Renewing Heart Qualities By Doc Childre

Posted on | by HeartMath

Spring is a time of regeneration and renewal. One of the most regenerating actions we can do is to renew or increase our practice of heart qualities, such as genuine kindness, gratitude, sincere listening, forgiveness, compassion, and more. Many of us agree that these heart qualities are important, yet our mind often jumps ahead of our heart and dictates our behaviors at important choice points. This has caused most of us significant stress, downtime, and sometimes health related problems. It’s important to realize that research is showing that it’s a lack of genuine heart connection that underlies a significant amount of stress we experience personally and within teams and groups.

Most of us have had times when we felt hurt from being unfairly represented, and then spent much of the day upset, while creating an unintentional yet serious stress deficit. Now more people are becoming aware that we can reduce these predictable stress deficits, because we have the choice to say, “No, not this time.” We can manage and change our predictable reactions with some practice — and by putting our heart into it.

So much of our stress can be replaced with balance and happier moments by allowing our heart energy to flow through our day to day interactions and responses. True connection at the heart level organically creates a pathway to coherent cooperation and more effective outcomes.
Intentionally practicing increased care for each other raises our vibration to the higher-dignity level of who we truly are. This increases our sense of self-security, creates clearer choices, and gives easier access to our heart’s intuitive guidance, along with lifting the spirit of others and the environment.

Heart qualities of care, respect, kindness and compassion are among our most honored values. Most people feel they are a higher expression of one’s deeper self and humanity. Free inspiration comes as we start to remember that most of our mistakes came from the lack of pausing and taking a deeper assessment, which can come from our heart. It’s easy yet it brings remarkable results.

Ask yourself, what heart qualities could you practice more that would lead to less stress for you and others? (Examples: love, kindness, compassion, patience, genuine connection, latitude, cooperation, gratitude, deeper listening without judgments, and many more.) Suggestion: Write them down to help you remember.

Practice tip:

Choose one heart quality at a time to focus on for a few days in a row. As you breathe, imagine that you are breathing this feeling into your being. This helps set an internal environment for staying emotionally poised. Look for ways you can bring that heart quality into your communications, your interactions, your projects, etc.

During this period of societal turmoil, each of us can benefit from increasing our practice of proceeding with more care, kindness, compassion and less judgment. As we increase our care for each other – along with unbiased consideration of what is really best for the wholeness – this will draw much needed solutions for navigating through these unpredictable times. However, this type of transformation has to start with the individual – it’s an inside job that starts with opening our heart more to deal with whatever comes up. Deeper care is the new hope.

Activating the Heart of Teams™ – A HeartMath Certification Program

Posted on | by HeartMath

The Activating the Heart of Teams™ Certification Program is designed for experienced trainers, consultants, or facilitators who currently work with teams or small groups.

Upon certification, you will be able to provide your clients with a HeartMath skillset specially designed to help them increase connectedness, achieve greater team harmony and enhance their intuition for approaches for solving problems and making decisions. You will also be part of a robust community of trainers who are eager to share best practices.

Click here to learn more: https://www.heartmath.com/certification/activating-the-heart-of-teams-leadership-certification/

Raising Our Vibration in the New Year — It’s Time for a Reset

Posted on | by HeartMath

The start of a new year is often a time for a personal reset. With the rise in political and economic extremism we are seeing throughout the world, many are feeling it’s also time for a collective reset. More and more people are realizing that working together with kindness and compassion are essential missing pieces for resetting the current trajectory towards separation and division.

It’s obvious that we cannot create solutions from the same level of consciousness that’s creating the problems. Raising our consciousness for drawing in effective solutions starts with lifting our personal vibration. Read on to learn easy ways to raise your vibration.

Vibrations

HeartMath and many systems use the term vibration in reference to the quality of thoughts, feelings, emotions and attitudes that are generated and influenced by our beliefs, memories, choices, environmental stimuli and more. For example, you often hear people say, “I had to leave that office, the vibes were so low it was draining my energy,” or, “I felt a lift from being in her positive vibration.”

The vibration of our moods, attitudes, thoughts and feelings can rise and fall throughout the day, based on our actions and reactions to others, ourselves, or to life’s issues. The vibes we emanate to others and to the environment vary, based on our resilience for balancing our mind, emotions and disposition – especially in today’s dynamic emotional climate.

Lower-level vibrations can occur at every turn in connection with frustration, anger, disappointment, sadness, judgment, comparisons and much more. These emotions are part of being human, but it is within our power to shift out of these debilitating feelings into higher vibrational attitudes and perceptions.

An easy way to maintain a higher vibration is to interweave the qualities of our heart in our connections and interactions. These heart qualities include love, care, compassion, kindness, appreciation, forgiveness, and more. Anyone who experiences these qualities knows their power to lift our feelings into a kinder and more stress-free outlook.

Raising Others’ Vibrations

Science tells us that human beings and all creatures radiate an electromagnetic field produced by the heartbeat. Our feelings broadcast like radio waves through this field. When you are in the presence of a group of friends, family or others, everyone’s thoughts, feelings and attitudes are intermingling in your immediate area — which HeartMath calls the field environment.
One study, with 40 participants, explored the effects of being in a coherent field environment. The participants were divided into 10 groups of four people who were seated around a table. They were all connected to equipment that simultaneously measured their level of heart rhythm coherence. Three of the participants had been previously trained in a HeartMath technique called the Heart Lock-In® and were instructed to get into a coherent state at random times unknown by the fourth untrained person. Overall, as the coherent vibration of the three HeartMath-trained participants increased, the untrained person’s coherence level also measurably increased from being in that more coherent field environment.

Poised in Higher Vibrations

When poised in our higher vibration, we experience many benefits. Decisions and solutions flow more easily due to increased access to our heart’s intuitive wisdom; our discernment becomes more inclusive and our choices become clearer and more effective; it gets much easier to deflect frustration, anxiety, impatience and other chronic stress producers that strain our critical thinking and reasoning.

We can learn to lift our vibration to meet challenges by adding heart qualities of conscious care, kindness, gratitude or compassion in our interactions. As these qualities of love move through our system, it lifts our attitudes automatically for the highest way to deal with the situation at hand.

Unconditional love and compassion are among the highest vibrations of love and are not subject to preconditions, limitations, or requirements of others. Many people are realizing that unconditional love and compassion are from our higher consciousness potentials with the capacity for healing and attracting solutions for social transformation. Practicing compassion is something we all can do that lifts our vibration, while adding seen and unseen benefits to the whole.

Summary of Benefits from Raising Our Vibration Levels

  • Increased care and kindness flow more automatically in our connections.
  • We are more clear-minded and self-secure in our choices and actions.
  • Our mind and emotions interact more harmoniously to suit our needs.
  • We deflect common stress triggers – frustration, impatience, intolerance, etc.
  • We are much more resilient and resistant to fears and self-doubt.
  • Our heart’s intuitive suggestions are less overridden by the second-guessing of our mind and emotions.
  • A higher vibrational attitude wards off anxiety, excessive worries and overwhelm.
  • We tend to lift others and the environment when our vibration is up.
  • We are less judgmental and intolerant with others and ourselves, which prevents mega stress accumulation.
  • Lifting our vibration amplifies our intuitive heart feelings for better choices and outcomes.

Simple Exercises to Raise Your Vibration

(Adapted from exercises in the book Heart Intelligence: Connecting with the Intuitive Guidance of the Heart.)

How to replace lower vibrational feelings, such as sadness, anger, insecurity, anxiety, self-judgment, rejection, etc.

1. Exercise: For a few minutes, find a quiet place where you can breathe easily, imagining with each breath that your mind, emotions and body are becoming still inside. In this stillness, desire the uplifting feeling you would like to have, and as you breathe, imagine breathing this new feeling into your being for a while. Imagine you are anchoring in the feeling with your breath.

2. Another Exercise: When feeling low, just sit quietly and imagine radiating love, compassion and stillness into your mental and emotional nature. Self-care is often allowing ourselves to feel low at times without compounding it with self-criticism. When our light is dim, it helps to give ourselves the feeling of compassionate heart warmth that we would give a child or a pet that is infirm. Even if it doesn’t stop the pain, we know it can help energetically. If we feel awkward while trying this, it helps to ask ourselves, “What’s the difference between nurturing ourselves with compassionate intention, and taking the vitamins and health foods we need for self-care?” Or, “Why do we teach kids to put their hand over a hurt area and radiate sunshine from their heart to help it feel better?” We do this because it’s a natural expression of self-compassion, with benefits to their mental, emotional and physical nature.

You can soon feel a difference when doing these exercises, unless extremely challenged. If it doesn’t work the first time, be patient and simply try again later. Being genuine makes a difference. This activates your heart energy. Practicing for a few days in a row strengthens your capacity to reset unwanted feelings and raise your vibration.

These simple exercises can help lift your vibration more than you may think. Make it fun to consciously reset your vibration throughout the day and watch your spirit lift and your stress diminish.

Holiday Message from HeartMath

Posted on | by HeartMath

Inspirational sunrise

The holidays can magnify our care, kindness and connection…yet they can also magnify separating energies like blame, chaos and emotional instability. To consciously rise above and reduce these down-spiraling tendencies, practice having genuine compassionate care for each other’s views and concerns.

Make heart-firm commitments to add compassion, kindness, patience and latitude as you interact with others and with yourself. Realize that we are all doing the best we can, even if it’s not always the best of who we are in that moment.

Doing these practices during the holiday time can reduce stress accumulation and increase the connection to our heart’s intelligent guidance for the best way to respond to whatever life brings us.

Love, kindness and compassion are baseline heart qualities for practical, uncomplicated spirituality. Innately many people may sense this, but we have to activate it.

Let’s do this together as we enter into the New Year, a year when increased care for each other can make a significant difference – particularly during these changing times.

Happy holidays and thank you for letting us be included in your journey.

With genuine care,
Doc Childre, HeartMath founder

Why is the heart brain connection so important?

Posted on | by HeartMath

The quality of communication between the heart and brain is increasingly being recognized as key to our ability to perform at our best. Watch this video with Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., Director of Research of the HeartMath Institute to learn why this is so important.

Watch our new videos on heart coherence and why it matters

https://www.heartmath.com/#What-is-coherence

The Happy Salad – A HeartMath Favorite

Posted on | by HeartMath

The HeartMath offices are in a small town, and as a result, our options for a quick lunch are limited. So, the HeartMath Kitchen was created many years ago to provide our staff delicious healthy lunches, as well as to cater meals for our onsite certification programs.

Our on-staff chef Lena Goelitz, and her amazing team create balanced, nourishing meals with lots of added heart and care. They focus on the texture of the food and color combinations, with nutrition first in mind. Their goal is to offer a wholesome eating experience for our employees, one that fulfills their nutritional, emotional and social needs as we share a meal together. Enjoy this recipe from the HeartMath kitchen!

Happy Salad

8 packed cups spinach, cleaned
10 medium strawberries, sliced
1-2 kiwis, peeled and cut in quarter moons
½ cup almonds, sliced and toasted

Dressing

1/2 cup agave syrup or honey
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon onion pulp
1 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon poppy seeds

  • Take half of a peeled onion and rub down the side of a grater. This will make your onion pulp.
  • Blend dressing ingredients (except oil). Turn blender on high and add oil slowly. Cover and chill.
  • Place spinach in bowl and top with strawberries, kiwi, and almonds.
  • Toss dressing on to taste. Starting with less and add more if you like.
  • If you have edible flowers they can be a nice addition.

Serves: 6
Total cooking time: 20 minutes

How Stress Affects the Body

Posted on | by HeartMath
How Stress Affects the Body

Stress Facts

Understanding the mechanics of stress gives you the advantage of being more aware of and sensitive to your own level of stress and knowing when and how to take proactive steps. This increased awareness also helps you to better care for your family, friends and colleagues. Here are a few stress facts that many people are unaware of:

Fact #1: Your body doesn’t care if it’s a big stress or a little one.

The human body doesn’t discriminate between a BIG stress or a little one. Regardless of the significance, stress affects the body in predictable ways. A typical stress reaction, which most of us experience dozens of times each day, begins with a cascade of 1,400 biochemical events in your body. If these reactions are left unchecked we age prematurely, our cognitive function is impaired, our energy is drained, and we are robbed of our effectiveness and clarity.

Fact #2: Stress can make smart people do stupid things.

Stress causes what brain researchers call “cortical inhibition.” The phenomenon of cortical inhibition helps to explain why smart people do dumb things. Simply said, stress inhibits a small part of your brain and you can’t function at your best. When we are in coherence – a state where we are cognitively sharp, emotionally calm, and we feel and think with enhanced clarity – the brain, heart and nervous system are working in harmony. This state of coherence facilitates our cognitive functioning – we are actually operating at peak performance mentally, emotionally and physically.

Fact #3: People can become numb to their stress.

We can be physiologically experiencing stress yet mentally numb to it because we’ve become so accustomed to it. Some have become so adapted to the daily pressures, irritations and annoyances of life that it starts to seem normal. Yet the small stresses accumulate quickly and we may not realize how much they’re impairing our mental and emotional clarity and our overall health until it shows up as a bad decision, an overreaction or an unwanted diagnosis at the doctor’s office.

Fact #4: We can control how we respond to stress.

We don’t need to be victims to our own emotions, thoughts and attitudes. We can control how we respond to stress and we can become more sensitive to stressful situations and how they are affecting us before it manifests as a physical, mental or emotional complaint. There are simple, scientifically validated solutions to stress that empower people to rewire their own stress response.

Fact #5: The best strategy is to handle stress in the moment.

The best way to manage stress is to deal with it the very moment you feel it come up. Millions of Americans unsuccessfully use the binge-and-purge approach when it comes to stress. They stress out all day, believing that they can wait until later to recover when they go to an evening yoga class, go to the gym or chill out when they take the weekend off. Unfortunately, when we put off going for our own inner balance our bodies have already activated the stress response and it’s our health that suffers.

HeartMath’s research shows how emotions change our heart rhythm patterns. Positive emotions create coherent heart rhythms, which look like rolling hills – it’s a smooth and ordered pattern. In contrast, negative emotions create chaotic, erratic patterns. Using a heart rhythm monitor, you can actually see your heart rhythms change in real time as you shift from stressful emotions like anger or anxiety to positive feelings like care or appreciation. Coherent heart rhythm patterns facilitate higher brain function, whereas negative emotions inhibit a person’s ability to think clearly. Coherent heart rhythms also create a feeling of solidity and security.

Creating a Counterbalance: How to Change Stressful Perceptions and Reactions with Inner Ease

Posted on | by HeartMath

Science has shown that positive emotions can help shift and replace our stress-producing feelings and perceptions. This serves to counterbalance the depleting effects from our stressful reactions and also positively affects our psychological and physiological levels.

As we increasingly take charge of our emotions, we can reduce and prevent much of the stress we experience. In learning to neutralize and transform our stress, we become a conscious contributor to our own health, balance, and fulfillment.

To help become a conscious director of our emotional nature and stressful reactions, start with the practice of self-monitoring.

Inner Self-Monitoring

As you start your day, and occasionally throughout the day, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What am I feeling right now? Are my mind and emotions churning out worry and stressful projections regarding future outcomes, or do I feel resilient and balanced in my decisions, actions and responses to whatever the day brings?
  • Am I remembering that I have the choice to take pause and weigh out my heart’s responses and suggestions — before falling into the same old mental and emotional reactions that lower my spirit and drain the energy needed to create and operate effectively?

These types of questions are simply for stimulating the memory that there are pro-active things we can do to mitigate and prevent a significant amount of stress and low productivity.

Breathing the feeling of ease helps to quieten your mind’s static; this makes it easier to feel your heart’s intuitive suggestions for less stressful, more effective ways to handle whatever a day brings. We can’t erase all of our challenges, but we can get a lot smarter in how we deal with them. Connecting with our heart-smarts can become a powerful stress-buster and guidance system for a more fulfilling life.

When you need an attitude lift to re-kindle your resilience: Breathe in the feeling of inner ease and calm for a few minutes. While doing this, hold the feeling of genuine appreciation for someone, a pet, or something you care about. Feelings of appreciation have been proven to benefit our health.

Make a list of a few behavior patterns you would like to change to reduce stress and increase emotional balance. (Emotional balance slows down the burn rate of the energy we accumulate from sleep.)

Positive Self-Talk

Have a sincere and honest self-talk about the attitudes and behaviors you listed. The most meaningful self-talk occurs when the heart – your true self – speaks to the mind. If you feel yourself drifting into mind processing, make a genuine effort to ease back into your heart space. If indecision or self-doubt begin to surface, simple realize that it is your old way of thinking. Breathe ease, and gently return to focusing on the change you truly desire.

Applications for Inner Ease

Identify daily activities, situations or interactions where you think breathing ease and taking a quiet pause could be helpful.

There are many situations that create stress in people’s lives that they take for granted because it seems normal. You can breathe ease in these situations and take charge of your energy. Here is a small list of important times for remembering to breathe ease.

  • Before responding to a vexing e-mail.
  • When overwhelmed with too much to do.
  • While stuck in traffic and running late for an appointment.
  • As your computer reboots.
  • While discerning important issues or choices.
  • When life’s challenges are coming in faster than solutions.
  • When you get caught in other people’s drama and can’t leave the room (breathing ease can help you detach from the energetics and not get pulled in).
  • During meetings – breathe ease for deeper listening, better comprehension, more patience and to stay emotionally poised. But if you lose your composure, breathing ease helps you re-center, especially if you get caught up in frustrations and judgments.

After you learn to breathe ease, you’ll find there are many situations where, while breathing ease, you can imagine that you are drawing in higher quality emotional attitudes which promote health, balance and self-security. Try breathing the feeling of nonjudgment, kindness, forgiveness, increased resilience, compassion, etc. Anchoring these positive emotional qualities has been proven to help transform stress on the spot, along with their wholeness health benefits.

Here is how Ashley created a Counterbalance by Breathing Ease and Taking Pause

Ashley arrived at her workplace and ran into Melissa. She immediately recalled how Melissa snapped at her during yesterday’s office meeting, Through inner self-monitoring, Ashley acknowledged that just seeing Melissa down the hall brought up a feeling of resentment.

Rather than allowing her energy to feed resentment, Ashley remembered to breathe calm and ease while taking pause to sense what her heart felt and might suggest. As she reflected on her awkward communication with Melissa, her perception started to shift: “Perhaps I didn’t communicate clearly with Melissa, as I was in a hurry. What if she was having a bad day emotionally? Then I started to remember my intention to shift from these lower type feelings quicker, because I know in my heart, that nobody comes out ahead when there resentment and separation are involved.”

As always, Ashley was amazed at the difference in perception when she genuinely connected with her heart’s discernment and guidance. As her heart feelings reopened to Melissa, she experienced the warm connection she naturally has with Melissa along with deep appreciation for her friendship.

The heart lights the straightest path back on the road when we spin out.

Practicing inner ease is not just for bailing out of stress, but for maintaining balance and harmonious interactions. Moving with inner ease is not inferring that you have to operate at the speed of a snail, nor is it a sleepy-time relaxation state. It’s about slowing down your inner body language – the mechanical mental and emotional reactions that cause mistakes and do-overs that we conveniently blame on others.

Take a few moments each day for breathing ease, inner-self monitoring and taking pause to sense what your heart would feel about matters, and what it might suggest – then jump on that like a Harley and ride wide open without looking back. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy? Our hearts facilitate us like the new e-bikes: They assist you, especially up the hills, but you still have to pedal. But that’s fair.

Article courtesy of the HeartMath Institute
With contributions by HeartMath founder, Doc Childre

New Science! It’s Not Just the World Wide Web That Connects Us.

Posted on | by HeartMath

We are all connected!

Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., HeartMath Institute’s director of research who is heading up the Interconnectivity Research Project says, “I believe humanity is at a unique point in its evolutionary history of consciousness. We now have an opportunity and the intelligence to make more empowered choices to create a cooperative and harmoniously connected world.”

More people than ever are being nudged from their hearts to take more self-responsibility for the attitudes, thoughts and feelings that they are “feeding the energetic field” that connects us all.

This is why HeartMath Institute (HMI) is conducting research on the interconnectivity between human consciousness and Earth’s energetic systems as well as between people and other living systems, such as animals and trees.

There is evidence that Earth’s magnetic fields help to synchronize, energize and support the interconnection of all living systems. Science is only scratching the surface of the many benefits to come from increased conscious awareness of our interconnectivity with others, animals, trees and nature.

You can be an essential part of this ground-breaking research on interconnectedness which is needed in these times of world uncertainty.

2018 Research Focus:

Human-Earth Connectivity/Interconnectivity – examining new ways in which all living things (humans, animals, trees and more) are interconnected, and exploring the many untapped benefits from harmonious interactions between these powerful kingdoms of creation.
Global and Group Coherence – By working together to consciously increase the coherence in the global field environment, we can intentionally increase our consciousness vibration which is the foundation for personal and global peace and cooperation.

If you can, please support the Institute’s Interconnectivity Research Project so this important work can continue. HMI’s research team is committed to creating easier and more effective tools for us to manifest a happier and more secure future

HeartMath Institute is a not-for-profit 501c3 organization.

DONATE

The Prestigious Scientific Reports, a Nature Journal, Published a New HeartMath Institute Study

Posted on | by HeartMath

A new study by the HeartMath Institute was just published in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal. The study makes a striking correlation between people’s heart rate variability (HRV) and energetic environmental phenomena such as the electromagnetic energy from the sun, the Schumann Resonance Power (magnetic waves that circle around the Earth) and energy influxes coming from outside our solar system. Click for Research paper.