How To Charge Your Inner Battery

Recently I listened to a webinar by the Institute of Heartmath. I have their emwave2 device, and its such a simple yet sophisticated device I wanted to learn more about using it.

Heartmath believe the key to having energy stored in an inner battery is resilience. Their definition is “the capacity to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of stress challenge and adversity.”

Coherence

Hearthmath has a term they use called coherence. It is the optimal state to be in where the heart, mind and emotions are aligned and in synch and the pulse rate reflects that.

The idea is to do enough prep work out of a stressful situation so that soon after you find yourself stressed then you can work on bringing yourself back into coherence. It’s harder to get back from a stressful event without having done the practice already. Much like meditation, it perhaps puts a groove in the track of your neural pathways so its easier to do.

One question to ask ourselves – Is this moment depleting us or renewing us?

Relaxation

Relaxation does not equal coherence. We can be relaxed and depressed, relaxed and sad, which is a high inner state of turmoil where you may be lacking in energy.

Emotions

One of the key drains of our inner battery is emotions. Emotions like fear, anger, frustration and impatience. Over time they can be detrimental as they increase the stress hormones in our body. The idea is to take chunks out of the power these emotional responses have in our lives, and find another way of responding. They affect our ability to self regulate. Often they can be a background hum in our lives, we don’t know that they are just ticking away quietly draining our energy. The minor daily irritations, not the big blow outs.

How can you plug the energy leaks?

We need to spend more time practising resilience emotions. Emotions like appreciation, gratitude, enjoyment, ease, tolerance, patience, compassion. Building our resilience and charging our inner battery mean we spend a period of time actively in these emotions, not waiting for the outer circumstances to impact us so we feel these emotions.

Resilience is about composure.

Put Your Heart Into It

It’s not a case of being Pollyanna about life, but the times you feel these emotions, by putting your heart into them, will impact the stressful times and you’re resilience. It’s like saving for a rainy day, so when it does rain, you have a buffer already in place and can access your reserves more automatically.

Being coherent is being energetically centred and being able to be in charge of yourself.

Heartmath breathing is basically breathing through your heart. Imagine you have lungs in your heart and you breathe in and out through your heart. You’re shifting from your thinking brain to your heart brain. Taking slow breaths.

Using my emwave2, I surprisingly noticed that what I thought was relaxed and coherent, was not. I found if I had thoughts of love for people or animals while breathing, I couldn’t stay in coherence, but I noticed if I had more spiritual thoughts while breathing, I was in coherence faster and for longer. Thoughts about love for humanity.

Do you have any kind of stress reducing practice?