Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

Announcer: Theatre of the Mind Podcast, accelerating the evolution of human consciousness. Theatre of the Mind Podcast, brought to you by Brainsync.com. CDs and MP3 downloads for peak performance at Brainsync.com. Expand your knowledge of the bodymind connection and learn how to tap the other 90% of your unused potential.


And now, your host, Kelly Howell.


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Kelly Howell: Monday, November 28th, 2005. I'm back. I've been in the recording studio for about three weeks straight. I'm working on a couple of new programs for BrainSync. One is called "Awakening Kundalini." It's a really, really great program. The other is "Relieve Jet Lag."


To find out more, how to synchronize your brain for peak performance, visit www.brainsync.com. There's lots of free information on there: research articles, stories, testimonials, MP3 downloads. We've got about 30 titles you can now download, and of course order CDs if you like.


So, today, I have a really great show. It's about the heart brain and heart intelligence. We've all heard the saying, "Follow your heart and the rest will follow." Or, "Listen to your heart." Well, now there's pretty amazing research revealing that the heart is the seat of intuition. Not only does receive and respond to intuitive information before the brain, the heart also has intuitive access to a field of information not bound by time and space.


So, in a moment, we'll be speaking with Deborah Rozman, PhD from the HeartMath Institute. She is coauthor of a book called "Transforming Stress." She wrote the book with Doc Childre, who is the founder of the HeartMath Institute.


This is one of those small books with a really big message. It's only about 150 pages long, but it's loaded with new scientific knowledge about the heart brain. It offers many exercises and techniques to develop intuition and transform the physiology of stress.


So, here comes the interview.


Hi, Deborah, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Deborah Rozman: Well, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
Kelly: Yeah. I loved, loved your book "Transforming Stress."
Deborah: Thank you.
Kelly: It brings a whole new message to people, that I don't think we've heard before about stress and the heart. So, I was thinking we could start with an overview of what the HeartMath techniques are and how you know that they work.
Deborah: Well, that's a good place to start. I think that people intuitively know that stress and the heart are intimately connected, because when we're very stressed from disappointment or lack of love or major issues that hit our heart deeply, we really feel the pain and the tension in the heart area.


But I don't think that people really understand the physiology and that's really what the HeartMath research and techniques are about, and how you can shift that stress response.
Kelly: So, when you talk about the physiology, is that the research that you've been doing there at the HeartMath Institute on the heart?
Deborah: Well, that's part of it. The Institute of HeartMath was founded in 1990 by Doc Childre, the coauthor of "Transforming Stress." He had been a performance stress researcher for 25 years before then. So he's been doing this a long, long time. And he was always looking for what is the inner mechanisms that people can connect with themselves to empower themselves to shift out of stress, frustration, anxiety, worry the painful states. And learn what we need to learn from them, but not have them drag us around. And shift into peace, clarity, wellbeing, the more emotionally fulfilling states and have those become our real baseline in approaching issues in life.


So the institute was started to really research where the connection was in the heartbrain communication system, or if there was one. We knew there was, because people do this all the time through different types of selfhelp techniques. But, to really find what the mechanisms were.


That's how the research began, and it's been looking at the heartbrain communication system, the dynamics and the nature of the heart the physical heart itself and how it interfaces with the emotional system.
Kelly: Could you talk a little bit more about that, because I think this is very new information for a lot of people. But you all have been doing the hardcore research there. If you could just explain a little bit about what the heart brain is.
Deborah: Well, in 1995, we published one of our first research papers that showed the critical link between emotions and the rhythms of the heart, the rhythmic beating patterns. The first time any scientific, measurable link was established between how we feel our attitudes, our perceptions and the emotional states that accompany them and what's going on in the heart itself.


And what we found is that the heartbeat creates a pattern over time. So, when you go to the doctor and the doctor says, "You're heart's beating at 70 beats per minute, " that's really an average. Or you take your pulse. If you can plot the beattobeat changes, which is each beat faster, slower and what that speed is. Like, the first beat might be 50 beats per minute, the next might be 80 beats per minute. And they average out.


Anyway, there's some complex algorithms that look at this and then plot the pattern. You see in that pattern exactly what's going on in how you feel. So, when you are stressed or frustrated, it creates what's called an incoherent wave form, heart wave form, pattern. IN the beattobeat intervals, that's very jagged. It's like an earthquake if you're very angry.


And then when you feel positive emotional states, when you feel peace or joy or appreciation or sincere care, and you feel good in the heart, it creates a very smooth rhythmic pattern that's like a sine wave, which is then communicated. And this is where it gets really exciting.


The heart pattern whatever it is gets communicated by the heart to the brain and actually tells the brain how to react, how to put that feeling to that pattern.
Kelly: So, the waves are actually triggering our chemistry, in a way.
Deborah: Exactly. Triggering our electrical and neuronal responses and biochemistry. And there's more nerves most people don't know this going from the heart to the brain, telling the brain what to do, because the heart also picks up information from all over the body, and that has more. And there's more nerves most people don't know this going from the heart to the brain, telling the brain what to do, because the heart also picks up information from all over the body and then it processes it within the heart. The heart processes it for blood pressure, for hormonal response, as well as sends this information that the heart as learned about how the body heals to the brain and tells the brain what's going on. And the brain then responds.


Now, that's not the only thing the brain responds to, but it's such a dominant influence that we never understood before. That's the key to how you can transform your stress response.
Kelly: Is the heart the control center?
Deborah: It is the central operating system. Think of your heart as the mainframe in a computer system and your head or brain is more like the memory system and the digital readout. And if you really think of it that way, you can make a lot of changes really by going directly to the heart.
The old sayings: "Listen to your heart." "Follow your heart." "Use your heart as your guide." They actually have meaning. And in the physiology of the heart, only in the last 20 years have scientists discovered that the heart has its own heart brain and an intrinsic nervous system with about 40, 000 neurons that are like the brain's local circuit neurons. And they process and store information. They learn. They are sensory neurons, so they are picking up information as well.


And these neurons are incredibly powerful, because as they integrate with the whole body, it's like a distributed system. It is telling the brain a lot of information that the brain is responding to. It's not just the brain thinking and then analyzing or habituating and then telling the body what to do, there's a twoway communication pathway.


But it's very hard for us to change our brains directly. We've tried positive thinking, we've tried cognitive therapies. You can think, but when you feel and have the power of your actual feelings, it changes much more quickly.
Kelly: That's great. I mean, I feel that in myself, like if I'm feeling stressed or angry about something, I go out and I take my dog for a walk, I put on my favorite music and I get myself feeling really good. And it just shifts everything.
Deborah: Exactly right. And that's not just a makeover, that's an actual shift in your hear rhythm pattern and in your heart energetics and in the whole process there that actually sends a different signal to the brain. It says you don't have to go into this defensive reactive protective more any more. What that does then is often gives you clarity about the issue you have been reacting to.


That's why often people say, when you're stressed out, "Let's sleep on it." And you wake up with sometimes you wake up with a different view if you've really let it go.


So, transforming stress is how to take those things that stress you out and use the power of your heart to let it go for a minute or two to get more clarity and then you can make a whole different decision.
Kelly: Yeah, it's true. If you think about it, if you do that where you can get into a positive frame of mind and heart you think better.
Deborah: That's right, you do.
Kelly: You can see more of the picture. You can get lessons from whatever it is that you're in the middle of.
Deborah: Research shows that. That's what the research shows. When the heart is in that coherent rhythmic pattern from positive emotions, positive attitude, it actually sends a different signal to the brain that synchronizes the thalamus and the higher cortical function and actually facilitates thinking, physiologically.
Kelly: Now, on the other side of it, what happens to the brain when your heart is incoherent, when you're very stressed out?
Deborah: It does something it's supposed to do. It sort of shuts down your higher cortical functions, so you can't think as clearly, you can't philosophize. It shuts down the abstract reasoning parts of your brain and focuses you just on survival.


Because the stress response was a beautiful design by nature and we really needed it thousands of years ago when we needed to focus on the danger of a tiger or a bear chasing us. And we needed to have that immediate survival response that would shut down all creative abilities and just run for your life. Fight or flight.


And what happens is that the stress response is still there and it operates all the time when we really aren't in a lifethreatening mode. And we respond to little irritations and frustrations, the little inconveniences of the day, with that same mechanism.


Over time, it just really builds up into a pattern. So, we're reacting with frustration, anxiety, anger. We really need more of our bigger picture perspective of what's going on, to see that it's just not the way that we perceive it to be.
Kelly: Right.
Deborah: So, the next level of human unfoldment is learning how to manage and transform the stress response into not to get rid of it when we really need it but into something that we have more emotional regulation over.
Kelly: Why is it that some people are able to function well under stress and others just crumble or flail about?
Deborah: It has to do with attitude. And, again, it has to do with positive emotional states. Because we can't mix our definitions of stress. When people feel pressure, and the body may be strained to try to get something done, it's what your motivation is. If you're going, "Wow, let me take this on as a challenge. I feel some resistance, but I'm going to go for it." Then you thrive, because the attitude it still positive. You still have your higher faculties.


But as soon as you let the stress... You cave in, and you start whining and complaining and you don't like it and it's too much, which it can easily build up to be too much. It overloads the system. Then, there's no possibility of seeing of seeing a larger view or seeing alternatives. You're really stuck in a reactive mode and in a blame and a judgment response. Which is where most people end up with a lot of stress situations.


Now, we all our thresholds.
Kelly: And everybody's threshold is different, right?
Deboarh: That's right. And it's different based upon our overall growing up, out pattern, our sensitivity, our stress response. It's really how much we've learned to manage our reactions. That's what it boils down to.
Kelly: So, can that be changed?
Deborah: Absolutely. We see it all the time. When people learn the HeartMath techniques, they can begin. You start with the smaller reactions and you reset your pattern, you learn how to shift your heart rhythms. You get a new perspective and then you get motivated to apply it on the bigger stuff.


You actually get more of your own intelligence and your own common sense that comes in and gives you that power and ability to stop it. And then regrid, reboot your internal operating system, as we call it, and just see from a clearer more integral level what you need to do.
Kelly: So, in your book you offer a lot of different exercises or techniques to generate coherent heart waves?
Deborah: Well, there are four or five techniques given in the book, from a clear integral level, which you need to do.
Kelly: So, in your book, you offer a lot of different exercises or techniques to generate coherent heart waves.
Deborah: There are four or five techniques given in the book, as well as exercises. You read the book and you just go through them. It's a very simple book, very easy to read, and very simple exercises. If you do them step by step, you'll start to see, just like using a computer program, how you can actually manage this automatic response you've got going on, towards stress.


The quick coherence technique is the most basic. It's showing you how to stop in the moment, at any time, whether you're stressed or not, and bring more coherence, more of that smoothness and positive emotion into your heart rhythm pattern.


It's a simple technique. We've all done it before, hit and miss, but when you put the three steps together: learning to focus on the heart, keep your attention on the heart area, breathing through that area. Then finding something to appreciate or care deeply about, something you feel positive about, that you have a positive attitude about and focusing, breathing, and feeling that attitude through the heart area, that immediately shifts the heart rhythm pattern.


If we had you hooked up to our freeze frame, or heart rhythm coherence monitor, you would see an immediate shift.
Kelly: Here's the thing. When you're really upset about something, it's hard to find something that you appreciate.
Deborah: That's true. You have to pick something else in life and then it becomes conceptual. I know I appreciate my daughter, but I don't feel it right now.
Kelly: Right. [laughs]
Deborah: That can be there. Even just to get to an attitude of neutral. There's lots of things you can do, replacing an attitude. You can breathe through the heart, or compassion for yourself.


Or just breathing neutral, an attitude that I'm going to be neutral about this for a moment until I get more information, and not just assume it's the same old thing and "he did it again".
Kelly: Right, right. [laughs]
Deborah: And sometimes you really can step out of that and generally recall a time in your life that you felt great, or recall a previous conversation.
Kelly: Right. Memories are probably a great resource.
Deborah: They are. They are. Pulling up a positive memory. The key is that you want to reevoke a positive memory, a feeling.


So, like you did: put on some music, play with your dog, go for a walk...but you want to be able to do that in the moment when you can't go out for a walk or you can't turn the music on. When it's just you, and there you are in the situation and you want to be able to just shift that physiology.


The combination of the breathing, focusing on the heart, and even the intention (even if you can't feel it all the way, just the intention) to go to neutral. Breathe a positive attitude of compassion for everyone involved, or care for yourself in the moment. All of those are positive qualities that invoke coherence in the heart rhythm. Care, compassion, kindness, tolerance, nonjudgment, neutral, appreciation, gratitude. All of those uplifting qualities of spirit, as we call them, actually evoke a coherent heart rhythm.


If you can only get halfway there, it'll give you some results.
Kelly: Right. And I'm sure the more you practice it, the better you get at it. Right?
Woman 1: The easier it becomes, and then you can apply it and most situations lose their pull on you, their significance where you can't make the shift.


I mean, life is life. There will always be some things that take a little longer, things that you have deep, older histories about, or cellular memories about, or issues that you just know something inside that won't let go. The body can be stubborn about things.
Kelly: [makes affirmative noise]
Deborah: But, as you go, you start to get glimmers of light and new air comes in.
Kelly: I love that.


So, listen. In your chapter, "The Energetic Field of Stress", you talk about the environmental stress, and how stress and other emotional states can be transmitted. Can you explain that?
Deborah: Well, absolutely. We all know what that means. You walk into a room and there's been an argument, or there's people yelling at each other, blaming each other, and you can feel yourself kind of pulled into it. Or, you feel the energy, you can "cut it with a knife, " as we say.


Just in contrast, you go into a room where people are very inspired. It feels uplifting in the room; the room is electrical. We've all had those experiences. You're at a football game and everybody's happy and rooting, and you feel uplifted.


That's an emotional, energetic transfer. And so, all this is happening, whether we're watching TV or hearing what's going on in the world, or whether we are with our children. In our family situation, there's always these emotional transfers going on.


They do effect how we feel, and they effect our heart rhythm pattern and our brain waves. Research at the institute has shown, for example, that when two people are touching, or even standing three feet apart, the heart rhythm pattern (whether it's incoherent or coherent) can actually be measured in the brain waves of the other person. It shows up, even if you're not conscious of what you're feeling.
Kelly: Because this happens a lot to people. If you're around someone and you just don't feel comfortable.
Deborah: And it could be more complicated than that, because that person could be pulling up some association you had with someone you didn't like, because they look similar, when you were five years old. It could be your heart waves going incoherent, interacting, and you're not sure why you're feeling uncomfortable.


Or, you could really be picking up somebody who's in distress, even if they're not showing it, and you're feeling that.


We do effect each other all the time. By learning how to shift into more coherence in your heart rhythm, you become more centered and it helps deflect other's energetics that you don't want. It helps you have more maturity and clarity about how to respond in a situation that would be to your benefit and to everybody's benefit.


That's why it's so important. We all need tools and techniques to regulate the emotions in today's world. There's so much bombardment of information that could cause one to feel stress.


In time speeding up events, events speeding up, the body hardly has a chance to recoup and keep up before the next one.
Kelly: Do you think we're under more stress than we used to be? Is there more stress around? Or is it a perceptual, individual experience?
Deborah: I think there's all three of that, but I do think that we're under more stress than we used to be for several reasons.


One, we have much more information coming in to us that we've ever had before. From all the technologies, and it's constant. There's just going to be a high ratio of stressful information in that.


In the olden days, even if we were stressed about the next meal, or stressed about the relationship issue (because that's not new) we had time on our hands to attempt to address it. It gave the body a chance to recoup, put things together and make sense of things more.


We just don't have that time, or take that time, nowadays. So the stress builds, and it stacks and stacks until something has to give. We stuff it down or pretend it's not there, we vent it out on our relationships, our family, our work, or we manage it if we can.


So, it's nowadays. So the stress builds and it stacks and it stacks until something has to give. We stuff it down and pretend it's not there, we vent it on our relationships, or family, or our work, or we manage it if we can. So, it's important for people to learn though, that they don't have to be resigned to that. It's not a hopeless situation. No matter what your situation, these simple techniques and tools harness the power not just of your mind and your emotions, but your physiology, your heartbrain system. They really go in there, through an access right to your heart and feelings to reboot the human operating system. You know, it's sort of the escape key on your computer, and just clear the slate and restart. We do that all the time with our computers, we can do it with ourselves. That's where the hope is.
Kelly: That's wonderful work that you're doing, and it's just so great.
Deborah: Thank you.
Kelly: I, oh, I have something else I want to ask you. It was towards the end of your book, I thought it was really intriguing, the research that has to do with how the heart has intuitive access to a field of information not bound by time and space. Can you elaborate on this?
Deborah: It's pretty exciting research. It was published a year ago in two issues, back to back, in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peerreviewed journal. What the research showed was that when we had people hooked up to all the electrodes and they were looking at a computer that was showing random, selected pictures, very gory pictures and very beautiful pictures. And you didn't know which one you were going to get, and the computer didn't know because it was selecting it. But, the heart knew. You could see the response, that the heart had a rhythm response to the picture before, get this, before the computer even randomly selected it, it knew.
Kelly: Wow. So we really do know.
Deborah: We really do know because we're hooked into a quantum field effect that is not within the just linear time, space that the mind is structured within. And it's from there that we get intuitions, not just precognitions, those are fun when they happen, or sometimes not, sometimes they're scary. But, they're interesting, but what intuition is really designed to do, is give us more clarity in the moment, more coherence, of how to handle our relationships, how to improve our communications with each other and with life, that's the first and most important function of heart intuition.
Kelly: So true. And with the, I know with the heart, I'm a mother, and I have a sixteenyearold boy, but whenever I've needed to know something, it would just come right on through. You know, if he was ever in a little trouble, or something was bothering, it would just pop into my mind.
Deborah: And many mothers experience that, and fathers too. But that's because your heart is in resonance with his. Whether it's conscious or not. That love, it's love....
Kelly: It's love.
Deborah: That care.
Kelly: Well love is the big, the great bond.
Deborah: That's right. Well all these positive emotions that create coherence in th
e heart: appreciation, care, compassion, they're all aspects of love. And love and joy, love itself is the most powerful, when you really feel that pure love.
Kelly: It's true. I mean think how, I mean, whenever people are in love, how great the feel. I mean, there's nothing better.
Deborah: There's nothing better. It's in hormones. And then other side of it, we get attached to that feeling and then we want the person to keep delivering it to us, and when they don't there's no stress that's worse, in heartache and heartbreak. But, we can learn how to find that within ourselves. That's what it's all about, and generate that and experience that in ourselves so we can appreciate what Doc Childre likes to call the addons in life, without them becoming dependons because that's what creates our misery and our biggest stress. And learning to transform stress is learning to take that back, so you can enjoy the richnesses of life and not be debilitated by change.
Kelly: Well Deborah, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Deborah: Well I'm very happy that you invited me, and I have a passion about this, as you can tell, because it's changed my life so much, and I know it can make a huge difference in anyone who wants to transform stress and to feel better, do better performance and fun in life.
Kelly: You've been listening to Dr Deborah Rozman, coauthor of the book, Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue and Tension. You can purchase her book at Amazon or any bookstore, and start getting answers from your heart, right away.


To wrap up this show, I'd like to leave you with one thing you can do that will cultivate your heart's higher intelligence. During your day, in fact, everyday, take a few moments to check in with your heart, and ask yourself, what do I need to feel good. This is not a thinking exercise, but rather one of listening to your heart. The heart speaks to us in simple, straightforward terms. Answers from the heart come quickly and maybe even in a flood of simple needs and desires. They don't often make sense because heart intelligence is nolinear. But it's that nonlinear intelligence that leads us to greater happiness, so if your heart says "I need to look for a new job, " or "I want to cancel my day, " or "I need more time to myself, " or "I want to take piano lessons." Whatever it is that comes into your mind, instead of trying to rationalize or argue with the information you receive, take a step towards acting on it. Even if today you can only take one small step towards a much larger change, you'll find that those small steps will be rewarded.


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Announcer: You have been listening to Theatre of the Mind Podcast: Accelerating the Evolution of Human Consciousness. Visit the Theatre of the Mind at www.KellyHowell.com Leave comments, questions and feedback, and join the conversation about consciousness. We want to know what you're thinking. Or you can call Kelly. The phone number is 2063398686. That's 2063398686. Theatre of the Mind Podcast is brought to you by BrainSync.com Cds and Mp3s for peak performance. Find them at www.brainsync.com.