The magic behind heart coherence
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Coherence is the state when the heart, mind, and emotions are in energetic alignment and cooperation. It is a state that builds resiliency – personal energy is accumulated, not wasted – leaving more energy to manifest intentions and harmonious outcomes.
- HeartMath Institute Research Director Dr. Rollin McCraty
The heart and all its wonder
Did you know that the heart can respond to stimulus a whopping 6-seconds before it is introduced (1)?
Or that your heart generates its own electromagnetic field “producing the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field of any of the body's organs” (Energetic Communication, HeartMath Institute)?
This seemingly fundamental organ is much more than an internal metronome-pump. Among other things, the heart can increase cognitive functioning, ease our emotions, and even heal our bodies. It may even have the ability to tap into a field of information beyond the physical world.
What does this mean for us? Our bodies and well-being? Our relationships with fellow humans? And how do we harness the remarkable power of the heart to generate health, joy, and compassion?
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There is compelling evidence to suggest the physical heart is coupled to a field of information not bound by the classical limits of time and space.
- Intuition Research: Coherence and the Surprising Role of the Heart (HearthMath Institute)
What is heart coherence?
According to the HeartMath Institute’s Research Director, Rollin McCraty, “Coherence is the state when the heart, mind, and emotions are in energetic alignment and cooperation. It is a state that builds resiliency – personal energy is accumulated, not wasted – leaving more energy to manifest intentions and harmonious outcomes.”
In other words, heart coherence is a state where our bodies, mind, and emotions function in a harmonious way, creating optimal health and well-being.
Heart coherence also:
- heals and regenerates our bodies
- slows our biological aging
- increases positive emotions
- strengthens our immune system
- improves sleep quality
- increases compassion and our connections to others
- raises our cognitive functioning
- increases our intuition (or our connection to our higher selves)
How does heart coherence work?
A commonly held thought is that the brain is the command center for the body, and that the heart is merely responding to neural signals sent by the brain. However, thanks to new studies from research centers like the HeartMath Institute, we’re learning that the heart actually sends more signals to the brain than vise versa. When the heart and brain work together efficiently, we call this “heart coherence” or “heart-brain coherence”.
Without diving too deeply into the science behind heart coherence, I’m going to cover some of the basics:
Different patterns of heart activity have distinct effects on our brain and emotions.
When we experience stress or negative emotions (anger, frustration, and anxiety), our heart rhythms become erratic, sending chaotic neural messages to the brain and inhibiting cognitive functioning.
When we experience positive emotions (like joy, gratitude, love, appreciation) accompanied by a steady breath pattern, our heart rhythms become stable and ordered, facilitating higher cognitive functioning and reinforcing positive emotions/feelings.
HRV (or heart rate variability) is the beat-to-beat change between heart beats. Our HRV naturally slows as we age and low HRV is also associated with disease and premature mortality.
Higher HRV is the secret sauce behind heart coherence. Increased HRV is associated with reducing stress-induced wear and tear on the nervous system and facilitating the body’s natural regenerative processes.
In other words, when we feel positive emotions and slow our breathing, our HRV increases. Increased HRV creates heart coherence, and ultimately increases our health, well-being, and ability to tap into a world beyond the senses.
The carry-over effect
Generating heart coherence is incredibly simple, yet overwhelmingly powerful. In a matter of minutes you can completely transform your cognitive functioning, emotional stability, and overall mood.
Best of all, this increase in awareness and emotional composure has been recorded to have a “carry-over effect” that lasts into the following day!
This means practicing heart coherence for a mere 5-15 minutes a day, can offer incredible, long-lasting effects on your emotional stability and overall health.
Graphs created by the HeartMath Institute.
The heart’s magnetic field
According to the HeartMath Institute, our heart’s magnetic field is a whopping 100 times stronger than the brain’s electromagnetic field. Information is constantly being sent out and received through this field.
When in a state of heart coherence, the sending and receiving is even more powerful:
The heart radiates a more coherent signal out to the environment.
We are more sensitive to the information in the fields radiated by others (#).
HearthMath believes that our field is encoded with our emotional state (#).
When I feel joy, for example, my heart’s electromagnetic field will radiate joy. If I feel anger, on the other hand, I will radiate anger. When we radiate emotions, we’re sharing emotional information with one another and with the earth.
So when you feel joy, and use heart coherence to radiate this emotion, you are essentially adding this emotional information to a global field for others to experience!
The earth’s magnetic field lines oscillate at a specific frequency: 0.1 hertz. This happens to be the exact same frequency of our heart rhythms when we are in a coherent state. (4)
This is why it’s incredibly important to be aware of what we’re “feeding the field” as HeartMath’s Dr. Rollin McCraty calls it.
How to create heart coherence
There are various ways to generate heart coherence, but they all start with a similar, basic framework. The HeartMath institute offers a number of classes and training resources to become a heart coherence expert!
To keep it simple, I’m going to share my favorite way to generate personal heart coherence:
How to do it
1. Start by slowing your breath to roughly 6 breath cycles per minute (5 second in, 5 seconds out) or find a comfortable, slower pattern that works best for you.
2. As you breathe, imagine your breath moving in and out from your heart center. (Optional: I like to add colors that align with my heart chakra. Breathe in green, breathe out white).
3. Activate a positive emotion like love, gratitude, or appreciation. I love to think of things I’m grateful for while doing this breathing exercise (like my family, my dog, or how much I love my life in general).
And that’s it! Continue this practice for a few minutes everyday - or multiple times a day. I like to do this at the start of my meditations to help me “drop in” to my meditative headspace. Doing this everyday will have incredible affects on your health, well-being, and emotional state.
How to tell if you’re reaching a coherent state
There are a number of ways to tell if you’re achieving a coherent state. Here are a few of my favorite:
1. I feel like I am buzzing.
2. I feel full of love, compassion, or just generally good.
3. Breathing feels easy and effortless. Breaths seem to flow together seamlessly.
4. Stressful things start to melt away. I can view them through a new lens with a healthy perspective.
If you want to go even further to check if you’re in a coherent state, I highly recommend the HeartMath Institute’s “Global Coherence” app from the app store or on Google play. It’s absolutely free to use and it’s an amazing tool to help you monitor your coherence level right from your smart phone. You can purchase one of their sensor devices, or choose to use you phone’s camera sensor to monitor your HRV. You can even join global coherence groups to share your coherence with the world.
