The power of a coherent heart

Living from the heart is a metaphor that we all seem to instinctively understand. But what does it mean in practice? According to Doc Childre, founder of the Institute of HeartMath (www.heartmath.org), heart-based living refers to all intentions and actions that express qualities of heart in daily life. These qualities can include appreciating or caring for others, expressing kindness to those around you and giving back by volunteering to work with others, and to help the planet.

“One of the most important and empowering aspects of heart-based living is the inner work required to discern your heart intuition and then following your heart,” he says. “The practice of listening to the heart’s intuition unfolds your real self. Becoming your real self involves removing self-centredness and separation through the practice of being non-judgmental and forgiving.”

Your real self, in human potential coaching terms, is your true self – that part of you that instinctively knows what the healthiest, wisest, most congruent response is for you in any given moment. And heart coherence plays a big part in that. Here’s an excerpt from a recent HeartMath article about the subject.

Clear your emotions

It’s important to clear your feelings as you go so you don’t start building up a stack of unresolved emotions and adding to undesired emotional habits and the stresses that are stored in your body’s cells. Clearing emotions as you go not only keeps your current emotional slate clean, but also helps you begin clearing past emotional habits and imprinted emotional memories.

Feel positive

One day in this new millennium, the amazing power of positive emotions may well be remembered as one of the great breakthroughs in the quest to improve the human condition. A key process of the HeartMath System is learning to use heartfelt, positive emotions and attitudes, whether they are experienced intentionally or unintentionally, to help you feel better, think more clearly and improve your outlook and performance.

Intentionally feeling positive emotions is central to HeartMath’s science-based and tested tools. These easy-to-learn tools teach people to manage stress, control emotions and use the intelligence and wisdom of their hearts to overcome many negative conditions. They can provide immediate and, when practised regularly, long-term relief.

Improve your HRV

HeartMath researchers have studied the influence of heart rate variability (HRV) – the natural increases and decreases in heart rate from one heartbeat to the next – on how we think, feel and perform. What they have found is that when HRV patterns, also referred to as heart rhythms, are smooth and ordered can indicate a state of coherence. All of your body’s processes function more harmoniously and efficiently when you are coherent.

Repattern negative emotional circuitry

The part of the brain that gets activated under stress stays active long after stressful situations are over, which may explain why it’s hard for many people to let stressful feelings go. And the brain is also a pattern-matching system that scans for what’s familiar. When a stressful situation occurs, the brain scans its memory banks looking for previous stressful experiences until it perceives a match. Then it triggers the same emotional reactions you had the previous time – like anxiety, hurt, resignation or depression.

These brain circuits are flexible and we can intentionally reshape and repattern negative emotional circuitry, but because our emotional processes work faster than thinking, something more powerful than mental processes is needed. That something is the power of a coherent heart.

Scientists have discovered that the heart’s signals have a significant effect on the brain’s cognitive and emotional functions, continuously influencing how people perceive and respond to the world as well as how they feel.