“The key to allowing your awakening, as well as the change, is the ancient science of compassion” – Gregg Braden
The Heart is a Brain
Your feeling that many of your important ideas about what you most need to do come from your heart are heart-felt and correct. Your heart has neurons (nerves) that communicate with and listen to the neurons in your brain. Your heart makes hormones to modulate nerve activity and communciate with cells throughout the body. Your heart independently regulates its own rhythm and your whole body knows the beat of its pressure waves travelling through your arteries, and the electromagnetic pulse of each contracting and expanding heartbeat.
Your very breath modulates your heart. The heart sits between your two lungs and feels them filling with air and emptying. Rebirthing teaches that connected breaths rock the cradle in which the heart sits. Just as the child is soothed by the rocking back and forth motion of a cradle or pram. In the womb the child’s body grew in the company of this same motion from heart and lungs above. Held breaths have a frightening effect. The baby feels it if the mothers heart skips, or the pram or cradle stops its back and forth motion. Fast, shallow breaths encourage the heart to breath faster. Slow, deep breaths encourage your heart to “breath” slower.
Exercise
How fast do you need to breathe?
Is it really necessary to breath and beat that fast?
Exercise
Sit in a swing, sea-saw or rocking chair, or lie in a comfy hammock and get a nice cyclic swinging rhythm going with the help of a friend. This is what the Rebirthing, Heart Math (see below), and certain yogic and Chi breaths do. Breath together if you can. Then for 3 or 4 minutes match the swing’s rhythm to your breathing (and theirs if they can too), and imagine you feel your heart in your chest. Once your are in the rhythm of it. Have your friendly assistant change the motion of the swing, sea-saw, rocking chair, or hammock without warning you beforehand. Their movements should be gentle, firm and insistent in briefly imposing their own rhythm onto yours. Have them give you a few minutes to settle back into breathing and listening inbetween imposing their limits on your movements. Keep feeling your breathing and your heart beating, notice any changes, and discuss these with your assistant. Stay in charge of the process.
The heart comes before the brain (next chapter) because it connects to GAIA and the environment around us and feeds details to the brain and body. Gregg Braden teaches us in his book “Walking between the Worlds – The Science of Compassion” that changes in the electromagnetic field (EMF) of the heart change the EMF of Earth and that effects of the planet have also been measured in the heart field”.
Appied kinesiology has a theory that the left-right chambers of the heart relate to left-right functions in the body-heart and the top/bottom halves relate to higher and lower ‘thought’ functions just as in the brain (cerebrum/cerebellum). It is possible that the front/back of the heart relates to past and present/future as has been shown in extensive muscle tests of brain and body function.
HU
Sing HU (a spiritually charged word for God sung as in the boy’s name Hue) with a long drawn out uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu after the H. Sing it with your heart with all the love you can. Hu is a love song to God. Sink into your heart space and feel all that love waiting for you to discover and accept it.
Visit Eckankar for more information on HU, download a sample of people singing HU, or order a CD.
Heart Math
Heart Math encourages heart-based living by listening to heart rates and heart overtures (this author’s word use) and centering/breathing techniques to bring the hearts many rhythms into coherence. Overtures are my term for the heart rhythms that heart math speaks of when you measure the time spaces between heart beats. These measurements reveal a cyclic rhythm that translates to music if adjusted into the frequency of our hearing. Just as music can be heard when the songs of insects, such as bees and cicada’s are slowed down into our “speed of hearing”.
Check out Heart Math who are busy encouraging coherence and heart based living. You can download plenty of help to de-stress, relax, and get your heart waves flowing with rhythm.
Exercise
Take 5 minutes to sit or lie in a quiet space where you will not be disturbed by people, animals, or loud noises. Ask your heart for its daily news. What does it want you to know right now. Sit with it, write it down and come back in a week to review what you wrote.
If your heart says it wants to be looked after physically it might like:
Heart Herbs
Capsicum (Cayenne pepper) dried form from Supermarket. Traditionally believed to help prevent clots and to help the tissues stay alive when there is less oxygen.
Hawthorn berries. Tinctures or capsules.
Take these and/or others as recommended by your health practitioner.
Heart Nutrients
Carotenoids (this is the beta-carotene (carrot) family and full family is best)
Flavonoids (this is the Vitamin C family: full family is best)
Garlic, a clove or two a day helps keep blood vessels clear and supple.
Lecithin, a teaspoon or two a day helps keep blood vessels clear and supple.
Salmon Oil (free of toxins). Vegetarians may substitue flaxseed or evening primrose oil
Vitamin E (full family 8 vitamin Es in natural form is best)
Minerals: Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Selenium
Salt: Celtic Sea Salt harvested without touching metal, and magnesium rich with all trace minerals to prevent salt causing any problems in the body and to fix any that mineral-absent, pure, white table salt has caused.
This information is not for self-subscribing. Take each as recommended by your health practitioner.
Exercise
Heart pumping exercise that raised your heart rate and keeps you breathing deeply for 20 minutes or more three times a week. Have a health check up first if you are not sure of your heart health.
Pulsing
If you have a pulsing book to study, or a practioner in your area, explore the feelings of motion through your body, as they initiate different back and forth waves of rhythmic motion by placing their hands on places like head, shoulders, hips, and feet.
Exercise
Love is a heart-felt. Prepare someone a meal, or make them something while feeling the joy they are in your life, the love you have for them, the support you are keen to give them by doing this. See how they enjoy the joy you put into it.
Five Elements
In Chinese Medicine the heart is of the fire element. It is a yin organ because it works continuously. Blood carries your fire, your passion throughout your body. As you might well belief issues to do with love, forgiveness, security, and anger affect the health of the heart. Laughter heals the heart and as Norman Cousins, the Man who laughed at death, watched comedies to heal his body of cancer.
Exercise
Love is a heart-felt. Prepare another Soul a meal, or make them something while feeling the joy they are in your life, the love you have for them, the support you are keen to give them by doing this. See how they enjoy the joy you put into it. You may do this for friends, family, cats, dogs, birds, or livestock – anyone who can show their appreciation.
Soul Food
On page 137 of his book “Baking Bread with Children” Wareen Lee Cohen (www.hawthornpress.com) says “I have baked for communites large and small, sometimes with assistants as young as four years of age. I remember baking and serving fresh bread for a conference of 120 people. The mood in the kitchen was especially festive. We were working well together, singing and thoroughly enjoying our tasks, and one another. We filled the kitchen with our music and purposeful activity.
The bread we baked – some Italian loaves with herbs – turned out especially light and flavourful. They were not exceptional by a baker’s standards, but the way they were received by the guests was notable. The guests went straight for the bread and kept on asking for more and more. They literally sang its praises until there were only crumbs left. It seemed that they could taste the joy of our young bakers and craved more of this complete nourishment.
Time and again I have noticed a similar phenomenon. Other chefs have confirmed that whenever the mood in the kitchen is light and gay, so too is the bread. Likewise, when the mood is heavy, somehow the bread just won’t rise or taste right. Joy-filled bread nourishes the baker as well as the consumer in ways that go far beyond the nutrients of the ingredients. It has become soul food, with joy as the chef’s secret ingredient”.
Exercise
Eat food made by different people. You can do this one even if you live alone. Buy it from supermarkets,cafes or restaurants. You may even notice that their food is ‘not what it used to be’. Think about what those preparing the food may have been thinking about while they did so. Do you feel that they were enjoying their work?
When I was young I hardened myself to criticism and lived in my head so that I didn’t have to feel. I lost my sense of self-love and joy for living. I worked hard and had lots of money. I would have been dead in my 40s but I met wonderful people who started teaching me and my heart. I decided to have feelings. After lots of rebirthing and kinesiology I learned to listen to my feelings and my brain learned to respect their decisions. My brain and heart now have synergy, they play together on the same team… and I’m older than 40!
Affirmations
Louise Hay says on page 39 of her little book “You Can Heal Your Life” that if you squeeze all the love out of your heart in favour of money or position, and believe stressful living is worthwhile you more likely to have a heart attack or other health problem.
Her affirmative statments for the heart are “My heart beats to the rhythm of love”, “I bring joy back to the centre of my heart and express love to all” and “Joy, Joy, Joy. I loving allow joy to flow through my mind, and body, and experience”.
Heart Pain
See your doctor if you have what you think might be heart pain. See an applied Kinesiologist if your heart tests healthy and you still have pain in the chest or arm have a kinesiologist or massage therapist check your pectoral muscles for referred pain.
Health Checkups
Doctors, Nurses, Naturopaths and many others can listen to your heart and take your blood pressure. They can refer you to a cardiologist (heart specialist) if needed.
Iridologists and Reflexologists can give assess your health from reflexes in your eyes, and feet. Kinesiolgists can muscle-test and tell you what physical, dietary, nutritional, psychological and emotional factors are affecting heart and blood vessel health.