The HeartMath Solution

Doc Childre, Howard Martin

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062037770
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Cardiología

The Intelligent Heart

Access the power of your heart's intelligence to improve your focus and creativity, elevate your emotional clarity, lower your stress and anxiety levels, strengthen your immune system, promote your body's optimal performance, and slow the aging process.

PART 1
Heart Intelligence

The HeartMath Solution is a comprehensive system that provides information, tools, and techniques to access your heart intelligence. Part 1 is designed to give you the foundation needed to take the first step of the HeartMath Solution: acknowledging your heart intelligence.

This first section will describe heart intelligence, explain how it works, and discuss why it’s so important. Scientific research will be presented that reveals an intelligence residing within the heart and shows how the heart communicates with the brain and the rest of the body. This research has shown that when heart intelligence is engaged, it can lower blood pressure, improve nervous system and hormonal balance, and facilitate brain function.

In order for the mind, emotions, and body to perform at their best, the heart and brain must be in harmony with one another. Learning to align these two integrated but separate sources of intelligence is another important part of this section.

In Part 1 you will:

Realize the significance of heart intelligence

Understand the biological communication between the heart, the brain, and the rest of the body

Distinguish the difference between the head and the heart

CHAPTER 1
Beyond the Brain—The Intelligent Heart

It was 5:45 A.M. on Tuesday morning, February 6, 1995. We were at HeartMath’s business center in Boulder Creek, California. Dr. Donna Willis, the medical editor for NBC’s Today show, had called the previous afternoon to say that they’d decided to run a segment on our work the next morning. They were going to call it “Love and Health.” Dr. Willis would start off with an overview of the Institute of HeartMath’s research about the electrical energy produced by the heart. Then she’d go on to tell Bryant Gumbel and the viewers about our FREEZE-FRAME technique, which uses the power of the heart to manage the mind and emotions.

“We’ll have only a few seconds to give them your number,” Dr. Willis said, “but you might want to put some of your people on the phones, just in case.”

With little time to prepare, we quickly arranged for our staff to come in early to handle any calls—and it was lucky we did! As soon as the phone number appeared on the screen, the switchboard lit up. For the rest of that day and into the night, then all day long the next day, we fielded calls almost continuously. Each time the show aired in a new time zone, another wave of calls came in.

We talked to thousands of people from all over the country—from anonymous parents in big-city ghettos to leaders in science, medicine, business, education, and religion. Before it was over, we’d gotten calls from around the world—all from a four-minute segment on a national television show that flashed our phone number on the screen for five short seconds. Why was that brief mention of the heart so magnetic?

The people who called us knew instinctively that the heart played an important role in their overall well-being. “I knew it all along,” they said, and now they were eager to find out more. They wanted to know how their thoughts and feelings could be used to improve their health—mentally, emotionally, and physically. Others—people who associated the heart with love—wondered what they could do to bring more “heart” into their lives.

This immediate response further confirmed our long-standing belief that people are ready to put the heart to work in their lives. Without knowing the specifics, they sense that loving, positive feelings are somehow related to health, and they do their best to encourage those feelings in their lives.

Most people would rather feel loving and appreciative than resentful and depressed. But often the world around us seems to be spinning out of control. Despite our best intentions, it’s hard to maintain our emotional equilibrium when we’re confronted every day—sometimes every hour—with stressful situations.

We’ve all been told, at one time or another, to follow our hearts. And it sounds like a great idea, in principle. But the problem is that actually following our hearts—and loving people, including ourselves—is much easier said than done. Where do we begin? People talk about following their hearts, but nobody shows us how to do it. What does following the heart really mean? And how do we love ourselves? Aside from love’s being a nice sentiment, why should we love other people? We’ll show you a practical, systematic approach to answering these questions for yourself and outline the enormous benefits you’ll reap in doing so.

Over the past twenty years, scientists have discovered new information about the heart that makes us realize it’s far more complex than we’d ever imagined. We now have scientific evidence that the heart sends us emotional and intuitive signals to help govern our lives. Instead of simply pumping blood, it directs and aligns many systems in the body so that they can function in harmony with one another. And although the heart is in constant communication with the brain, we now know that it makes many of its own decisions.

Because of this new evidence, we have to rethink our entire attitude toward “following our hearts.” At the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), scientists have found that the heart is capable of giving us messages and helping us far more than anyone ever suspected. Throughout this book, we’ll share the research that provides new evidence of the power of heart intelligence. And we’ll show how that intelligence can have a measurable impact on our decision-making, our health problems, our productivity at work, our children’s learning ability, our families, and the overall quality of our lives.

It’s time to reexamine the heart. As a society, we need to take the concept of heart out of confinement in religion and philosophy and put it right in the “street,” where it’s needed most. The HeartMath Solution is a comprehensive system that will give you new information about heart intelligence; new tools, techniques, and exercises to access that intelligence; and instructions and examples regarding how and when to apply it to make your life better.

The biomedical, psychological, and social science research presented in this book provides the underpinnings of the HeartMath Solution. As you learn and apply this system, you’ll rapidly gain new solutions to problems, new insights, and an expanded understanding of yourself, other people, society, and life itself.

The heart isn’t mushy or sentimental. It’s intelligent and powerful, and we believe that it holds the promise for the next level of human development and for the survival of our world.

As we enter the new millennium, our increasingly global society is faced with daunting challenges. The world’s power structures are changing. Leaders are suffering from a lack of credibility. Technology is rapidly linking the world through satellite TV and the Internet, creating both opportunity and challenge. More nations are gaining nuclear capabilities. Threats of terrorism, global weather changes, and uncertainty prevail. Many important institutions and systems that we rely on for security and order are in disarray.

Largely because of all this change, stress is at an all-time high. As Albert Einstein said years ago, “The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Developing the capacity to deal with the challenge of living in a stressful, ever-changing world is now more important than ever. To live happily and healthily in all the turmoil that progress brings requires exploring new ideas.

Hundreds of years ago it was obvious to everyone that the earth was flat. That fact was clearly observable; the earth extended as far as one could see. When the means to travel further and take a better look became available, however, everything changed. In the fifteenth century, the explorations of Columbus and Magellan proved to the world what Copernicus had already calculated mathematically: despite appearances, the earth is round. Then Galileo verified Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. In the span of a few decades, our world had been turned upside down.

In the realm of the heart, the Magellans have returned with news of strange new lands. They tell us, “Our old models were based on limited information.” [1] New discoveries now reveal that within each of us there exists an organizing and central intelligence that can lift us beyond our problems and into a new experience of fulfillment even in the midst of chaos. It’s a high-speed, intuitive source of wisdom and clear perception, an intelligence that embraces and fosters both mental and emotional intelligence. We call it “heart intelligence.”

Heart intelligence is the intelligent flow of awareness and insight that we experience once the mind and emotions are brought into balance and coherence through a self-initiated process. This form of intelligence is experienced as direct, intuitive knowing that manifests in thoughts and emotions that are beneficial for ourselves and others.

The HeartMath Solution provides a systematic way to consciously activate and develop this heart intelligence. With that solution, we can learn to expand our awareness and bring new coherence to our lives. In short, we can go beyond the brain.

Early Exploration of the Heart

When I (Doc) founded the Institute of HeartMath in 1991, my colleagues and I embarked upon an in-depth study of the literature and research published on the heart. Having experienced significant improvements in our own lives through the practice of listening to and following our hearts, we turned our curiosity to the investigation of how and why that process works. We asked ourselves, “Does the heart operate simply under the direction of the brain, or does it possess an intelligence of sorts that has influence on our mind and emotions?” We wanted to understand how the physical heart communicates with the body and how it influences our whole system.

Although the words “heart” and “math” are rarely used together, I felt that this thought-provoking combination reflected the two most essential aspects of our work. The word “heart” has meaning to almost everyone, of course. When we think of “heart,” we think of the physical heart as well as qualities such as wisdom, love, compassion, courage, and strength—the higher aspects of all human beings. The word “math” resonates with most people as well. In the context of “HeartMath,” it refers to the stepping stones of the system—the nuts-and-bolts approach to systematically unfolding “heart” qualities. It also refers to physiological and psychological equations for accessing and developing the incredible potential of the heart. The term “HeartMath” thus represents the importance of both fire and precision in our exploration of the heart.

For centuries, poets and philosophers have sensed that the heart is at the center of our lives. Saint-Exupéry, perhaps the most spontaneously boyish author of our time, wrote, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” [2]

The world’s languages are filled with idioms about the heart. We use them to express our instinctive knowledge that the heart is the source of our higher qualities. When people are sincere, we often say that they’re “speaking from the heart.” When they throw themselves into an activity, we say that they’re doing it “with all their heart.” When people betray their own best interests, we comment that they’re “thinking with their head, not their heart.” And when they fall into despair, we worry that they’ve “become disheartened.” Even our gestures indicate the importance we give to the heart: when people point to themselves, they generally point toward the heart.

In our explorations, we paid close attention to what had been written and said about the heart throughout history, wondering if there was more to this word “heart” than mere metaphor. If our culture were the only one to use the heart as a metaphor for high-quality feelings, we could consider it nothing more than a provincial turn of phrase, passed down through our ancestors. But over the centuries, the heart has been spoken of as a source of wisdom and feeling in almost all cultures. And many religions refer to the heart as the seat of the soul or the connecting place between spirit and humanness.

One of the observations that intrigued us most is that, throughout the ages, the heart has been referred to as a source not only of virtue but also of intelligence. The role of the heart as an intelligence within the human system is one of the most prevalent themes in ancient traditions and in inspirational writing. Blaise Pascal stated, “We know the truth not only by reason, but also by the heart.” Lord Chesterfield wrote, “The heart has such an influence over the understanding that it is worth while to engage it in our interest.” And Thomas Carlyle concluded, “It is the heart that always sees, before the head can see.”

Many ancient cultures, including the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Greeks, maintained that the primary organ capable of influencing and directing our emotions, our morality, and our decision-making ability was the heart; and they consequently attached enormous emotional and moral signi...