HeartMath – The Power of Your Heart to Heal
In my quest to learn more about how I can regulate my blood pressure, I was recommended to look into HeartMath and came across a book about HeartMath and Hypertension. I had stumbled on HeartMath years ago but it never resonated with me, now it does.
Fundamentally it is about the power of your heart to handle the stresses in life, and by doing so, changes your brain chemistry and in turn helps with your immune system, your emotions, and how you cope with stress.
There are biofeedback devices you can buy but I like the simplicity of these exercises. Before I would have thought they were boring and simple and wouldn’t possibly make much of a difference. Now I think differently.
Having cleared out a bulk lot of trapped emotions from my heart wall using the Emotion Code, which had helped me to even feel my heart and want to reside in that space for any length of time, I felt the power of my heart even more.
I like Greg Braden’s description of why the heart is so powerful at healing.
Here’s 3 techniques to use, do this multiple times a day in order to change the neural pathways in your brain from one of being stressful, to one of responding automatically in a calmer state. Preferably use all these techniques together.
Heart Focus
Move your attention away from your mind chatter and what’s going on out there, and shift the focus to your heart.
Heart Breathing
Imagine you are slowly breathing in and out through your heart. Starting to slow your breathing down, counting to 6 in, and 6 out. Now forget the counting and just focus on the air going in and out of your heart. Start to slowly disengage from your stressful thoughts and just notice the breathing through your heart.
Heart Feeling
Intentionally generate sincere positive emotions of care, appreciation, gratitude and love. Make sure you feel it, not just think it. Send this feeling out to yourself and to others. Perhaps family members, or your pets. Make it so I’ts easy to send out, meaning, don’t think of people you struggle to love.
These feelings go up to your amygdala and then affect your frontal brain overriding the negative emotions that cause stress.
The more you do this throughout the day the easier it will get, your brain will respond faster and it will become automatic.
Leave a comment and let me know how you get on.
Comments
Michael Wolff
Hi Kate, thanks for your tips. Very valuable. Breathing into the heart is spot on, but I would like to make an observation. I’m an Aikido teacher and we learn how to be centred by breathing into the lower belly. If a student is standing straight and breathing properly in their lower belly, when pushed from any direction, they test strong (integrated body and mind). But if they just breathe into their heart, they test weak. However, if they breathe into their heart while remaining connected with their lower belly, then they test strong.
Anna
These look good exercises, I will try them. I used to do the heart feeling one a lot, I thought I had made it up myself and that it might benefit others more than me. But it makes sense it’s good for your heart as well.