Did you know that your heart consists of more neurological tissue than muscle? Your heart actually has its own brain, a brain that is fifty times more powerful electrically, and five thousand times more powerful magnetically, than the brain in your head.
Just like the conductor of an orchestra, your heart has the capacity to create system wide order and harmony, that leads to positive changes in gene expression, biochemistry, and self-healing. From this point of view, poets have known more about the healing power of the human heart than cardiologists.
The science coming from the field of neurocardiology, much of it from the work done at the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California, is demonstrating the healing power of the human heart. The heart has the power to enhance our intelligence and intuition, while lowering stress, anxiety, anger, and blood pressure. The heart has been shown to strengthen our immune response by raising circulating levels of the IgA antibody. It also has the power to create emotional clarity, enhance creativity and balance hormones. It’s the heart’s balancing influence on the brain and the autonomic nervous system that explains in part, the comprehensive healing impact of the heart.
A significant discovery is that the beat-to-beat changes measured in the heart rhythm (known as heart rate variability) reflect emotional states more accurately than changes in skin measurements or even brain wave changes. Negative or stressful emotional states produce a more random or disorganized beat pattern, while positive emotions create a very orderly, or ‘coherent’ heart rate variability pattern. It’s the coherent pattern that inhibits the stress response, or the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, while activating the parasympathetic division that’s responsible for the healing benefits mentioned earlier.
Another important finding sheds light on how we can learn to reduce emotional reactivity by cultivating a coherent heart rhythm. Our perception can be habitually routed through the amygdala, a portion of the brain that’s assessing incoming perceptions based on past emotional threats. This is the style of perception that triggers emotional reactivity and ‘stink’n think’n’. We can be reacting to imagined or remembered threats that are no longer appropriate. A coherent heart rhythm, on the other hand, allows new perceptions to bypass the amygdala in favor of the pre-frontal cortex, where perceptions can be evaluated and responded to free of unwarranted emotionality. The pre-frontal area helps us to appreciate just being in the moment, just being here now.
Your heart produces electromagnetic signals …. similar to homeopathic remedies …. that guide your health for better or worse.
The quality of your heart rate variability is reflected in the electromagnetic field produced by the heart. Information from this field is imprinted into your blood with each heart beat and is communicated to your fifty trillion or so cell membranes. The point is, a coherent heart beat …. reflecting calm, peace, gratitude, or joy …. has a very positive effect on gene expression and ultimately on your health. A less than coherent heart rhythm …. reflecting anger, worry, anxiety, or hopelessness …. has a negative impact on the expression of your genes …. and ultimately on your capacity for healing.
If the heart has such great healing potential, then why are we so stressed and sick?
We live in a culture where we’re encouraged to distance ourselves from our heart felt feelings and the guidance they offer us. We’ve become alienated from the wisdom of our hearts and bodies, and live instead in our heads, cut off from the heart’s healing wisdom. We distract and distance ourselves from our feelings because we were never taught how to experience our feelings, and the energy they contain, in a way that allows them to support us, to balance us, and to lead us more powerfully forward in life. Most of us have been programmed from childhood to unconsciously resist and judge feelings as if they were symptoms that needed to be eliminated, when in fact, they are integral aspects of our self-regulating capacity. The research emerging from the field of neurocardiology continues to validate our self-healing potential.
Hopefully, this information about the self-healing and self-regulating power of the heart will encourage us to be more conscious of the moment to moment thoughts, attitudes, and emotions that ultimately create our biology. Ideally, we’ll also be reminded to consistently practice the self-healing modalities of our choice that best create the coherent heart beat….that leads to epigenetic changes….that creates a biology that’s favorable to healing, health and wholeness.
Dr. Templin offers online courses and consultations, and sees patients personally in his office in Lakeland, Florida. You can learn more about his course Bio-Energetic Focusing: A Revolutionary Medical Model for Self-Healing! here.
Steven Templin, D.O.M., Dipl. Ac., is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, specializing in MindBody Medicine. He is a certified META-Medicine Health Coach and nationally certified acupuncturist. He shares the underlying science and more importantly, the practical tools for resolving the unconscious energetic and emotional roots of illness. In his online course Bio-Energetic Focusing: A Revolutionary Medical Model for Self-Healing! he provides training in Self-Regulation skills, that include Bio-Energetic Focusing, HeartMath and Energy Psychology techniques, Energy Medicine modalities, and Gastrointestinal repair for enhanced immunity, mood, and mental clarity. Dr. Templin is in private practice in Lakeland, Florida, at the Natural Medicine Center of Lakeland.
