elcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Welcome everybody to the Next Level Human Show. And I am excited today because Deborah, you're somebody who I wanted to be talking to. Heart Math is an organization that I am very interested in and have learned a lot from. And this is uh Dr. Deborah Roseman, PhD. And is that how I say your name? Is it Roseman Rosman? How do you how do you say it?

SPEAKER_00 1:46

You got it. It's Rosman.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yep, Deborah Rosman, PhD. And you are the executive director of the HeartMath Institute.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

And from my that's not my title. I am the president and co-CEO of Heart Math Incorporated.

eartMath Origin And Deborah’s Story

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Okay. Okay. So I got I got that wrong. So why don't you get us started with just letting people know uh exactly what uh you all do at HeartMath and maybe even a little bit of your story about how you got into this work. And I have lots of questions for you because I'm very interested in being educated by you on all the things that you all do.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Well, thank you. Well, HeartMath started in 1991 officially with the HeartMath Institute, and I was the executive director there. And our research breakthrough in helping people understand how the heart, brain, and nervous system work together or don't, with a nervous system dysregulation, and then how you can get all those systems in sync for nervous system regulation. That was our research. The breakthrough was in 1995 in the American Journal of Cardiology, where we saw how emotional state, our inner emotions, affect our heart rhythm, our heart rate variability, and how the heart then communicates that to the brain and body. And that's when we started the for-profit company, HeartMath Incorporated, and I became president and co-CEO. That's the backstory of HeartMath, but I'm a behavioral psychologist. And probably like many of you, but this was back in the 1980s, I had a lot of challenge with stress and anxiety. And nowadays everybody's immersed in a bath of global stress and anxiety. But I wanted to find out how to shift my own attitudes, how I could understand the human operating system. That's a term we used what back then. And I know you use that too, Jade. And that's when we began to research how the heart and brain talk to each other, how the autonomic nervous system functions. I was a long-term meditator. And in yoga and meditation, the whole idea is to try to manage the autonomic nervous system. But by really looking into the biofeedback of the heart and heart rate variability, we saw a whole new window of information that is important for us to be able to self-regulate. So that's my brief story. And I think it's really important nowadays for all of us who are having to deal with stress accumulation and recovery.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah, you all, you all and yourself were way ahead of the game on this. And from my perspective, of prior to getting introduced to your work, there was a lot of talk, of course, in the new age world about this idea of how emotions are impacting the body, but we didn't really have many mechanisms. And heart math really put together those mechanisms. And I really want uh to learn a little bit about some of these mechanisms. And let's just start with something that probably everyone has heard about, but most people probably don't necessarily know about. And this is this idea of heart rate variability and this idea that this idea of the heart, most of us think of it beating like a metronome, like love dub, love dub, love dub in this very synchronous way. And in reality, it's sort of uh erratic. If uh and it goes love dub, love dub, love dub, love dub. And it's kind of like music instead of just this metronome. And this tells us a little bit about sympathetic and parasympathetic balance in the autonomic nervous system. And you all are doing some really interesting things with heart rate variability. And I would love for you to just first of all correct me if I am wrong on my description of that. And uh next kind of help us understand how this uh work helps heart math do what it does. And then we can get into a little bit deeper uh information.

RV Explained In Plain Language

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Sure. Thank you. Well, we looked at all forms of biofeedback to see if we could see emotional state reflected in any sort of biofeedback in the heart. And heart rate variability refers to the pattern of the beat-to-beat changes in heart rate. We tend to think of our heart rate as 50 beats per minute, 60 beats per minute. That's an average. If you have a way of having a sensor detect each beat, the heart rate actually goes 55, 75, 45, 80, and then the average is 60 beats per minute. So you're absolutely right. That's not a metronome of everything being the same. It really is a fluctuation. That's why it's called heart rate variability. And it's really important that we have a lot of variability naturally so that the amount of heart rate variability is high. The peak and trough of that is reflective of our emotional flexibility and adaptability. So children naturally have the most. In fact, they use heart rate variability, fetal monitors to see the health of the baby. And Dr. Donald Singer, who coined the term heart rate variability, actually was on our scientific advisory board. But we were trying to look at heart rate variability not as the amount, but what happens to these beat to beat to beat changes? What's the pattern over time? And when you plot the pattern of the frequency over time, it was like an epiphany because if you're hooked up to it and you're seeing your HRV pattern, it's reflecting really sensitively how you feel, your emotional state. So when we're frustrated, impatient, angry, depressed, the stressful emotions, that HRV pattern, which is the interaction of your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, it's looking at your autonomic nervous system, becomes very jagged and irregular. In fact, the more emotionally upset you are, the more jagged and irregular it is. Now, what was really interesting when we did our research as meditators, when we would breathe at a certain rate, like about six breaths per minute, and we would feel genuine feelings of love or care or calm or compassion or gratitude, qualities long associated with the heart, that HRV pattern would go into this beautiful rolling heel sine wave. So parasympathetic and sympathetic were dancing together in a very wonderful way. Not just relaxation, which is parasympathetic, and not just activation, which is sympathetic, but presence. That calm, aware presence that love or care or compassion or gratitude brings you into as you're breathing those qualities. That was the magic. And it turned into this, what physics calls a coherent waveform. So we develop techniques, simple, simple techniques for people when you're stressed, to shift quickly within less than a minute from that incoherent HRV pattern to a coherent one. And what's amazing is that if you practice these techniques even five minutes a day for six weeks, we've proven over and over, and over 500 research papers published now, that you're changing the signal from the heart to the brain, and you're actually creating more habit change where you can come back flexibly to that coherent, calm state. And you're the power of the heart is actually activating that. And that was what was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. And it's amazing that most people still don't know about it. They still think the brain controls the heart, but it's a two-way dialogue.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yeah, I love this. It's like that old saying, you know, some people wear their heart on their sleeve, they're actually wearing it on their heart rate variability. It's more like it. And we and we can actually measure that. And it's really interesting because you said two things there that I also think get lost here. There's the idea of regulating breath and that the heart will respond to that, but it's also this idea of uh intention, right? And so it's not just it's not just the breath part that you mentioned, but you also mentioned this sort of intention towards gratitude or calm or more of a blissed-out state, more heart-centered intentions. And it seems like those two things together are what created this coherent wave. And I'm interested, I just want to ask a little bit about that. Have have how much work have you done in the regulation of those things? Am I right in saying that? In other words, if I breathe six breaths per minute and I put myself in a distress state of anxiety type of thoughts, do have do we see that we can't get into that coherent state? Or if I try to breathe much faster, let's say, but also then try to um, you know, put these heartfelt intentions, do I still not get in that state? In other words, I'm trying to understand does your research tease out which might be the most important, or are both required?

oherence Through Breath And Feeling

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Yeah, that's interesting. You can force the system into coherence just through breathing, but you can't sustain it long. I mean, it doesn't feel good. And you can it's the feeling, the intention plus the genuine heartfelt, use that word, feeling of appreciation, say, or gratitude, that immediately moves you into coherence. Now, what that does is it entrains respiration, entrains blood pressure, and heart rhythm. So they're all at the same frequency. And that powers up and entrains the alpha brain wave. So now you're really getting into the mechanism you asked of heart brain synchronization. If you and you can forget about your breath then, because you're in a flow. You think of the heart rhythm and that synchronization as an orchestra, and now you feel in the flow, so you don't have to think much about the breath, but you do have to still be in that breathing rhythm. And similarly, with uh if you're feeling angry or upset, believe me, and you're trying to force the rhythm, it's still going to be chaotic. So the real answer to your question is just what you said, it's flow state. It's that breathing rhythm combined with the intention and the feeling. And that's what our heart math app and inner and inner balance coherence sensor trains you to do. So you don't want to just see what it looks like. You want to train yourself to make those quick shifts. I mean, that's why the military first responders, all that we train in heart math, use this so that they can quickly shift out of those stress states back into inner balance.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Yeah. And you know, I'll tell you this, Deborah, and just I'll I'll explain it for the listeners. But when I first got introduced to you all, which is years and years ago now, the first tool that I used was a tool where I would watch this little circle. As I breathe in, it would expand out. Yeah. And as I breathed out, it would come back in. And as I got into coherence, it would move from red uh to green. And I noticed right away with this tool. When it was back then, it was like a little tool that you hooked up on your ear. I know you still have this, I still have mine. And I can maintain that to your point, as long as I kept in that gratitude, heartfelt state, I would be able to maintain that for much, much longer. But you would also catch yourself, and for you meditators who've never done this, as soon as my mind would wander away or get stressed on the daily activities of living, then that would start to dissipate a little bit. So I learned very quickly through the heart math tools and techniques how to match this rhythm uh with intention. And so I definitely saw that both are doorways. I mean, I noticed that if I breathed nice and slow, that would make it easier for me to get into this state. But it wasn't enough until I got into that heart sort of centered uh, you know, sort of gratitude and appreciation. So I'm very familiar with this, and I just want uh the listeners to understand how easy heart math has made this. If you've ever meditated, it's hard to know, right? Because your mind is wandering all over the place. But this is one of the best ways that and I learned to meditate with this device, actually. So I wasn't a long-term meditator like you. Um, but now I oftentimes, when I meditate, will even see this expanding circle, this closing circle, and see it in glowing, you know, powerful light. And that's what I oftentimes visualize as I enter into my meditation. So I just want to show you, uh, you know, tell you that and say thank you for the work that you all have done there, but also just illustrate to individuals how much intention is in this, because we do have a lot of people who are very much into breath work, and I do a lot of breath work for access, but I have not been able to see breath work be as powerful when it doesn't layer on intention. So these two things seem to me to be important. I almost feel like for me, and you may disagree with this, that intention, though, is perhaps if we're gonna choose one, and I think both are uh important, but if I was gonna choose one, at least for me, I feel like the intention piece is most important because just like you said, when I get there, my breath sort of entrains, and it's much easier to maintain that. So powerful stuff.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

I totally agree. We have a technique in heart mouth called attitude breathing, where you're actually breathing the heart frequencies, because they're all measurable frequencies: love, appreciation, care, compassion, gratitude are different frequencies within the love spectrum, so to speak, the heart spectrum. And that's so fascinating to me because that's what you want flowing through your system more and more, because that changes the nervous system response, the hormonal response, the immune response, the autonomic nervous system, which controls 90% of your body's functions, you sleep better. I mean, it's all regulated by how you feel. And people talk about mental stress, but it's really the emotional system that is driving so much traffic in the body. And so I totally agree with you when you breathe appreciation, or but not, it can't be from here. It's got to be genuinely felt intentioned, heartfelt. It works tremendous magic, you could even say, but we haven't been taught how to really do that, except in the sort of sweet idea of yes, be grateful, be appreciate, you know, be patient. But it's really the activation of the heart rhythm pattern that signals the brain, that synchronizes the system, so it's all operating coherently. And that's why we call this heart intelligence. Because even though your mind isn't starting this intention, it's engaging the heart, the power of the heart, the rhythm of the heart, the pattern of heart rate variability to actually take the operating system into a higher level of awareness. Because as you do this, it's activating the thalamus, which synchronizes cortical function, and activating the frontal lobes. So you are really activating higher brain potential through the heart.

raining Tools And Real World Use

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah, and I uh now that you're bringing up some of the mechanisms, if you don't mind, I'd I'd love to share with you a little bit, and this is selfish for me. I hope the listener doesn't mind, but I would love to get Deborah's take on some of the ways I see this and have you perhaps correct me if I'm sort of I'm off here. In the work that we do at Next Level Human, one of the things that we try to do is we see uh our stories, let's call them our subconscious stories. In my work, we call them MUD, misguided unconscious decisions. These are stories that, you know, you as a psychologist understand. These would be things we pick up when we are children, when we're teenagers, when we don't have the knowledge or the experience or the wisdom or the tools to understand what's happening. And so we create stories about ourselves. Is the world safe? Am I worthy? These kinds of things. Now, those stories from my perspective combine with the emotions to form almost like, you know, the let's think these stories as mud and the emotions like rebar. And when they come together, it forms like this cemented belief structure, right? And so then we walk around with, I'm worthy, I'm safe, the world is good or the world is bad. And so one of the things we do in our work is we will re-enter into these stories, which can be a little stressful, but then we move people into this heartfelt appreciation and coherence-based breath that heart math has so famously helped us understand. And what I feel like is going on here is based on my understanding of the mechanism, is that we are doing memory reconsolidation, which you know is uh this idea that when we bring up a memory, it makes it labile and changeable. But I also feel like then this coherence breath and moving into this heartfelt appreciation sort of uh makes that stick. So it's almost like we do this sort of rewiring or rewriting of the story, and then we use this emotion as a rewiring of the emotion so that the story and emotion can then change. And I have seen this uh be incredibly powerful in my work, but I don't know. I've always wanted to ask you all how you see uh this model and how you're using it in your work.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Yeah, no, it's wonderful. The psychophysiology of what you're describing is how the operating system works. The heart rhythm pattern is you're putting the gratitude or the emotion and you're getting the heart rhythm into coherence, it's sending a different pattern, frequency, to the amygdala, the emotional memory center. So if you have an anxiety habit, for example, wherever it was started, when you feel anxious, the heart rhythm pattern is gonna go into a certain pattern, which we can see the anxiety pattern, and it's gonna send that frequency pattern to the amygdala, which is gonna say, Oh, that's familiar, and it's gonna activate those memories of anxiety and fear to shift that imprint, which is what you're doing, as you activate, say, just gratitude for your pet. It doesn't matter what, it's the genuine feeling, it's gonna change the heart rhythm pattern. We know what that looks like for appreciation or gratitude, and it's gonna send that frequency pattern to the amygdala, which is gonna go, huh, I feel safe. And it's gonna then begin to activate a different response. And if you do this enough over time, you start to reprogram, rewire that imprint. And at the same time, there's another pathway through the vagal nerve that the heart pattern sends to the brain. 90% of the vagal traffic between heart and brain is afferent, which means it's from the heart. The heart is telling the brain what to do and how the body feels. So it's sending that to the thalamus, which synchronizes cortical function. And when it feels safe, the thalamus then activates our higher creative potential, our frontal lobes, our executive decision, our bigger picture thinking. In other words, we see the incident that maybe created that traumatic imprint from a more objective, depersonalized, higher intelligence perspective, which then allows us to feel safe and secure and release more of that. That's what you're doing, Jade. And that's the mechanism. So this heart revealing coherence is the activating the heart power to help us clear those old imprints, activate our higher cognitive functions, higher performance, improve our relationship. Connect our compassion, all the wonderful aspects of our higher brain, but they require the higher heart to open them up. And yes, that to me is next level human.

hanging Emotional Imprints In The Brain

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yeah, same. And thank you for uh validating that. I didn't know that that was necessarily going to be the case, but uh, that's the way I understand it as well. And one of the things I'd love to point out to the listener that, and I have another mechanism I want to double check that I think is going on that you may or not may not be aware of. But my what I want the listener to understand is if we're listening to Deborah, essentially what she's saying is very different than what is typically being preached out there in the world of functional medicine influencers and everything else. Because from my perspective, and Deborah, don't let me put words in your mouth. So definitely jump in and correct me if you think I'm miscommunicating what it is you're saying. But when I think about this, I think about this idea that most people go, you know what, you just need to relax. You need to go sleep better, or you need to, you know, do your circadian rhythm stuff, you need to, you know, um, relax the nervous system. And a lot of that stuff is a lot of habit-based, information-based, biohacking-based related to physiology and/or biochemistry. But when I hear you talking, it's like one layer deep in this operating system, deeper in this operating system. It's uh it's a layer of thought and feeling, not necessarily choice and action. It's almost as if you're working at this layer that determines choice and action, right? If I can think and feel a different way, then naturally my choices and actions are going to flow out of that differently. But if I force it the other direction, try to change my choices and actions and expect that to automatically change my habitual feelings, I'm not saying that that doesn't work because I do think it can work, but to me, it's much slower. And wouldn't we want to come from both directions anyway? So, in my work, what I've seen is that when you do this rewrite phase, rewire phase, which I think heart math has really helped me understand, and we combine that with the retrain phase, which is what everyone else is kind of doing and missing this piece, I think we start getting real change that happens. And the mechanism that I wanted to run by you is that I don't know if heart math has done this research yet on the habenula, which we know as the failure sensor in the brain. So whenever we perceive ourselves as failing, even if we didn't fail, even if we think we failed, this habenula fires and that kills willpower and motivation. And my understanding is that just as you know, this kind of heart coherence and compassionate-based uh, you know, thinking is down regulating fear centers and increasing neuroplasticity and doing all of these things, it's also protecting this habenula hijack that's happening. Because if we have the perspective that I'm only here to learn and I don't have to think in terms of success and failure and be anxious about the right choices, that we take this sort of firing effect off the habenula that then allows us to sustain willpower and motivation. And I'm just wondering have you has your organization done any research in this area at all?

SPEAKER_00 26:45

What we've done research is on the difference between heart power and willpower. And again, willpower fizzles if your heart's not into the diet or the exercise program or whatever you're trying to change. That's where back to intention and feeling are so important. And they have to be aligned with what you really believe, or you're not gonna you're gonna disconnect anyway. There's not enough juice in it. So, relaxation by itself is not powerful enough to change the communication pathway. It is wonderful to relax, but it's not a high-performing state. It's not a high-presence state. You don't want a bunch of executives around a table just relaxed if you think you're going to have co-creation and creativity and dynamic. And that's how the system needs to work to change a habit. It needs that power of the heart. And that's what coherence gives you. It's both relaxation, parasympathetic activation, and coherent activation, sympathetic activation. It is a different state. And on the power spectrum, if we're looking at that, it is much more powerful. We have a graph that we show in our seminars than just relaxation alone, which is wonderful. But when you get the autonomic nervous system synchronized like that in balance, it builds a standing wave of heart power that gives you the motivation to act and choose what is going to be best for you. That's why we say you're becoming your best self. It gives you the capacity and the empowerment and the alignment to be able to do that. That's got to be first if you want to really have habit change mentally, emotionally, physically, in a short period of time. That's what I want to tell your listeners. There have been so many research papers published, 500 of them, on the different applications for coherence for not only health issues like lowering blood pressure, but also ADHD for having more ability to take charge of focus, but also in schools for learning, for relationships, for having more true compassion. Because it's it the magic of it is that it's you. It's aligning your own system. It's not anybody doing anything to you. It's you resetting, rewiring to use your terminology, and realigning has to be the precedence for doing that.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Yeah, I love this. And I'll use a couple other R words here, right? Like my big pet peeve is if we're gonna regulate the nervous system, which by the way, HeartMath Institute, I'm sure you all are very excited about this. Regulating the nervous system is all the rage right now, right? Everyone's talking about it. But from my perspective, what they're really doing is they're simplifying this into relaxation. And you and I talked just before we came on live and discussed this idea that regulation is not relaxation. Regulation is taking something that is hyper-functioning and bringing it down, and taking something that is hypo functioning and bringing it up, and more importantly, being able to go to stressed-out states and come right back down to balance states, being able to go to relaxed states and come back into focused states. It's this flexibility that, and we want to train this regulation, which is what your tools are doing in my mind, and what a lot of this relaxation stuff actually is not doing. And so it's not to, you know, come in and say that people are necessarily doing this wrong or that relaxation is not the thing to do. It's just that there's something I think is much more important if we're going to talk about regulation. So, sure, keep relaxing, do your naps, you know, do your red light therapies, do all the things that you're doing to recover. But also, if you really want to regulate the nervous system, you need to learn to get it into coherence. And this is where this heart-based technology that you all have, you know, sort of elucidated these mechanisms for us uh comes in. Now, one of the things I really want to just briefly touch on, and you I know you said it, and you said it so wonderfully, but I just want to just drive it home. There's this other idea that the heart has its own nervous system and is talking to the brain. Yeah. And it's doing that uh more than, you know, so if you all were listening to Deborah, she said it's actually the heart is more in control of the brain or has more efference to the brain, sending signals to the brain than the other way around. And this, I know when people hear this, they go, oh, that's interesting. But I don't think they truly understand the ramifications of that. That really then, when we're dressing like a wardrobe in our emotional state of, you know, anxious feelings versus intentional, heartfelt feelings, that this really is the way that we begin to shut down the mind running all over the place instead of fighting the mind. People hear this and they still want to do it in the mind when it's actually happening in the heart. And I don't know if you want to add any more to that. I think you said a bunch about it, but I just want to make sure people understand what we're talking about here. It actually is the thing that calms the brain. The brain is not calming the heart, the heart is calming the brain.

egulation Versus Relaxation And Willpower

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Exactly. Just a second. I've just lost you for a moment here.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

Yeah, take your time. And why while Deborah kind of gets her sort of mic back on, you know, from from my perspective, for those of you who are listening, I just feel like this is we oftentimes get these mechanisms in medicine, in functional medicine, and we learn these new things, but then we keep on doing the old behaviors. And that's why I'm bringing this up because I just really want to drive it home that I don't think people are truly getting, that it's not like let me in my head think about my heart. It's like, no, come from the heart. It's not a thought-based thing, it's more of a feeling-based, intentional thing that then changes the thought patterns. And I really want to just play with this idea for a minute because in my way of looking at this, what happens is my mind will be running and it will be doing its thing and it will be catastrophizing. And if I go, calm down, Jade, calm down, or try to logic my way around it, I'm still ping-ponging all over the place. But as soon as I regulate my breath and go into my heart, and I know a lot of people don't know how to do this, is why the heart math tools are important. But as soon as I go into my heart and stop fighting my thoughts with my thoughts, that's when things begin to clear. And I still feel like this just people hear it and they hear it and they hear it again, but they just don't get what's happening here.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

Yeah, you're right. And I have so much compassion because I was like that. We all were. We're brought up to lose the heartfelt feelings we have as babies, as children, and just live in the mind, leave your emotions at the doorway, both at school and at work, and that doesn't work. And that's because even when you are calming down the mind or trying to, there's an undercurrent. You talk about that, the emotional undercurrent, the emotions call the shots on how you're perceiving, whether you're intentionally aware of it or not. So what people don't, it's hard, and I understand, understand, is that the heart's actually talking to the brain in four different ways. The heart is putting out 2.5 watts of power with every heartbeat. That's signaling the pattern of what you're feeling, the HRV pattern to every cell of the body. That really impacts health, immune response, sleep, recovery, all the things that we're often trying to correct from the outside in. Whereas going right to the heart of the matter, so to speak, and shifting how the heart rhythm pattern is working is the fast track. And then, of course, the other outside in things work better. But the other way the heart is signaling the brain with that 2.5 watts of power with the pattern as well. It's bathing every cell of our body in that pattern, which reflects how we feel. Then you've got an intrinsic nervous system of the heart was only discovered in the 1990s. That's amazing, isn't it? That the heart has 40,000 sensory neurons that learn, feel, sense, remember, and they're independent from the brain. They're not connected except through this vagal nerve traffic and what's called the baroreceptor system. So it is sensing these nerves, how the body's feeling, and sending that information as frequencies to the brain. The heart also communicates with the blood pressure wave, that we know, the pump. And that is also impacting a lot of how we feel, and even perhaps how we think. And then there's the whole energetic field of the heart, which we're measuring at the Heart Math Institute, which is quite amazing, and how we pick up on each other's vibes or even the non-local connections of the heart, which is a whole nother podcast.

SPEAKER_01 36:20

Actually, that's where I wanted to go, Deborah. That was exactly where I was wanting to go, if you don't mind uh going into this.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

Sure, let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

My listeners uh are used to me talking about a term that's, you know, it's it's a cumbersome term and it's probably not the best term, but quantum metabolism, let's call it. And it comes from just this idea of quantum biology. And so where we have gotten to in, you know, sort of uh where we are in biochemistries, we're now seeing that uh photosynthesis is using quantum mechanics. We're now seeing that mitochondria are using quantum tunneling. And so there's things that we are now understanding that uh, you know, perhaps um we are in the microtubules. You know, this might be where the consciousness events are happening. But one of the things that I love about this idea, and I know we can't, you know, uh, we don't know exactly how this works, but from my perspective, this idea that uh you all talk about, and I'll probably get it wrong, but the heart has a magnetic field that is essentially coming off feet off the body. So, you know, if Deborah and I are in the room together and we're standing next to each other, this my heart field magnetic field is interacting with her heart magnetic field. And my question to you is tell us a little bit about how this works. So the heart is actually putting out a magnetic field. We can measure that through equipment. Do we know that other humans can pick it up? I think a lot of us would just say, well, kind of no duh. We can sense and feel other people. Maybe this is how it's working. But I would love to understand some of the science and mechanism that you all are doing with these the heart field. And how big is this field and what does it mean, and how is it interacting with other people?

SPEAKER_00 38:11

Big questions. So we've actually done research where you know, this 2.5 watts of power, this it's it's electromagnetic field. Anything like that, it's like is going to put out an electromagnetic field. You know, it's like uh think of your heart as like a radio station broadcasting programs, broadcasting what you're feeling. It's all frequencies and vibration. So why wouldn't we pick up each other's vibes? But we've actually done research where we've had somebody doing what we call a heart lock-in, you know, which is locking the heart and breathing love or appreciation through the area of the heart and radiating it out intentionally. And the person not touching, but standing nearby, that pattern shows up in their brainwaves.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

So fascinating. Yeah.

ow The Heart Communicates Four Ways

SPEAKER_00 39:09

And we've repeated that over and over. So that's a mechanism for how we're picking up on each other's vibes. When you walk into a room and two people, uh, you can you can tell they've been arguing, you can like cut the air with a knife. Those are expressions we have. Or you walk into a cathedral and you go, oh, you feel uplifted. Why? Because there's so many of the heart feelings of prayer that are in practically the walls of the cathedral. So there's quite a bit of um research showing, yes, that's the think of your heart as a broadcast system, and it's also receiving, like it's a radio receiver and broadcaster. And now how far does it go? Magnetometers can measure it up to five feet away. Our brain waves, you can only measure about a half an inch because of the skull, but also it's just not a it's not the originator of the spirit of the power. The heart is. So learning to interact at that core level with your heart through your intention and feeling and breath is empowering. And it's what accelerates spiritual growth, but also trying to reprogram, rewire imprints. It's without activating the power of the heart, you're only got half the system you're working with. And that's what I learned as a behavioral psychologist: cognitive behavioral therapy can be very helpful, but it's missing the whole body, it's missing the whole heart and somatic part of it. Now, your other question, how the quantum level of it. It's really interesting. Many years ago, Dr. Carl Prebrum, who was head of brain research at Stanford and was one of our advisors, uh, sponsored a quantum consciousness conference here at Heart Math Institute in Boulder Creek. Stuart Hamerboff, Sir Roger Penrose came, they were looking at quantum coherence and the microtubules that you're talking about. It was fascinating because they're looking at the waveform collapse and stuff that was beyond my understanding, but intuitively I went, oh, there's something here in terms of non-local heart connection and intuition. And HeartMath Institute's through the Global Coherence Initiative has done this incredible research on non-local intuition, meaning when we train a group of police officers, which we do, first responders, and we talk about the heart brain synchronization and the research showing the heart picks up non-local signals and then sends that information to the brain, which then sends that information to the gut, and that's the gut feeling, or to the body. And a lot of times people, the psychics or mothers know when their kid is in trouble across the planet. That's through some quantum field effect. They're picking it up, but it's because of the heart connection they have that allows that. Now, there's so much more research that we want to do on that, and we're we're starting to study that through uh network of random number generators in the Global Consciousness Project. But one of the studies that was done was where we have magnetometers in different locations in countries like Lithuania and New Zealand, as well as the United States, and we did a study where at the Hartmouth Institute, where people would do this heart locking technique for 15 minutes, and we were all hooked up to our sensors, and that was fed into a local uh local computer data system, and their heart rate variability pattern synchronized. They synchronized with each other in the group, and they synchronized with people in all the groups, and that synchronization sustained itself for 24 hours. That carryover effect was amazing.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

The carryover effect of appreciation was amazing, and then we found that there was a slow wave rhythm in the earth's geomagnetic field that was synchronizing. Like we're now synchronized when we're in heart coherence with nature and with the earth. And what are the implications of that for global coherence, for people getting along with each other? That's all a quantum field effect. And that is very exciting to me.

eart Field Research And Group Effects

SPEAKER_01 44:03

It's incredibly exciting to me. It's actually why I'm working on my PhD now for the same reasons because I want to study this work. It's why I'm interested in your organization. And it's really funny, right? Because for those of you listening to this for the first time, if you're listening to Deborah and me and you're like, oh my God, what are they talking about? I mean, I think what we're seeing is, you know, sort of this wave change. And I've been grabbed kicking and screaming from this sort of very materialistic mindset of like, you know, the brain creates consciousness to now with looking at some of this research and, you know, going, okay, well, there is another way of looking at this, and that is that we are essentially receiving uh consciousness. And I'm interested in exploring that, you know, and I think we can certainly what you're describing, Deborah, we we as humans can kind of go, you know, I feel like I have a felt sense of what that's like when I'm around certain people, or we're in church, we're in church singing together, or we're at an event together, and we can feel this sort of, you know, kind of coherence. But this other thing where we are now connected into nature, and many people have felt that. And certainly those of us who meditate or those of us who have done uh you know journeys and things like that have had felt senses of this. But of course, as people who appreciate science and want to want to be evidence based, I'm just so appreciated. Appreciative of the fact that you're trying to find the mechanisms behind this. And I think that we are at a place now where we have to begin to look at this stuff very, very seriously. One other line of questioning before we begin to wrap up is I'm just curious your thought on this. I have my thought, and I I've talked to many people, and some people have different thoughts on this. And I'll just give you my thought and see if you agree, disagree, or, you know, and I'm just interested in your thoughts. You know, from my perspective, we talk a lot, a lot of people talk about the nervous system. And I feel and regulating the nervous system. And I know that this is all the rage, and we've kind of moved from, you know, gut stuff, hormone stuff, and now it's nervous system stuff. You and I have probably seen a lot of these trends go over the years. And, you know, so from my perspective though, I feel like emotions kind of get lost in this because they kind of get lumped into the nervous system. And I'm not so sure that they exactly are and should be put uh into the realm of the nervous system. To me, I almost see them as like the go-between between, let's say, the nervous system and this, let's call it quantum field or biofield. They almost seem like they're part nervous system oriented, but part field oriented. And I wonder just how you see this, because when I do my work, I don't put emotions really in the realm of nervous system. I mean, I know that that's partly what's happening, but I put them as rewrite the thought-based stories that get stuck, rewire not the nervous system, but the emotional holding patterns, and retrain the nervous system. So I see these three parts as kind of different, even though there's overlap. And I I've talked to many people who agree, disagree, have different thoughts on that. But I'm just curious, how do you see it and how does heart math see it? Do you see emotions as strictly being nervous system phenomena, or do you see them as being something else?

lobal Coherence Quantum Links And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 47:26

Oh, well, they're definitely more than nervous system phenomena. And Candace Purt, who passed away, was one of the first researchers who discovered that emotions are distributed throughout the body. They're in cellular patterns, you know, probably right at the DNA level. And, you know, epigenetics affects that. The nervous system is sort of like the transporter, like you said, it's it's a different system, but it's all connected. And the power of changing the nervous system, regulating your heart rhythm pattern is the key to that, because that's measure of the autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. As you regulate that, you're activating different frequencies that are distributed and communicated to your cells and to the brain and to the emotional memory centers. So you're actually sending a different frequency pattern. And I think the answer to your question is let's start looking at frequency. Let's start looking at pattern, because that's in cells, that's in quantum patterns, it's everywhere. It's the pattern that you want to shift, and the nervous system getting that in sync and in trained and aligned, all those things we're talking about, coherence, gives you the power to intentionally change emotional state and habit and change the cells. And the hormones also are so related to emotion and how we feel. You know, oxytocin, the heart produces as much oxytocin as the brain. Most people don't know that. The heart produces serotonin, the heart produces what's called ANP, where the balancing hormone that has receptors in the brain. So as you start to get autonomic balance, you're sending that to the brain. Remember, we can't forget the pathway to so much of this is heart to brain. So back to the fact we've been schooled to stay up here. We think we live from here up. We don't. And it's still the undercurrents driving traffic up here. So let's learn to shift to here. And when we do, it activates getting coherent activates our higher brain centers, our higher mind, our intuition, our ability to care for each other as ourselves, our ability to not be separate. And that is the key in all that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 50:07

Yeah. I love it so much. And I just love hearing your thought on that. And so, one of the things I love about HeartMath is that you all have tools for people to learn. So it's not just talking about the science and talking about the philosophy. There's actually tools there. And so tell people where they can get involved to begin to get some of these tools. I have quite a lot of biohackers and things like that that may not be aware of some of the tools that HeartMath uses to uh help people understand this, you know, uh mind sort of body technology that I think is unique to you all. So, how do people get in touch with you and how do they get access to some of these tools?

here To Start With HeartMath

SPEAKER_00 50:49

Sure. Well, HeartMath is a system of tools, research-based research tools we created to help people not just track, but train technology to track and see in real time the shift and train yourself to be able to have a new baseline of coherence throughout your day. And we have all sorts of research studies on how that helps relationships, health, performance, etc. So people can get access to that. We've developed the highest quality HRV sensor. If you go to HeartMath.com, you can see what's available there. We developed the HeartMath app that onboards you into training and shifting and how to apply coherence for improving your meditation, sleeping better, all the things you want to release or transform stress and anxiety into coherence and other tools. 30 years of heart math research and content are on that half that the sensor gives you lifetime access to and trains you. We're trying to hold people's hands through this shift from head to heart-centered living, because that's where we connect with intuition and with fulfillment and purpose and just become who we are. And it will ever methods you're using for self-improvement, just add the power of the heart. So heartmath.com that shows you what you can do. We have certification programs for health professionals and coaches and workshop trainers and organizational consultants. And our vision is let's get a hundred million people on this planet into coherence and see if we can lift the vibration of this Earth system and people.

SPEAKER_01 52:42

Yeah, I love that so much, Deborah. Count me in. I want to be a part of that. And um I I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to educate us. Uh, I'm I'm glad that we finally got a chance to get together. And um, why don't you stay on the line? I'm just gonna go ahead and hit uh the stop and I just want to make sure everything loads up. But for all of you who uh hung out with us today, thank you uh to Deborah and to all of you, and we will see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

Yeah, thank you, everyone.