can be detected up to 15 feet away from the body. The electromagnetic pattern generated by the heart as the largest electromagnetic signal generator in the body also travels into space and continues indefinitely.
It is not surprising then if the heart is not well then we are not well—and at so many levels of experience—psychological, physical and spiritual.
The Heart and Positive Emotions
Psychologists, researchers and scientists are conducting studies that test the effect of positive psychological functioning on the body and on our overall well-being.
A 2007 study found that individuals with emotional vitality and who were optimistic about life had a 20% reduced risk of heart disease compared with those lacking emotional vitality. Actively cultivating positive emotions helps the body restore and renew itself.
Positive emotions are a protective factor against coronary artery disease. Taking this finding to the next step, actively cultivating positive emotions can be a preventive measure that can reduce depression and improve overall health.
Howard Martin from the Institute for Heart Math says:
“When heart/brain/body communication is optimal, we associate it with feeling emotions long associated with “heart” such as care, appreciation, compassion, love. People intuitively know that heart and the qualities of the heart are real.”
The Spiritual Heart
There seems to be a spiritual truth that outstanding teachers have voices — the way to the centre of ourselves is in the heart. It is the access point to the soul, to the human spirit, to wisdom, and intuition.
In so many spiritual and ancient transitions, the heart is a symbol and source of health, wisdom, and intuition. The universal teaching is that when we are connected to the heart’s inner knowing, its wisdom can be used as a source for love and higher, intelligent guidance.
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This is not a discussion of one denomination or faith. Rather, it is an emerging idea that the psycho-spiritual heart is an archetypal and universal inter-spirituality that is practical and creative. It is a spirituality that we can live and practice every day.
A path of the heart is also a path of cultivating the soul and connecting to the essential part of our being. The spiritual heart is the deepest part of who we are as spiritual beings having a human experience.
Cultivating Heart Intelligence
So how do cultivate our heart intelligence?
Studies support the importance of being able to self-regulate emotions—to be able to meet challenges and bounce back from them. This requires that we activate work with our emotional life. This means taking time to name feelings and to accept them as essential messages of our inner life.
Repressing and ignoring our feelings adds to the soul’ and the body’s distress and disease.
We accept that there will be some terrible days, but they won’t last forever. This too will pass.
The research from the Institute of Heart Math (IHM) that when we are experiencing negative emotions, the coherence between the mind, body and heart is low. We lower our vibrational level. Conversely, when we experience positive emotions, we have higher vibration levels and greater coherence.
We can measure the coherence state of our system by measuring our heart rate variability, also known as HRV.
More coherence leads to greater resilience.
A daily practice of meditation will, over time, cultivate our heart’s intelligence where we are actively meditating to bring the body, mind and heart into a state of coherence. Any way that you can actively ease your stress and return your system to a state of calm and peace.
Here is what Dr Joe Dispenza says:
“The moment we move into that level of heart coherence, whether we are in medittation or in nature or Authentic Power, we start to experience a level of joy and love that is coming from within us. When we slip into this place and feel so whole, we are at the kingdom where we can have anything but no longer want it. That is when miracles begin to happen around us. And the rganization of the universe begins to show up in new and unusual ways.”
Here is a guided meditation to support coherence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuboVv7MyCY
Copyright Christina Becker
March 2021
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Hi Christina,
Your article reminded me of a meditation practice I did several years ago in which I focused consciousness on my heart and asked it (silently) to say what was troubling it. After a minute or so it replied in a deep voice but seemed hesitant to talk, as though it was surprised at being spoken to. I found the communication quite helpful and may renew the connection now that you have reminded me about it.
Best Regards,
John