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Thinking is important, of course. We need to think to function in life. But if we let thinking run rampant — if our minds lead our lives — confusion around the best decisions to make in our business and personal lives, depleted energy, unhappiness, low and negative thoughts, frustration and stress will all run rampant too.
What many of us don't know is that we have another mind within us, another brain if you will. And that other brain is the heart. I know it sounds like a contradiction. If I have a heart problem, I don't see a neurologist, I see a cardiologist. The heart does the pumping; the brain does the thinking.
Yet more and more scientific studies have revealed that the heart has its own form of intelligence, one that offers a clearer picture of the world around us — and the world within us.
Did you know that your heart actually has its own independent nervous system? The heart contains 40,000 neurons, or brain-like cells that include sensory neurites, which help in receiving and transmitting information. It turns out there is a whole heart language that helps direct your brain and the rhythms in your body, and your heart sends more messages to the brain than vice versa! Your heart also creates an electromagnetic field that is a hundred times greater than the field your brain creates. So, what does this all mean?
It means that your heart is not just a muscle pumping blood through your body or a metaphor for sentimental love. It is a center of profound intelligence. Your heart is also a kind of brain. Accessing this intelligence is a pathway to massively increasing your intuition, so vital to make the decisions that really move your business forward into new levels of success beyond classic pro and con lists — whether that is making the final decision on hiring a key executive or how to allocate your yearly budget.
It is also a different kind of intelligence that allows you to bypass the stress response, versus trying to minimize it after getting stressed out in the first place.
The Power of Heart Coherence
Imagine the difference of swimming across a lake in one smooth flow, versus hitting rocks along the way, pausing to defog your goggles, and getting a painful cramp in one of your calves.
The first kind of swim is what coherence is, which is syncing up of systems within your body. You become like a finely tuned machine where everything is working at its the best. Coherence has to start with your heart, since it's the strongest biological oscillator, or rhythm setter, in the body.
When you activate your heart's power, it creates more aligned communication between your heart, brain, and nervous system, and then facilitates better communication with the rest of the body. With your brain and heart in sync, your overall health and bodily efficiency improve significantly.
Coherence is a core part of accessing your heart intelligence, and it can be measured physically, as shown by smooth, rhythmic patterns in your heart rate variability. When you feel coherent, you feel calm, clear, focused, intuitive, energized, and in sync with yourself and the world around you.
You can see in the following graphs how when you are in the incoherent emotion of anger your heart rhythms (HRV pattern) are chaotic and disordered. This chaos is then unfortunately carried through all the systems of our body.
On the other hand, when you are in coherent, calm emotions like appreciation and care, your heart's rhythms are smooth and orderly. And this is also echoed through the body in a smooth, orderly flow.
When you are also more coherent, you become more resilient against going into stress responses. This not only allows you to remain more centered and clear, so you increase your emotional intelligence and make better decisions, you also protect your body and your health.
The stress response activates a whole cascade of hormones in your body, including cortisol, which is known as the stress hormone. On the other hand, the hormone DHEA can reduce cortisol and help prevent depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease; it has also been shown to help increase energy and vitality.
Research shows that in just one month of practicing the heart coherence tools — details of which are outlined in my new book The Hidden Power of the Hearts and introduced below — subjects increased an average of 100 percent in their DHEA levels and dropped an average of 23 percent in their cortisol levels. This research is exciting because it shows that we can learn to empower ourselves to create hormonal balance within — without external aids, such as drugs!
Higher Intuition
Research reveals that when the heart and brain are in sync and coherence increases, a far deeper intelligence is accessed, and we can then operate at our top performance levels. Most of the authors and entrepreneurs I've interviewed for my Feel Good podcast have mentioned how important intuition was in their success—even in the most tech-heavy of businesses. This deeper intelligence is heart intelligence. And intuition is a core part of heart intelligence.
Higher coherence leads to a calmer, more ordered state throughout your heart rhythms and other systems, which allows you to hear your own intuition. The more coherent you are, the more your intuition can speak to you. Intuition may arise as feelings, messages, and guidance from within.
Sometimes, intuitive feelings or messages may seem illogical or "wrong" by the linear mind. That's why it's so important to work on increasingly being calmer in your life. Calmness, like clear waters, allows you to listen effectively instead of receiving distorted messages and becoming confused. Calmness keeps you from being tricked by the ego's limited thoughts, chaotic emotions, and old, rigid ideas that can take you down the wrong path and limit your success.
Heart Coherence tools
Increasing your heart coherence is more simple and accessible than you think.
The team at my company, Solluna, ran a study on the 8-minute HeartAlign Meditation with the HeartMath Institute's research team, with 30 participants practicing the meditation over four weeks, four to five times a week. There was an average increase of 29 percent in coherence levels. In other words, the participants had reprogrammed their nervous system to a more optimal functional state in just one month.
One of the key parts of the practice is to start simply shifting your attention to your heart. Research published in the American Journal of Cardiology and other journals found that this alone starts to enhance communication between your heart and your brain, help bring your nervous system back into balance, heighten cardiovascular efficiency, and bring more coherence to your emotions and mind.
Another key part of the meditation is doing heart-focused breathing. While focusing on your heart, take a few deep breaths in and out. There is a certain rhythm of this breath practice, detailed in The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, that was shown to help increase heart coherence and shift you into a more coherent state. However by simply taking a natural pattern of some slow, deep breaths in and out, while focusing on your heart, you will start to increase your coherence.
Try doing these preliminary steps, which will take under one minute, before you make a decision about which direction to go in, which next best step or any decision to access your own deep intelligence and wisdom to guide you to the best choice. It's also a great idea to pause and shift into your heart, away from the deluge of thoughts and reactions, and take some deep breaths as you start to feel yourself go into a stress response. Over time you will find your intuition start to grow, which will be invaluable in your business's and personal life's success.
This essay was adapted from The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts by Kimberly Snyder (September, 2024, Hay House).
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