HeartMath: When Love Is Not an Emotion

Drunvalo has invited us to abandon the polarized brain as our center of consciousness and abide in the nonjudgmental place of the heart. And from what we have all been reading for the past decade in so many spiritual works, "living in the heart" definitely seems to be an idea whose time has come.

Unfortunately, however, anatomy students aside, the word "heart" means different things to different people.

Many are turned off to concepts involving the words "heart" and "love," probably because those words are so often used to disguise negative emotions and hidden agendas.

But even if we have a positive attitude, we still may find it difficult really to conceive of the heart as a physical location for consciousness. The word "heart" comes to us trailing metaphorical, many-splendored allusions to the blind emotion of "love."

As a result, for many of us, living in the heart seems to be about giving up discrimination in favor of a gushy, "I love you" approach to life. And that's not it! It's not even close.

The heart that Drunvalo refers to is a real place, not an emotion. So how can we arrive in this Secret Space in the Heart?

Enter HeartMath: A Scientific Approach

The Kogis suggest that if we stand up and remain standing for nine days without food or water, we will surely wind up in the place of the heart. Well, yes, okay.

Drunvalo's workshops are effective for most. But a workshop is a special environment, where students are carefully prepared for what they will experience, and where an effective teacher's intent creates subtle alterations in the Unified Field. And even when we have Drunvalo's upcoming book, Living in the Heart, we may find it difficult to do all of this for ourselves.

But there's a straightforward method you might want to consider. To tell you about this, we interviewed Howard Martin, the man who, with Doc Childre, helped found HeartMath and has been with the organization ever since.

HeartMath scientists have been studying the heart-as-brain for thirty years and have produced an incredible body of knowledge and achievement.

Equally important, they have created a set of practical, do-able, and provably effective techniques for achieving heart-centered awareness.

Without resort to spiritual concepts or the "love" word, the scientists at HeartMath have proved scientifically that this heart-centered awareness is a sensible and achievable ideal, a journey of consciousness we can actually make that will take us to a truly new way of being in the world.

The HeartMath scientists also have proved that this way of being makes us happier, healthier, and more effective in just about every way.

Q: What do you think is HeartMath's most important contribution?

Martin: I think it's that we're taking concepts and understandings that have primarily been held within the context of spirituality and religion, and translating them into usable and applicable technologies for modern life.

Doc Childre knew we were not going to have a major influence on society unless we had empirical understanding to support our concepts and beliefs. That's just how the world operates. The world wants validation. So when we enter into conversation with a large multinational corporation that wants to reduce health care costs or lower absenteeism, or whatever, we have to show facts and measurable outcomes.

Q: In other words, you're mainstreaming spirituality?

Martin: Well, the qualities that heart-centered awareness cultivates make for better, more productive employees, or students, or whatever. So yes, we've been able to have an impact on mainstream environments like governments, schools, hospitals, and industry.

Q: Could you tell us some of the important things you've learned about the heart?

Martin: I could talk about that empirically or from the standpoint of beliefs. For example, I believe that the heart is the entry point of spirit into matter. But let's start with the empirical knowledge. For me, that subject begins with the fact that the heart is an autorhythmic organ.

The Heart's Intelligence

Saying that the heart is autorhythmic means that the source of the heartbeat actually resides within the heart itself. The heart has its own intelligence. You see this clearly reflected in the heart transplant patient, where the beating heart is removed from the donor, and it's still beating and continues to beat during the transplantation process.

In fact, the nerves cannot be reconnected between the brain and the heart, but the newly transplanted heart keeps on beating.

In a healthy person, signals from the brain regulate the timing of the heartbeat. The capacity to slow down and speed up is not present in the heart. That's why heart transplant patients need electronic PaceMakers.

But the heart beats on its own. In fetal development, the heart forms first. It begins beating before we even have a physical brain.

For me, the implication is that when life itself begins, it is because something triggers in the heart. There is an integration of spirit and humanness, and the heart begins beating.

So right off the bat, from a biological perspective, we have this organ that starts to beat — nobody knows why — and continues to beat, even without the brain. Again, it has its own intelligence. That's what Drunvalo is speaking to. Even at the biological level, this innate intelligence manifests within the heart.

Heart-Brain Messages

We now know definitively that the heart, on a purely physical level, sends powerful messages to the brain and the rest of the body. It does this in four different ways:

Neurological — Messages travel a nerve pathway from the heart to the brain, and timing information from the brain is received along these pathways. So this is two-way communication. This nerve pathway comes in through the lower brain, goes through the midlevel brain, which has a lot to do with our emotions, and terminates in the neocortex — our creative thinking centers.
Biophysical — Messages are carried through the blood pressure wave. Every time the heart contracts, it creates a wave that pushes blood through the veins and arteries. And when you map out the electrical activity taking place in the brain, it's clearly evident that this activity is synchronous with changes in the blood pressure wave.
Biochemical or Hormonal — In 1983, the heart was actually reclassified as a hormonal gland. It produces several hormones. One of them, called atrial peptide, has the job of reducing release of the stress hormone cortisol. The heart also produces oxytocin, the famous "love hormone" that shows up when people are in a loving state. Oxytocin is produced in the brain, as well, but the heart contributes to its production.
Electromagnetic — The heart is actually an electronic organ. It produces the strongest source of electricity in our body, forty to sixty times as much as the brain, which is the second biggest producer. When you have an EKG, that's what's being measured. So we have this bioelectricity coming from the heart, and it permeates every single cell in our body.

That signal is so strong that it actually radiates beyond the skin, out into space. And it creates a torus-like field that surrounds us in a 360-degree sphere. It's been measured eight to ten feet outside the body. And it's centered in the physical heart.

When I speak to this electromagnetic energy coming from the heart, by the way, I'm not speaking about subtle energy, like an aura. I'm talking about a very dense level of electromagnetic frequencies. It's really there. It's scientific fact.

HRV and HeartMath Technology

To achieve our technology, we've done tremendous amounts of research in the field of heart-rate variability (HRV) or heart rhythm analysis: analysis of the subtle, beat-to-beat changes in the heart rate, and what they mean.

These rhythms reflect the synchronization and health of the autonomic nervous system. And that's important, because the autonomic nervous system has an impact on 95 percent of our physiological functions.

Heart-rate variability gives us a picture of the health of the physical heart, and enables us to analyze the communication taking place between the heart and the brain. Heart-rate variability affects all four communication areas: neurological, biophysical, biochemical, and electrical.

HeartMath leads the world in the field of HRV analysis. This analysis gives us a new way of looking at the whole heart-brain communication, and has enabled us to developed technology that consumers can use to eavesdrop on this communication.

Furthermore, using this feedback, we can learn how to change the communication so that it becomes optimal.

Q: How do the heart patterns normally look, and how do you change them to achieve optimal communication?

Martin: When you look at the frequencies emanated through the electromagnetic field that the heart generates, you see a couple of different patterns.

In one case, you see an incoherent spectrum: many, many different frequencies that are sort of fighting for power in a pattern that looks jagged and irregular.

This is the pattern we see when people are experiencing strong negative emotions, like frustration or anger.

On the other side, there is the coherent spectrum, where instead of competing, frequencies are ordered and synchronous, working in harmony. And we see this when people are experiencing positive emotions, like deep love, care, or sincere appreciation.

What's important about this is that we are broadcasting this electrical information, not only to every single cell in our own bodies, but also into space. We are in a sense transmitting our feelings through the electrical field of the heart.

Q: So you use biofeedback to train people to broadcast a coherent spectrum of energies.

Martin: Yes.

Q: What kind of research are you doing on the effects of HeartMath training?

Martin: A primary area of research concerns the development of intuition.

The way it works is that when people are in alignment with their heart — when they have this communication ordered — the coherence this creates opens the brain up to the "bigger picture." So we're doing research now showing the effect of coherence on intuitive intelligence.

We've learned that when we are in positive emotional states and operating from a position of coherence, our intelligence actually changes. It becomes less linear and more intuitive. We begin to know things without knowing why we know.

Other ongoing research concerns the effect of coherence on the regeneration of cells. I can't say a lot about this now, because we need to publish the studies scientifically before we can talk about them in the media.

We have studies showing the effect of positive emotion on production of DHEA — immune system components — all showing positive results. And on the other side, we've demonstrated, for example, that five minutes of anger suppresses salivary Immunoglobulin-A for 6 hours.

Q: You talked earlier about beliefs as compared to empirical knowledge. Could you expand on this for us now?

Martin: I believe that the heart represents the entryway into a completely new intelligence that defies traditional, logical, linear thinking. It represents a complete dimensional shift in planetary awareness.

Our characterization would be that we're moving out of third-dimensional consciousness into the higher, fourth-dimensional consciousness. And that dimensional shift is happening right now.

And we need to understand that when we shift dimensions like this, the precepts of what "living in the heart" means will change, as well.

The Heart Space and the 4th Dimension

In 3D consciousness, living in the heart turns into sentiment. It has a sort of "squishy" characterization.

But when it moves to the fourth dimension, heart-centered awareness becomes a high-speed source of wisdom and intelligence. It's "care," but on a new octave — it's for growth, and moving things along. It's not about "soft and sweet." And it's not about informational intelligence, or facts. Instead, it's about new experiences, emotional textures we haven't known before.

It's about high-speed intelligence that's intuitive in nature. New understanding, new information. And everything arrives at a quicker pace. Awareness about yourself and your unconsciousness comes more quickly. You are really thinking, feeling, and perceiving beyond the insecurities and vanities that we're used to in third-dimensional consciousness — the subtle disappointments and judgments, the comparisons, the feelings of loss from unmet expectations.

This doesn't mean that people just stay in this place and never have any of the other "human" emotions. But the ratio begins to shift.

It's about consciousness of one's own consciousness.

Q: Isn't that a concept that people have been working on for a long time? The witness...?

Martin: Yes. That's already happening. But it's not anchored or grounded. We've been coming at this from the brain, and cutting through the veil that separates us is not something the brain can do alone. That's where the heart intelligence comes into play.

When we come at heart-centered awareness from 3D reality, we tend to look for peak experiences — the Great Insight. That's the kind of thing people seem to go for. And they go for it often, because in the end Great Insights and peak experiences don't manifest as sustainable change.

When we learn heart-centered awareness, we become aware of how we are dealing with reality on a day-to-day basis.

How do we process standing in line at K-Mart? What do we do when we don't get our way? What do we do when we're faced with a challenge?

This is where the game is really being played. It's kind of an inversion. From 3D reality, we see Transcendence as something large and grandiose. But when we're looking at it from a higher perspective, it becomes something practical and effective. It's about what we're doing internally during the course of any day.

Now, none of this takes away from experiencing beautiful, wonderful emotions. But we're getting at it from a different place. We're coming at it "top down."

Q: How can people participate in HeartMath© technology?

For home use, we have the Freeze-Framer™ (see Freeze-Framer for more information). This is a software program that runs on a PC, with a little finger sensor. This software trains you to be more sensitive to the communications from the heart.

We also have a one-on-one phone-training provider network of 190 certified coaches in North America and Australia.

Q: How long does it take to achieve results?

Martin: How long? Well, unfolding the intelligence of the heart is a lifelong process. But if they will devote fifteen to thirty minutes a day, people can see great improvement in a matter of weeks.

When we do this, our relationship to what we call the heart becomes pragmatic, efficient, energy-efficient — for the benefit of ourselves and for others.

Howard Martin, who has been with HeartMath since its inception in 1991, is co-author, along with HeartMath's founder Doc Childre, of The HeartMath Solution. He also has created an 8-cassette audio program plus guidebook titled Five Steps to Total Calm, Confidence and Creativity: The HeartMath Method. He is a key spokesperson for HeartMath, conducting approximately 50 to 100 media interviews annually.

Howard has conducted training programs in numerous government agencies, all four branches of the U.S. military, school systems, and ecumenical organizations of all kinds.

He also was a noted professional drummer during the seventies, who recorded and toured with numerous Rock and R&B groups. In 1992, he used his musical talent to co-produce Doc Childre's award-winning recording, "Heart Zones," which was on the Billboard charts for fifty consecutive weeks.

To contact HeartMath, call 831-338-8712, or email them at .