In a recent post, ‘You Can Learn to Connect with Your Body to Ease Anxiety’ I suggested that while mindfully connecting with your body is very helpful, it can also be difficult to impossible for some.
In this post we’ll look at some of these difficulties and how adding heart can make all the difference.
What does adding heart mean to you? Is it thinking about someone or something you love? Is it being kind or caring to yourself or others?
Those examples are certainly ways to effectively add heart — if the experience is felt in your body, especially in your chest, and heart.
Feeling your heart, what’s in your heart, rather than primarily thinking about what’s in your heart, gives you access to the deep brain structures and circuitry that allow you to free yourself from earlier stress-induced, survival programming.
The survival programming, while protecting your infant or child self from overwhelming emotions, can linger into adulthood when it’s left buried deep in the brain and out of conscious awareness. That outdated neurological programming can have serious effects on your adult health.
In the Adverse Child Experiences (ACE) study, the Center for Disease Control studied 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patients between 1995 – 1997. The study evaluated the impact of childhood abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction on adult health and well-being.
The study revealed that childhood stress was a significant predictor of adult chronic illness, like diabetes and heart disease, behavioral problems, emotional illness, addiction, incarceration, and employment challenges.
I’ve mentioned this study before in earlier posts because of its significance. It points to an underlying cause of much chronic suffering, both from a personal and cultural perspective.
It suggests that if we could become more emotionally intelligent we could solve some of our largest personal and societal challenges.
The Role of the Heart in Mindfulness and Emotional Healing
The felt experience of heartfelt emotions, like kindness and appreciation, energizes the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) of your brain. This connection with feelings restores our freedom to be rational, rather than emotionally reactive. It also fosters more creative thought and intuitive insight.
The PFC is also the neural circuitry that’s associated with the practice of mindfulness. That’s why an effective mindfulness practice has been shown to confer so many benefits to both emotional and physical health. Who would have thought that learning to sit quietly, connect with your heart, and breathe, would lower inflammatory signaling?
Much of this information comes from research in neurocardiology pioneered by the HeartMath Institute. They’ve documented that more balanced autonomic nervous system functioning, and therefore better emotional and physiological health, is facilitated by the experience of regenerative heartfelt feelings.
Their more recent research, the Global Coherence Initiative 2.0, focuses on the mutual interaction of human emotion and larger fields in our environment.
From the HeartMath website:
“Global coherence research encompasses a large variety of scientific data to gain new insights into the interconnectedness of human/
animal health and behavior and the sun and earth’s magnetic activity.
The scientific community is just beginning to appreciate and understand the deeper level of how we are interconnected. We are getting closer to understanding why and how magnetic fields generated by the sun and earth affect human health and behavior – and why it is important to know this.”
One facet of the research shows that groups of people who are bonded emotionally, meaning that they like and care about one another, have a more powerful influence on environmental fields when they come together with a common purpose.
The heart contributes to mindfulness and emotional healing in that it can foster a direct, felt experience of safety reflected in the PFC. When we’re safe, our old stress-induced, defensive programming is free to resolve.
Why Heartfelt Feelings and Our Potential for
Personal and Societal Healing are Avoided
Feelings can sting. Feelings can overwhelm, especially in infancy.
Early in life, as early as the womb, we learn to disconnect from overwhelming feelings. We unconsciously store them away. This is a great survival strategy to prevent us from being overwhelmed and incapacitated. Unfortunately, this survival strategy of disconnecting from felt experience can last, potentially a lifetime, and be injurious to us as we mature — if we’re missing the experience of heartfelt ‘safety’.
Ideally, we have an early caregiver, a mother, or father, or loving grampa or grandma, who teaches us through example and a process of energetic and neurological osmosis, that we are in fact ‘safe and loved’. Our nervous system learns from theirs. Babies’ nervous systems are too undeveloped to self-regulate and must learn through this process of co-regulation and positive attachment.
Ideally, this caregiver would be open-hearted, breathing freely, relaxed, grounded, and have a warm smile and loving eyes that twinkle. This is how we learn that it’s safe to be ourselves, to be here, to breathe, and most of all that it’s safe to feel, be undefended, and open-hearted.
Many of us missed having a caregiver with these qualities.
Without an embodied sense of safety, we tend to become cerebral and continue to unconsciously defend ourselves against feeling the feelings we disconnected from for our earlier emotional survival.
Learning Mindfulness is about Connecting with Your Heart
Connecting with the heart is easier said than done, especially for those with a history of early life stress and adversity who’ve learned to survive by being more cerebral.
There are steps we can take to gradually and safely invite conscious awareness back to the body’s felt experience.
For example, you can notice your feet with mindful curiosity, which is a quality of the heart. You can notice for tingles, warmth, vibrations — any sensation counts as long as you’re curious. The point is to notice the most subtle of sensations available to you. The more intimately you notice the more you’re connecting with deep structures in your brain.
Over time, these experiences of noticing curiously (interoception) convince your psyche that awareness of feelings is survivable, and is actually safe.
This newfound safety, which is reflected deep in your brain, paves the way to experience more sensations, and even the emotional sensations, or feelings, that we’ve been defended against for so long.
So in terms of using ‘heart’ to assist with the practice of mindfulness, here are examples of where you can start:
1. You can begin standing with your feet shoulder width apart while noticing curiously how your feet feel connected to the ground. For extra brain boosting, you could also be aware of breathing slowly while noticing your feet. You can begin doing this exercise for 1 minute. (This exercise connects you with a more neutral and less emotional bodily felt experience. Bringing attention to your feet is a subtle way to ‘ground’ and bring energy down from your head.)
2. You can take a hike. While you walk, rather than allowing your mind to wander, focus on how your feet feel making contact with the ground. And don’t forget to breathe slowly and into your relaxed belly. Again, noticing your feet, while moving, is an experience of interoception and grounding.
3. You can sit and notice your hands, curiously noticing for any available sensations. The more intimately aware you become, the deeper you’re connecting with your brain to update the belief that it is indeed safe to feel your feelings.
The exercises above suggest safe ways to condition your brain and nervous system to be more open to ‘feeling’ while being less ‘thinking’ centric.
As you become able to safely experience more emotionally charged feeling sensations you’ll be developing the ability to heal olds wounds, update old stress programming, and restore more autonomic nervous system balance with the attending emotional and physical benefits.
The general principle behind these suggested exercises is to return awareness to your body and feelings gradually while being very gentle and compassionate with yourself.
If this reconnecting process ever becomes too much or overwhelming, that’s a sign to take a break and be more gentle, more gradual, and compassionate towards yourself when you return.
Steve is a retired Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Acupuncture Physician, and HeartMath Trauma-Sensitive Certified Practitioner with over 35 years of clinical experience in Energy Medicine, Energy Psychology, and Biofeedback.