Engaging The Intelligence of the Heart with Howard Martin, Co-Founder of the HeartMath Institute

Welcome to Awake to Oneness Radio. I am Caroline Chang, your host. The mission of Awake to Oneness Radio is to inspire the world to awaken to the universal truth of oneness, that we are all one. Spirituality and science are both telling us that we are literally all connected. And once mankind awakens to the universal truth of oneness, there will be peace on earth. We have had many guests on the show thus far in the field of spirituality. Today we are going to have our first guest in the scientific field. Today's topic is Engaging the Intelligence of the Heart with Howard Martin. Howard is the Executive Vice President of HeartMath Institute, co-author of the HeartMath Solution, and he is an active member of the Global Coherence Initiative. Welcome Howard to Awake to Oneness Radio. Greetings, Caroline. Thank you very much for having me on your program today and tonight, and I want to say hello to everyone who's listening wherever you're listening around the world, whenever you're listening, and greetings to all of you. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. Like I said, we've had several guests from the spiritual side, and one of the things I want the show to reflect is not just spirituality is telling us that we're all one and we're all connected, but also science is telling us the same thing. So today you will be our first expert guest in the scientific realm, in the scientific field of oneness. Can you share with our audience a little bit about your personal story on how you came to come to do the great work that you're doing with HeartMath? Well, I'll sure be glad to do that. It's a very long story now, of course. It goes back over 40 years. As a young man living in North Carolina at the time, a young rock musician interested in personal growth and expanding awareness and consciousness, and read a lot of books on that sort of thing, and met Doc Childry, the man who's the founder. Oh, sorry. I think we just got disconnected. Okay, so hopefully Howard will call us back. I'm sorry, technical difficulties. We just got disconnected. The call just dropped, but I'm sure Howard will give us a call back in a few minutes. Sorry about the technical difficulties. Let's see. Howard, let's see if we'll get a call back from Howard in a few minutes. This is actually the first time. This is the 9th, 10th show we've done, and here, okay, Howard is back. Okay, hold on. You can call back in on a different line. Okay, I'm not sure what happened. That's okay, no worries. Okay, well, you're back. That's Hay. That's life. You're back. Okay, you were telling us that your story started, you said, over 40 years ago. That's true, and met Doc Childry when I was a young man and began an exploration of heart. Really, I was interested in personal growth, expanding awareness, being a better person, and our approach that, you know, that Doc was proposing was one that was truly trying to explore and embody the qualities of the heart, but in a different way, not in just a sentimental or squishy way, but in a very pragmatic and intelligent manner, utilization of this intelligence that we recognize that we all had inside ourselves. That work went on in obscurity in eastern North Carolina for over 15 years. We had no ambition at that time or no thoughts about it, really. We just didn't, wasn't in our consciousness to be an organization or to be authors or speakers of the things that we are today. It was just a process of putting first things first to try to, you know, again, you know, practice things and learn to be better human beings. I think the purity of that, Caroline, you know, was magnetic in a certain way because even though we were living in obscurity, people found us, and over time we made friends and associates with various people around the country, and back in the late 80s began to start thinking about forming an organization that we could put together without a business plan, without, you know, financing and investment and anything like that, but that it was a care-based mission to put together a system that we could share with the world to help the world through the transitional times that were already happening, but that we could see were definitely coming. So back in 1991, we founded HeartMath, and we did it in Northern California with some folks we knew out here, and we started with literally nothing. We just had our own visions, our own ideas. We began to write books. We began to develop training programs. We started our scientific research, which we can talk about during the show. All that led from one thing to another to, you know, today we are an organization that many, many people know about all around the world. We have a really big global footprint. We have for-profit business, nonprofit. We do training programs. We do licensing and certification. We develop technology. We have research published in major scientific journals of all kinds. It's just been an amazing process and journey, and that's a very, you know, brief story, of course, about my journey, but I will say this, is that in those early days for me, I recognized life was, I felt life was about continuous growth, and I also believed that life, for me at least, had to be about service to others, and I've used those principles as guiding principles through this whole process, and I believe today that even with all the sophistication and with all the wonderful things that have happened for me and, you know, a lot of fulfillment that has come my way, I don't think I've lost sight of that. I think that's still true for me today, and that's what makes it fun. To me, HeartMath has no ceiling. You know, what we've been doing here through the HeartMath system and through the organizations just keeps growing, and it gets more exciting all the time, and it's an open-ended adventure, and for that, I'm very grateful. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that, and I do understand what you said, what you said about giving back and sharing, because that's kind of where my heart is with this show and also a nonprofit foundation. I'm starting in my son's memory. All of it comes from the heart. You know, it's just, I feel spirit is communicating with me through my heart, and I'm just following and going with it, and I'm pretty much in the same boat that you guys were in 20-30 years ago, just following my heart and just starting from ground level and seeing where it goes. So I understand what you're saying, but sharing and giving back is a big thing with me, so that's kind of why I started this show. That's great. I'm so honored that you came on the show and to share your knowledge with us about HeartMath. I was first, I first discovered the work of HeartMath through the work of Greg Braden in 2010. I was studying a lot of his work, and he mentioned HeartMath a lot. So I'd like for you to share with the audience. I mean, the audience may not be familiar with HeartMath. If you could share what HeartMath is all about and what you are doing with HeartMath. Well, it's a system. HeartMath is a system consisting of tools, techniques, methods, and technology. It's all underpinned with science, Caroline, to give it an empirical, you know, sort of bottom line, baseline to it. And the entire system was designed to help empower people through these changing times, and it's a very heart-centric approach that we've taken to this, to the process of it. So that's kind of what HeartMath really is, and so it manifests itself in a lot of different ways. And as I mentioned a minute ago, it has a very large global footprint. I have an advantage of being a successful author and a spokesperson for HeartMath to speak and to travel, you know, a lot of places in the world. And that still amazes me, in a way, and really warms my heart, makes me feel so good inside. When I go somewhere really far away, like Kuwait or New Zealand or places like that, and there's people paying money, and there's like several hundred of them who are taking their time and paying their money to come and hear me talk, you know, and I'm sitting there thinking, how did this happen to me? And it's amazing, and they're in these places so far away, but yet they've been following our work, following the work of HeartMath for a very long time, and it's just a, it really is a fulfilling experience to see that. Greg Braden, you mentioned, has been a friend of mine and a friend of HeartMath for, you know, probably 15 or 20 years now, and he certainly talks about us a lot, and I talk about him a lot, and he and I have toured together. You mentioned you were studying his work in 2010, and in that year, he and I were very active. We were on the road together doing tours and things, and he's a great man, and their messages have a lot of similarity, and I think our purpose for what we do is very similar in terms of the changes we're trying to affect in the world. So, yeah, it's a great way to get introduced to HeartMath, through someone like Greg, who I certainly have a lot of respect and love for. Right. Well, with me, my search started in the spiritual realm, and then when I watched What the Bleep in 2007, and that opened my eyes to the fact that science is pretty much saying the same thing, that spirituality is saying, just using different terminology, but it truly means the same, and then from that, from What the Bleep, I discovered Greg, the work of Greg Braden, which introduced me to the work of HeartMath. Can you explain to our listeners the power of the heart, the electromagnetic field of the heart? Can you go into a little bit of detail for our listeners? Yeah, I'll be glad to. Let me put it in context, if I may. Here's why we got involved in science. When we started HeartMath, we had the 15 years of previous experience, and we knew there was this magnificent intelligence that we all had, and it had been talked about literally for thousands of years, and yet it sort of remained tied into the confines of only things that were considered spiritual or philosophical, and it wasn't being manifested as much in daily life as we felt it needed to be. We felt it was the key, you know, through the evolutionary shift that we're going through, to manifest more of our heart's intelligence. So we recognized, if we were going to introduce the system into the world based upon heart, we had to do it a bit differently, and we needed to do it in a way that would be appropriate for 20th and 21st century context. We needed to build a bridge between the philosophical and spiritual aspects of heart and the day-to-day manifestation of it. We chose science to be that bridge. The reason we chose science is because in our modern society, science is respected. It carries a lot of weight, and when science can show that something is real through an empirical understanding, it increases the power of belief, and when our power of belief has increased the effectiveness of that belief is increased. So we decided science was a way that we needed to go, and so our research is very broad today. I am not actually a scientist and a researcher. I've learned a lot about scientists, and in my role as a key spokesperson for HeartMath, I have to understand a lot of that. We have a great team of scientists here, and we have scientific advisors, scientific advisory boards, and lots of interactions with researchers and scientists globally, so I'm surrounded by them. I have to learn, you know. They're everywhere, and you know, the science really that we approached, we approached it from a really baseline way. In other words, we could have started with really wide scientific exploration and trying to prove cosmic things, but we chose instead to look at the biological heart and to see what the biological heart was actually doing. Was it doing more than pumping blood? We had a belief that it was, and when we began to explore this, we found out that there was research scattered all throughout the research literature that was indicating this, and there were things like the field of neurocardiology, which studies a nervous system that exists in our heart. That nervous system next to the brain is the most complex part of the nervous system that we have, and we discovered that that nervous system is actually sending information to the brain and throughout the entire body. Brain function, for example, is critically dependent upon information it's getting neurologically from the heart, and then it went on and on in discovering the ways in which the heart was actually communicating at a physiological level, that it was sending information. We've even done studies indicating that it's receiving information. So what we determined from all that, Caroline, is that the heart is, you know, of course, a cardiovascular organ, but it's also an information processing center in our bodies. It's taking in and sending information, which was, you know, a breakthrough. So what our scientists did is put together that story in a way that can be shared and understood. So today that information has been used in a lot of different ways. There are over 10,000 books in print today citing HeartMath, and a lot of those are talking about our research. A few years back I was asked by another interviewer what HeartMath's biggest contributions of the world had been so far, and I didn't have a ready answer for that, but the answer that popped out was, we have validated other people's belief systems, and by that I mean people have drawn upon what we have discovered to support the things that they have believed, and I think that's been a service that we provided throughout the entire, you know, community of new thought as well as academic research. So that was a long prelude to your question, but your question was about the electromagnetic field of the heart. One of the ways that the heart does communicate is energetically. The heart is actually an electrical organ. Think about it this way. When we go to a doctor and they take our electrocardiogram, they're measuring electricity. That's why they call it electrocardiogram. The heart produces by far the strongest source of bioelectricity in our bodies, and that electricity is permeating every single cell in our bodies. The electrical energy is strong enough that it produces an electromagnetic field that extends around us, all of us, in 360 degrees, and that field actually radiates beyond our skin out into space, detectable with something called magnetometers, which are very accepted and conservative research instruments, detected about three to four feet outside of the body. So we are producing this field, and it's coming from the heart, and it's extending all around us. Now, what's interesting about the field is it's constantly fluctuating. The frequencies, electromagnetic energy frequencies in that field are always changing, and what we found was is that the primary source of those changes is our emotions. As we change the emotional state, the frequencies in the field change. What that means is that we are literally broadcasting our emotions out into space. Now, this type of electromagnetic field is not something like subtle energy or an aura. That's a different form of study, but it's interesting when we began to look at the field and think about the field from the perspective of quantum physics rather than Newtonian physics, the picture gets very different. With quantum physics, you remove the barriers of time and space. All that becomes very different. So the implications of this field, beyond the conservative measurement that we do, and what it really is and how it interfaces with the field of consciousness itself, becomes something that looks quite possible. And that's where my interest lies, is in the interface we have between the field and consciousness and how we use that interface to co-create our own realities. And that's how we bring about change within ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we begin to change the world. So that that kind of lines up with spirituality, where we believe that what we project from within us is creating our outer world. You know, I always say change comes from within, and from that heartfelt place and emotions. I believe that's how we communicate with the outer world, and so the science is kind of backing that up from what you're saying, with the electromagnetic field. Which, from my understanding, it doesn't just radiate from, you know, just a certain limit from outside of us, but it goes infinitely from our being to outer space. I could be right there? Let's put it this way, it's quite possible. You know, there's more research to be done and proof of all these things, but a lot of the research done at HeartMath today is looking at what the scientists call the energetic connectivity between all living systems. Recognize everything's producing some sort of field, right on down to the DNA itself, and everything on the planet is, you know, plants, animals, rocks, everything is producing some sort of field. So, in a sense, we're all really connected energetically. Now, in spirituality, it's talked about a lot. You know, it's all energy, we're all connected, you know, through energies and things like that, and that's good, but there's new understandings coming into view now about those things, and I think it's important that it moves just beyond things that we kind of believe, or that, you know, we've read about in a book, down to something that's real and practical. Because the purpose of the science is not just to glamorize people, or, you know, to provide science for entertainment. It's there to give us belief in something we already have inside, which is the beauty and power and intelligence of our hearts, so that we can apply that intelligence in daily life. We are in the midst of tremendous transformation right now. It's a dimensional shift in consciousness, and we are moving, you know, very quickly through that shift. That's creating a tremendous opportunity for us to grow like we've never been able to grow before, but in that process, it creates all, it also creates chaos. And so, for many people today, managing life, managing the ups and downs of the swings in our feelings, managing the disappointments, managing the angst, managing the uncertainty, all those factors are at play right now for every single one of us, because we are being asked to grow, and to move, and to evolve at a super high speed. We need tools, we need techniques, we need a self-secure place and anchor to do that kind of work from. It is my belief, through my personal experience, supported by the results we've had at HeartMath that we've seen over these 25 years, in conjunction with the science, that lets me know that heart plays a big role in the shift that we're in right now. I've learned, or my belief at least, Caroline, is that the emergence of heart intelligence at a new level is part of the evolutionary imperative of what we call the shift. It's much bigger than HeartMath. It's a universal thing. It's part of the evolutionary imperative of these times. HeartMath, here at HeartMath, what we've done is give it some understanding, put together a system around it, supported it with science, and shared it with a lot of other people. We're just doing a service, that's all. You're doing a great job at it. You touched upon something that I hear a lot, is heart coherence. Can you explain that to us? Yeah, well, in our research, we wanted to be able to get measurement of this quality of heart-brain-body communication. To do that, we found a scientific and medical discipline called heart rate variability analysis, which is measuring the timing that takes place, the change in timing that takes place between heartbeats. It's not just measuring heart rate like a fitness monitor. It's measuring the time between each heartbeat, and that varies all the time. Now, a lot of things influence that variability. Movement does. Speaking like I'm doing right now does. Light can do it. Sound can do it. We also found that emotions are one of the biggest factors in shifting those heart rhythms. When we're experiencing a strong negative emotion, the heart rhythms can be very chaotic, very jagged and irregular. When we are experiencing a positive emotion, many of those related to heart, like love, care, compassion, appreciation, those heart rhythms change. They move in a very ordered and sine wave-like pattern. So, we are literally changing, you know, the communication that the heart is actually producing through our emotions. Now, to answer your question, when all that communication is synced up and it's really working at its most efficient level, we enter this state called coherence, heart coherence. What that means is that all the major body systems are synchronized to an ordered rhythmic beating pattern in the heart. That means digestion, respiration, immune system response, hormonal response, brain function, all syncing up with the heart. In that state, we are operating in a very efficient physiological level. It's really healthy for us. It is good for us, you know, in terms of our wellness. It's also a high-performance state. Coherence is arrived at through meditations, prayers, affirmations, spiritual practices, you know, are in gender coherence in many cases. But it's not a sleepy time state. It can be a very active state. It's a very aware, acutely aware state. So, things like reaction speed time, your visual field, all improve when we're in the coherent state. Now, there's an emotional side to coherence. Positive emotions generally trigger coherence, meaning when we are feeling appreciation for something in our life, our systems naturally move more towards coherence. Once we actually are in the coherent state, those kind of emotions, feelings, I'd rather call them feelings, those kind of feelings actually begin to flow through us more easily. So, we begin to change how we relate to the world, you know, through our feelings. And that's really the translator to me between spirit and humanness is the feelings. So, in the coherent state, we experience more positive emotions. So, it's good for us at a psychological level. It's really good for us at a physiological level. So, a lot of our techniques that you find in our training programs or our technology, the M-Wave technology, Interbalance Trainer been used by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people around the world. What they do is help train us to improve our coherence, to increase our natural coherence baseline, so that we operate more from that place moment to moment, day to day. And also, you mentioned training. I know that HeartMath has several training programs, but one of the ones that really would like for you to share with our audience is children. You're working a lot with training children in global, I mean, heart coherence? Yeah, go to, if any listener wants to go to the heartmath.org website. That's our nonprofit. And on the nonprofit side, one of the things that they do is work with youth and children. They also work in the field of education. And there are lots of resources there. Some are free, and there's little techniques and that sort of thing that you can teach children. There are books. There are programs. There's a board game. I know board games sound out of date, but this is a popular product for us. It's called Wild Ride to the Heart. It's a board game that children can play, or parents and grandparents can play with children. It's a wonderful product. So a lot of very caring intention has been put towards the advancement of young people. And so there are things that kids can get, and that parents can get for their kids. Rather than trying to describe all those, just say, you know, direct people to the website, let them take a look at the amazing resources. A lot of our training is institutional, meaning we are training in universities. We are training in Fortune 100 companies, in large healthcare systems, in the U.S. military, in police departments, places that are very mainstream-oriented. And those programs focus a lot on increasing resilience. And they use heart-centric techniques, and they use the technology and the science to support those techniques. But they're designed to really create more resilience in people, give them the ability to move through the stressors in life, you know, certainly in a different way. And so those training programs are being adopted in very mainstream organizations. I mean, police, for example, need to be more resilient. They've got so much pressure today. Someone working in health care or in companies, same thing. Also in school systems, I mean, teachers, I mean, administrators, they're going through a tremendous amount of change right now, which creates a lot of stress. So we have programs for that. I would say about our training, the training part of our mission is what it's really evolved into in many ways is training others to train. We certify people to be HeartMath trainers. And we teach them how to deliver a program called the Resilience Advantage. A big program for us is actually teaching people to use HeartMath techniques as coaches. It means like lifestyle coaches, business coaches, wellness coaches, those kind of people. And there's thousands of HeartMath coaches around the world that utilize HeartMath techniques in their coaching practices. So in order to sort of help advance our work and to reach more people, we chose to go with a model of licensing and certifying others, because that multiplies the effect. Rather than just being us and our trainers, we now have thousands of people, really, that are sharing HeartMath with others in a licensed, formalized way. And there are more than can be counted that are doing it informally. But the ones that do it through the licensing programs, they get the proper training. And certainly we applaud anybody who's using HeartMath in any way, but this is sort of where it's evolved to for us in terms of how we try to reach the world. And that touches upon the Global Coherent Initiative, which I know you're very active in. Can you tell us more about that? That's one of my favorite things. I'd be glad to. Okay. It's part of our nonprofit, Caroline, HeartMath Institute. And what it is, it's an organization that anyone can join. Membership is free. You go to the HeartMath, again, this particular part of our mission, then you go to the HeartMath.org website, click on the Global Coherence Initiative tab. You can join just by putting your email address in and a password. And it's bringing people together from all around the world, specifically to use their heart-focused care and their intention to help shift the planetary discord from the chaos and confusion and disharmony that we often see to a place that is more harmonious and that promotes things like, you know, really enduring peace. So there are about 70,000 people who have joined Global Coherence Initiative, and they have come literally from around the world, well over 100 countries represented. And we're not saying you have to be using HeartMath. You can use anything you want. All we're saying is bring your heart with you, because everybody has got a good heart. And we can use the power of the individual and collective heart to help make things a bit easier for others as we go through this transitional period. So we do that through things we call like care focuses, where we put out a message suggesting things that could use extra care and extra love, extra heart, and suggesting to the members that they focus, you know, some of their caring intention that way. We do a lot of things like that. Now there are many organizations that do something similar, and I'm really happy about that. Any of the organizations that are doing this work, thank you for that, because it is helping. And so we're just trying to do our part, really, in that process, working at things from a more top-down, more energetic and consciousness level, to try to have a positive influence on the society. But because it's us, we also incorporate science into that process. And that's where it gets interesting. So do you have any more comments before I go to that piece? Oh no, you continue. Okay, very good. So the science part's this. It relates to the research that we do around the energetic connectivity. You see, the earth itself produces energetic fields. The two primary ones, and many people have heard of these, are the geomagnetic field. Geomagnetic field is the field that the compass measures. It's the field that you see light up at the poles when solar activity hits the poles, and we have the aurora borealis, things like that. That's the geomagnetic field that's being lit up. There's also another field called the ionosphere, which works in consort with the geomagnetic field. It starts just above our atmosphere, goes about 110, 120 miles up into space. These two fields are energetic fields that provide a protective layer around the planet. They protect us from incoming solar radiation, cosmic rays, in general, what's called space weather. Without these fields, no life can exist on planet Earth. They are there for a reason. You can think about them, the listeners can think about them as, you know, sort of energetic ecology. They are part of the earth, really, as a living system. These fields are constantly fluctuating and changing all the time, and there's been a lot of scientific inquiry into the field, so a lot's been learned, but a lot's still left to be learned. One of the things that scientists have learned is that changes in these fields are having an impact on human health and behavior. They're affecting us, individually and collectively. This is well-documented, well-known, and still to be more understood about it, but accepted now. The changes in the fields are affecting everything from our brain waves to our heart rhythms to social outplays like traffic accidents, hospital admissions, heart attacks, strokes. Also, changes in the fields over long periods of time have been linked to some of the greatest flourishings in human history of art and creativity, so it's not like they're bad and always hurting us, but there's generally known now that there's an influence the fields have on us. So, we also have a hypothesis that we are testing, and it will take a long time for this hypothesis to be researched properly. The hypothesis is this, is that mass human emotion, whether that be positive or negative, is having a measurable impact on the Earth's energetic fields. In other words, if they're affecting us, we believe that we are also affecting them, or at least we have a hypothesis that we are affecting them. So, to research the fields, to understand their effects on us, and to research this hypothesis, we have developed technology. Our scientists working in conjunction with other space scientists. Technology that can measure very subtle changes in these energetic fields from a ground-based system, and we are deploying global coherence monitoring sites at strategic locations around the world. Today, for example, there is a site in Northern California. There's another site in Alberta, Northern Canada. The third site is located in Lithuania. The fourth is in Saudi Arabia. The fifth site is in New Zealand, and the sixth site goes in later this month in South Africa. Ultimately, we will want 12. Right now, we have six, and we're getting plenty of information, believe me. And these sensors are looking at these energetic fields and the changes, and we're trying to correlate and do research experiments around changes in the fields and the changes they're having on us with a long-term goal of looking to prove or disprove that we are, in fact, influencing the fields. And that's the scientific part of Global Coherence Initiative. So, when you put that whole package together, bringing people together around the world, using our hard-focused care and intention to help, you know, ease the planetary shift, learning things about ourselves as we go, feeling a part of a connection in the community, and doing advanced scientific research, it makes the Global Coherence Initiative something that, for me, is very exciting and something that I enjoy talking about. A part of my live show, my presentation, has Global Coherence information in it, really cool slides and pictures and things like that to really tell this story, because I believe it's an important story. It's something that's so appropriate for the times. It's linked to, again, to modern advanced scientific research, and it's something everybody can be involved in, because we all can come there with their hearts, and that's the most powerful thing that any of us has. Wow, you pretty much have said everything about what I really believe in, as far as the Oneness. I do, I know that science is trying to, you know, prove it. I believe it. We are all connected, and we are affecting everyone. Everyone is affecting the planet, and we are all affecting each other. That all goes down to the Oneness, and for me, when I felt, understood Oneness from a heartfelt place, not an intellectual understanding of Oneness, my whole life changed when I understood Oneness from a heartfelt level, and I think, you know, we were talking about the difference between the heart and the brain. It's hard for me to even put it into words, but my whole life changed overnight, and I understand that what your work is doing is proving it on a scientific level, which is awesome. Yeah, well, people like yourself, Caroline, and people around the world are getting intuitive insights into these things. It's part of their own spirit opening up to, you know, to some of the new, you know, energetic momentums that are associated with the shift. So many people are feeling things like that, and some, like yourself, are taking action on that, and their lives are changing as a result. So they're really opening up to intuition, in a sense, which is all part of the heart intelligence package, is an increased access to the field of intuition. So it's not the brain is bad or anything, it's all an integrated system. Everything works together, and through that collaboration between heart, brain, and other intelligences in our body, is where we come into a wholeness understanding of things. And so it's just part of the change that's going on in the world today. Now, what HeartMath is doing, to your point, is that people can have these intuitive insights, they can have these feelings about things, then when HeartMath shows up sometimes in their lives, and they see some real, you know, empirical evidence that supports what they've been experiencing, it can be very exciting for them, because it suddenly gives meaning to the things that they've already believed and felt inside. And I think that's, I'm so glad that we were able to do some of that and help people in that way. I think it's good that people can, you know, have these things inside that they feel, and know that they need to act on them, and very often do, and then find out that what they did has some scientific support to it. Yeah, that's what really blew me away, and like I said, I discovered in 2007 that science was proving the things I believed. It was very eye-opening. Going back to the intelligence of the heart, I know there's a research that HeartMath is doing that indicates that the heart may be able to know the future before it even happens. I first saw that in a film, I Am, by Tom Chadiak. Yep. Can you tell us a little bit about that research? Yeah, it relates to a study. It's a very interesting study on the physiology of intuition. It was done a while back, not too long ago, maybe five or six years ago, and it's a published study, published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The study was set up to look at what our researchers were determining at a time to be what they call the precognitive response, and it was based upon a similar study, a smaller study, done by a future guest you're going to have, Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Our researchers wanted to take it further, but here's the way it worked. Test subjects were being monitored for a variety of biological markers, brain waves, heart rhythms, heart evoked potentials, galvanic skin response, a lot of different measurements taken at one time, so they were getting a picture of what was happening in the body. The test subject sat in front of a computer. The computer had been previously loaded with images. Some of the images were really horrific images, and some were very beautiful. The computer was not programmed on what images it would select, it was in random selection. The test subject would simply sit in front of the computer, the screen would be blank, they would get a prompt to say push the button, they'd push a button, the screen would stay blank for six seconds, then the picture would show up on the screen, then it would go blank again for ten seconds, then they'd get the prompt again, push the button, and they repeated this process over and over again with a lot of different test subjects, accumulated a lot of data back from this process. So as they analyzed the data, they saw some amazing things. What they saw was, is that in many, many cases, the body was actually doing what it would be doing if the picture was there, but the picture wasn't there yet. That process began to happen six seconds before the picture shows up on the screen. In other words, the body was acting like the picture that was beautiful was there, but it wasn't. There was no picture there, and it was doing it six seconds before any picture came out, or whatever kind of picture that it was. So all this was happening. Now, that was amazing enough, but as they dug in deeper, and this was a very complex and expensive, to be honest with you, research study. It's just so large, it's published in two parts. You can get it on the heartmath.org website, but what they found when they dug deeper was, is that, and they began to decode the information traffic in the body, what they found was, is that the heart was actually the first part of our physiology to respond to the upcoming picture. Then the brain, and then they came together and synchronized at a frequency level, and the picture shows up. So it was heart and brain synced, then the two together, then the picture. So that was a big surprise, because it showed that the heart was actually preceding the cognitive response to it. It was happening at the heart level first, and that blew them away, because there was a different picture of what the heart may be doing as a receiver of information, not just a sender of it. Mm-hmm. So that kind of indicates that the heart kind of knows what's going to happen before it happens. It's an indicator. It's certainly a compelling study. You know, again, it's just, you can't say definitively, but it certainly relates to things that have happened in our lives, doesn't it? Right. Where we have these sensings, and it's like a heart sensing, not just like a brain cognitive sensing, it's a feeling more than it is a thought. And we've all had these experiences, and what this study does is it lends some credence to that, to that feeling that we have inside. And it's a very interesting, compelling research study, in my opinion. There's also mention about the random generators on 9-11, how they started indicating hours, a couple of hours before the first plane hit. Yeah, that's another study, not done by, it's just done by an associate of our mass, a guy who's actually on the scientific advisory boards of Global Coherence Initiative, Dr. Roger Nelson, who was a professor at Princeton, and I know Roger, and I've sat with him personally on a couple of occasions and talked about this particular event. He was a researcher at Princeton, and he was using something called random number generators, RNGs, and they are just little computer devices that randomly churn out numbers and symbols, and they're used a lot in statistical analysis research. So he has one in his lab, and he noticed that, you know, you have a normal sort of random output that would be there normally, but then on certain days it would be, the output would be a lot less random. And he couldn't figure out why that would be, but he noticed it over and over again. So he had this intuitive insight, he wondered, is there any way that these machines could be being influenced by people? And so he decided he would start doing some studies, and he put random number generators in various locations around the world. I think there's over 60 of them out there today. We have one here at HeartMath, but he's got about 60 of these things around the world, and he networked them all together and sent the information back to his lab at Princeton. And he started looking at events taking place in the world and seeing if there was a correlation between the randomness of the random number generator network globally. And sure enough, he found that there was. He found that when major events were going on, a lot of times, especially positive events, that the randomness was changing. Things like the start of an Olympics, for example. Or another one he cited, there's many, many. One I remember was Princess Diana's funeral. And he was noticing these statistically significant changes occurring in the random number generator relative to societal events that were taking place. One day he did come to his lab, and he looked at his random number generator network, and it was off the chart. He'd never seen as big a change, and he's never seen anything since as big. By far, statistically significant beyond his belief. And it was at 9-11. And on that day, the random number generator network changed dramatically. And when he looked at the data and began to study, he found that the network actually began to shift as three hours before a plane hit a tower. Changes began to occur three hours before. Now I show this in my live show, my presentations, and I make this point though, is that does it prove anything? I asked that rhetorical question, does it prove anything? The answer is no. And the reason is, is because even as intriguing as it is, and as much as I love it and respect it, none of us can still say how this could happen. There's no causal effect that we can tie to it. How could emotions from people around the world be affecting little computer machines? So we don't know how that happens yet. And because we can't tell how that happens, we can't say for sure that it's real. But the fact that it's tied together to so many events is amazing enough. So the question I ask is, does it prove anything? I answer the question by saying no. The next question I ask is, is it interesting? And of course everybody's yelling from the audience, yes, it's interesting. Because it really is. It's just showing something amazingly interesting as a possibility. So that's that. It was just something that was observed on that day. And I think it's an interesting observation. So with the Global Coherence Initiative, with that technology we have, we have the potential to take that kind of research further and to give it a more empirical understanding. Not better than Rogers, just taking it a different direction and a little further. He's a wonderful man, by the way, and you can check his site out too. He has the Global Coherence Project is the name of his organization. Okay. And you can read all about random number generators there. And he's a lovely man and I'm glad to support him. Very good. So how, what kind of information can you give, share with our audience, our listeners, on how they on a daily basis, daily, can help bring their heart more into coherence, dealing with chaos in their lives. Like you said, this is a very chaotic time we live in. So what can you share with the audience on a personal level that they can use, techniques they can use? Yeah, let me just say this. First, let me say to anyone listening right now, please, please, please go to the heartmath.com or .org site because we're gonna run out of time before long. And there's so much more you can explore on the sites. And there are free things you can get there and there's also books, there's also learning materials of all different kinds. There's our M-Wave technology, which measures coherence. There's an app for iPhones that you have to have a sensor for it and you get it from us or somebody that does the same thing. You measure coherence from your phone. There's so many things there, so please go there. But one of the things I'll say is this, is that if you do simple things to start with, like first of all, go ahead and believe in your heart more. You know, trust in the feelings that you have there from time to time and learn to sort of cultivate your relationship. Ways you do that? Well, I'll give you simple examples. These are things we've all heard before but maybe we could all take them, including me, take them to heart a bit more. One is to consciously activate appreciation. You can call it gratitude. They're words that have a very similar reference. But put out more appreciation and gratitude. And when you find yourself complaining and griping, observe that. Don't feel bad about yourself because you've seen it, but do something different with it. Instead of allowing the gripes and the complaints to go on, step back and begin to appreciate something. Something in your life. And begin to change that sort of, you know, energetic response that you're having to life by shifting from griping and complaining to appreciation. That's an exercise that we've all sort of, many people at least listening and read in books or gotten it in training programs and seminars and heard from other speakers. But if we use that and we use it really consciously, life will get better. It just works that way. The more appreciation we put out, the more the field of consciousness reflects back to us, things are going to be fulfilling. Another tip I'll give you. I was just going to interject and say I agree. I agree with you a hundred percent. I've shared this with my audience before. I have an appreciation journal. The first thing I do every morning is pick up my journal and write down what I'm thankful for and try to focus on that throughout the day. So I agree with you a hundred percent. That's putting in action. Another is to exercise more care. Care is a powerful and potent aspect of heart. To me, care is love and action. I was having a discussion about this with someone earlier today. Care is something that just means that you're really taking the initiative to use your heart in a way that benefits others, to really start putting out some care to someone else, to doing something extra for someone else. The tricky part of care is that often care turns into what we call overcare. That means care turns into a burdensome sense of responsibility. Rather than being regenerative, it becomes something that feels draining to us. If we do it from the heart, if we do it in balance, we can learn to go back to the original source of our care. From that original source, we can go back and find that powerful, beautiful, genuine care that we can radiate from the heart. So learn to manage the overcares. Learn not to let things like the news bring up all the overcares about all the terrible things that are happening to people. You have to have an understanding and compassion for that, but don't let it drain you as much. Put out more care to others. There's little acts of care. I'll just give you a personal example right now. There was a conversation I had with someone yesterday. I don't think it went well. I thought about it last night. I was told today that the other person had a similar response, that they didn't feel like it went well, and they've been thinking about it and processing it. So what I decided to do is to go over to their office and say, I'm not here to make anything right or anything wrong. I'm not here to do any of that. What I'm here to do is to offer you a gesture of care, because I know you're processing what we talked about yesterday and know what that feels like, because I felt it myself last night, and I don't want you to feel that way. And that's just taking it to the next level of caring, right? Yes. I'm not trying to go in and make sure that I'm right. I'm not trying to get right. Exactly. I'm not trying to do any of that. I'm walking in and saying, you know, I'm not about being right. I'm not trying to get back into sort of the digits of what went down. What I'm here to do is there's a better way through this whole thing for both of us, and it's just simply to say, I care enough about you to say, I don't want you to feel that way, so let it go if you can, because I am. Yes. I agree with you. Let's care. I think sometimes we suffer from, I'm right-itis, I call it. And you're so right. It's not about being right sometimes. Sometimes it's just about showing that you care, because truly, what's more important, you know, to show the other person that you care and you understand? It doesn't have to be about right or wrong all the time. I call it I am right-itis. You know, a lot of people suffer from I am right-itis. But also, Reverend Michael Beckwith mentioned, you mentioned the news. We talked a little bit about that on last week's show with Reverend Michael Beckwith. He says, when you watch the news, and I love the, I don't watch news, but he said, if you do watch news, to watch it and make that your prayer request for the day, you know? There you go. And so, yes, instead of letting it, you know, bring you down, bring your emotions down, you look at the news and you say, this is what I'm going to pray for today. Well, Michael's done. I'm going to be on it. I talked to him yesterday. I'm going to be on his radio show next week. And any of you who are listening today, living in Southern California, next Friday, I'm going to be in L.A. at the Agape Center. On Friday night, I'm going to be a spokesperson for a movie that both Michael and I are in called The Power of the Heart, which is a really cool movie. Wow. So I'll be a spokesperson for that. And then Saturday, I'm going to do an all-day workshop. And so if you live in Southern California and you want to come out and see that, see that movie and see me come to a workshop, something like that, and I'll be at Agape next Friday night and all day Saturday. Oh, thank you for sharing that with us. Yeah, Michael's going to be there with me as well. So he'll be there Friday night and some on Saturday. So it'd be a good time to, you know, to do that. It's a weekend and I know it's a memorial day, but it can be times when we actually have a little more time. So I'll be down there with him. I will be actually there on the 28th, 28th to the 31st. Michael invited me and I have never been to LA. I've never been to the West Coast. So I am very excited. I bet you are. Well, you'll be in good hands. Just take good care of yourself and you'll have a lot of fun out there. Yes, but it's very true what you talked about, about caring and also the appreciation. The other thing I heard years ago, I heard, I forgot where I heard it, but I heard someone say, people don't say thank you enough. And I thought about that and say, that's true. And I just took it upon myself to be sure to always thank for little things, you know, just to say thank you. Sometimes people just don't say thank you enough, but I've been saying this for years, that in each moment, we can focus on something we're thankful for, appreciative of, or we can focus on something that we feel we're lacking. We can't do both. We can't hold both in that same moment. That's right. So in each moment, we have that choice to focus on something to be thankful for, and we have many blessings that we tend to overlook, our blessings that we can be thankful for. So that is such great advice, because the more we focus on our blessings and thankfulness, that does raise our vibration. And also, about when I'm struggling with something, one of the things I find that helps me is to actually reach out, take my mind off of whatever issue I'm going through, take my mind off of that, and just reach my hand out to help somebody else. That helps me, you know, take my mind off of my stuff and just reaching out to someone else. So those two pieces of advice is great. Well, those are great things to do, Caroline. You should maybe get a radio show or something. Thank you so much, thank you. But yes, like you said, giving back is important. I think I have been inspired by so many authors, speakers, and I mean, the list is endless. So what I like to do with this radio show is invite all of those speakers and authors, spiritual speakers and scientists that have inspired me, and to share that with the world, because it has, you know, inspired me so much that I want to share that inspiration with others. Well, you're getting some really good speakers. I know you've got, I saw you mentioned you had Greg on your show, I think, right? No, no, I don't have Greg. Dean Radin and Dr. Bruce Lipton are our upcoming scientific guests, and you know, Michael was on last week, and Barbara Mark Hubbard, so some very, very well-known speakers, and I'm very honored. I'm very honored and very thankful for every one of my guests. They're good for you. Just amazing. So anything, any, in closing, anything else you'd like to share that HeartMath is up to? Well, let me share this instead, you know, rather than talk about us, let me offer something to everyone listening. There's the third thing, yes, earlier about what can you do to activate your heart, and there's one thing that I really think is important for all of us right now, and that's simply this. Please have compassion for yourself. We're going through an interesting time, and this could be times when we don't feel as good about ourselves as we'd like to. We may disappoint ourselves in some way, or don't feel like we're doing enough for we're growing enough, or we're making enough difference in the world. All those thoughts can come, and there would be a natural thing if they did. It's all part of the process. When you find yourself there, please go back to your own best friend, which is your heart. Have a conversation with that best friend, and please offer yourself some compassion. It's a great service to you, and it helps you to move forward and to continue that growth process, and it also is a service to the world, because as you do it, it makes it easier for others to do it, and I think we can all use a little bit more compassion these days. So that's my third suggestion for activating the heart is to please have compassion for yourself. Very true. That's so true. I think how Michael put it last week is there are no throwaway people. We are all special. We all have something to give. We all have something to offer the world, and uniquely, because what you have to offer the world, only you can give the world. So everyone listening and everyone on the planet has something to give. It's true. Very, very true. So I appreciate you so much, and thank you so much, and I'm hoping, so will you be at Agape this next weekend, the 22nd or the 29th? 22nd. I'm there a week before you. I'm warming it up for you, Carolyn. Okay, so you're okay. Okay. All right. Keep everything nice and warm for me when I get there on the 28th. All right. All right. Thank you so much. I appreciate everything. Words cannot express my appreciation for you and all of my guests. Thank you so much. Thank you, and thanks to everybody who's listening today, giving your time and attention, and if you're listening on a download, recognize that we know that that happens, and I always try to include you in my consciousness when I'm doing an interview. Even if you're not listening to it right when we're delivering it, I still feel like you're a part of it at an energetic level. So thanks for everyone who's offering their time and attention to listen to the conversation that Carolyn and I have had today. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good night. Good night. Good night.