Table of Contents
By Shannon McRae, PhD
Optimal health requires the nurture and practice of a quiet heart with heart intelligence. This means, if you have a troubled heart, that you may need to assess the stressors in your life as soon as possible. Does a need for forgiveness play a role? Or do you think you have to constantly know about the latest news that invites your fear? Are you addicted to a cycle of television shows or content on the internet or cellular devices that invite anxiety? It isn’t likely that you are predominantly at peace if you do so, but rather that you are feeling anxious or depressed and ills in your body.
Focusing on any events that invite your fear activates your sympathetic nervous system—even if all you do is observe such things on TV. Your body becomes vigilant just as you would if a bear were chasing you in the woods, and stress hormones result that cause blood to drain from your brain so that you can use the lower musculature to escape or fight. Those hormones engage genes that produce diseases such as GERD and other digestive ills, headaches, and more severe disease ultimately. Stress hormones also cause the blood vessels in your brain to constrict and decrease mental clarity to the extent that your mind is all a jumble.
Yet, there are people who do live peaceful and productive lives in the midst of all the wildly untamed chaos taking place in small groups or corners of society. How do they do this? The peaceful have compassion for others and quiet hearts as a result of beginning and ending each day with practices such as meditation. They have self-discipline and determination to live peacefully with quiet hearts and to avoid focus on unwanted things, including using electronic devices to learn about them. This leads them to intentionally focus only on the positive aspects of their lives and find things they can appreciate each day.
They appreciate that they have food, a roof overhead, and those who love and care for them. These are people who are helping one another and creating lives of growth, positive change expansion, and joy. These are fully present people because they are at peace with themselves and others. Their discipline to find peace pays off in that their body upregulates genes that produce healthy expression.
Well Being and Expansion of Consciousness
A recent Global Coherence Initiative (GCI) statement asserted that we are seeing a new world that is being born from an expansion in global consciousness. The statement went on to say that it’s “a world infused with the heart’s intelligence, a new understanding of love, practical intuition, and the energetic connection between all living systems. It’s here now—growing, building, and emerging—for all of us to experience.”1
It may take living with unmanaged stresses before you realize that life is supposed to feel good. However, there is a subconscious program that most people carry with them that requires awareness. Most of us learned as children that in order to get along we needed to please adults in our lives. We learned that it was necessary to meet others’ conditions. Perhaps someone close to you today thinks you should watch the news, and violence, or engage in conversations about problems in the world. Even though it doesn’t feel good to you, you participate because of your subconscious program that you need to please your mate, your parent, and your friend.
It may take a little practice but, through daily determination and disciplines such as morning and evening meditation, and contemplative quiet times, you can more predominantly and intentionally think thoughts that feel good. A good way is to start in the morning when you wake up and begin appreciating whatever you can, even such simple things as your pillow and bedding, a roof over your head, or electricity in the house for cooling, heating, and lighting.
Appreciating and listening to the heart is something most people need to practice doing, and this is because most of us stopped tuning in to our heart’s intelligence. We did so when we began to value others’ requirements for us to be a certain way so that they could feel good. Was this a father, a mother, a teacher, a friend? Our minds overrode our hearts and become the predominant guidance system, but a mind without a heart is a poor guide. When you listen to your heart you become one with a larger part of yourself and the world, and the noise of the mind becomes quiet, allowing your feeling self to become its guide.
Well-being is what flows in your veins and divides your cells for growth and repair. Presence along with appreciation is the most powerful way to perceive this reality. You can understand anything with presence. Fears can arise when you feel with your heart because you begin to feel your true nature, which may go against the conditioning from your childhood. It’s ok to feel fear when you first start perceiving union with your heart; just be aware of it and move through it. The feeling of quiet oneness ultimately brings peace.
The Thymus and Immunity
The heart center is characterized by a magnetic field of intelligence larger than that of the brain. The heart field is associated with the thymus, the endocrine gland located behind the sternum between the lungs. Researchers have found that this gland is most active before puberty when there is the greatest development of Thymosin, a thymic hormone that stimulates the development of immune system T cells. Scientists have observed that the thymus gland shrinks in size after puberty.
Isn’t it interesting that at the time of puberty, most children learn to focus in their minds and thoughts to survive in our society and leave the heart’s intelligence that guided them earlier? It is, however, when you are focused in your heart’s mind that you feel the energy of life flowing in the region of the heart. It is where you feel the flow of life. Clear intention and elevated emotion with heart coherence enhance the function of your thymus gland and therefore your body’s immunity to viruses, bacteria, and other elements that challenge your health!
Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath explore heart intelligence and its effect on your brain and body, and how it influences information processing, perceptions, emotions, and overall health. They state, “The heart [center] is, in fact, a highly complex, self-organized information processing center with its own functional ‘brain’ that communicates with and influences the cranial brain via the nervous system, hormonal system, and other pathways. These influences profoundly affect brain function and most of the body’s major organs, and ultimately determine the quality of life.”2
Heart/Brain Coherence and Immune-System Boosting
The simple act of centering or focusing on the feelings around your physical heart results in clarity in thoughts and actions that ensure optimal daily health. Not only that, this focus produces heart coherence, a condition that powerfully stimulates your immune system. This should not be a surprise to those who know that the heart center affects the thymus gland. Here is a simple heart coherence practice that achieves immediate results:
- Find a comfortable, quiet place, and begin to breathe in and out, slowly, for five or six slow, deep breaths. This calms the body and gives it a signal that it is safe, unlike what your body feels if you are watching negative news!
- Think of a pet or someone you love or feel deep appreciation toward; think of things you appreciate. That generates a feeling of gratitude, joy, peace, or love. Doing this will begin to create heart/brain coherence, a condition where the magnetic field of the heart brings the brain into alignment with that field. The key is to focus on the thought/feeling for at least three minutes preferably six.
Researchers have found that within three minutes of first practicing this focus, anyone can achieve heart/brain coherence—often, after having practiced once or twice for three days or so, you will find you can generate the state of coherence at will in any situation. HeartMath researchers use an emwave device to measure the success of heart/brain coherence on the body, but practitioners can also feel the state by the amount of peace and well-being that permeates the mind and body.
Research shows that this state of coherence is a trigger for over 1300 biochemical reactions that play roles in increasing immune response, and cardiovascular health through the release of hormones such as oxytocin that help keep arteries open, extending youthfulness, and extraordinary states of intuition and clarity for learning.3
A daily practice for listening to your heart is to focus on being connected with your body, your surroundings, and the peace of nature. Unmanaged stress causes more than 90 percent of all illnesses. Your energy goes where you focus and then attracts more like it. Do you want to be in a state of vigilance because of observing unwanted things? A recent study showed that people who learned to alter their unhealthy mental and emotional attitudes were more than four times more likely to be alive thirteen years later than an equal-sized control group.4
Heart Intelligence and Intuition
It seems my ability to perceive what is taking place in people’s emotions, bodies, and thought processes to a greater degree than normal since I was a child, comes from the heart’s intelligence. As a child, isolated by a mother who was socially embarrassed by my intuitive or clairvoyant abilities, I learned to be attuned to the heart’s intelligence. When someone asks me to examine them I can perceive their emotional patterns as well as related physical conditions that need to change in order for health to flow. Researchers have referred to this ability as clairvoyance, but I prefer to call it medical intuition.
As a medical intuitive and psychologist who has worked with almost every kind of client, or emotional, mental, and physical disease you can imagine over the past 40 years, it is clear that 95 percent of illnesses involve unresolved stressful emotions. The majority of illnesses begin with emotional disturbance. It’s actually more difficult to be ill than healthy.
Most clients are often slightly aware of the issues, but when I help substantiate how important it is for them to resolve the related emotion(s) because of the connections I see, it helps them focus on what is necessary. Interestingly, almost every client needs to do some forgiveness work, starting with forgiveness of self. It is a very powerful way to heal. The following case is a good example of this power.
A Case of Healing
A female client called saying she was having colon and reproductive organ issues. I scanned her body and saw the difficulties, so I started teaching her specific forgiveness principles. After our first session, she received a diagnosis from her doctors who thought she might have cancer in her colon and reproductive organs. All of the tests indicated she needed surgery and most likely follow-up with chemotherapy and radiation.
She called again and asked for my help. I reminded her about the need to forgive something in her life. I said I perceived stress in an important relationship. I knew it was a huge part of her problem, but I wanted her to identify it. She said it was with her daughter. People develop negative emotional relationships with others because there are unresolved emotions, as was her case.
Forgiveness leads to heart coherence. I helped this client concentrate on forgiving herself by making a list of things to forgive, including the strife in her relationship with her daughter, and then I taught her how to apply the same principles to forgive herself for other choices she made. She began to do this forgiveness work with focus.
Using energy medicine over several sessions, I also helped her remove what I perceive as darkened cells that indicate cancer. She then proceeded to have surgery. When the biopsy results came in, the astonished doctors told her they found no cancer at all. No chemotherapy or radiation would be needed, and no further surgery was indicated.
Self-forgiveness opens the heart and therefore pathways for healing; it removes emotional blocks. Without forgiveness of self and others, the body will be challenged to come to a completely healthy state. I think that we open to the enormous healing power of the heart’s intelligence when we forgive everything and everyone. Institute of HeartMath researchers have found that the heart emits a frequency signal 500 times more powerful than the brain. They have discovered that there is a kind of frequency modulator within the heart that has independent intelligence and communicates instructions throughout our physical environment that regulate hormones and genetic expression.2
Indeed, HeartMath researchers point out that “one of the early pioneers in neuroradiology, J Andrew Armour, introduced the concept of a functional ‘heart brain’ in 1991. His work revealed that the heart has a complex intrinsic nervous system that is sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a ‘little brain’ in its own right. The heart’s brain is an intricate network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells like those found in the brain proper. Its elaborate circuitry enables it to act independently of the cranial brain—to learn, remember, and even feel and sense.”2
Summary
It’s no wonder that doing a simple exercise to attain heart coherence several times a day can lead to the resolution of ills and health maintenance. Individuals can create coherence of mind and emotions at will easily. The result is more physiological coherence, which means there is, as HeartMath researchers say, a “more ordered and efficient function in the nervous, cardiovascular, hormonal, and immune systems…. Research has shown that this state is associated with high performance, reduced stress, increased emotional stability, and numerous health benefits.”
Coherence for the whole body comes from being aware of the feelings that come from the heart. This awareness leads to emotional stability, or to feeling good. However, focusing on outer events that cause stress and unresolved emotions can block this system from functioning optimally. A good rule of thumb for being aware if you have stress or unresolved emotions is to gauge how much peace you have in your life. Do you feel anxious or fearful with certain people or in places? Perhaps, if so, there are some old memories and feelings with them that are unresolved.
Heart coherence and forgiveness bring clarity and emotional conditions that can clear past emotional blocks to our heart’s intelligence. Being aware of the feelings of the heart and the coherence that allows the full natural flow of well-being is very important. Such awareness can lead to a kind of healing that even many doctors do not yet understand.
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Shannon McRae, PhD (psychology), is a medical intuitive who practices primarily via telephone and Skype with clients worldwide. Her book, The Healing Effects of Energy Medicine: Memoirs of a Medical Intuitive (Quest Books, 2015), is available at amazon.com as well as booksellers nationwide; it is also available in German (Aquamarin Verlag, 2016) and Spanish editions. She may be contacted at 1-775-315-7232.
References:
- See www.glcoherence.org.
- Institute of HeartMath, www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/introduction.html. See also, “Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance,” www.heartmath.org.
- See http://heartmath.org for emwave information.
- Grossarth-Maticek R, Eysenck H. Behav Res Ther. 1991; 29(1).
