Welcome to the Heart Moments 2012 Calendar Resources. For each month we will add the most current resource for each month’s heart practice. Also, find other resources on IHM Facebook and Twitter pages, and on IHM’s YouTube Channel, join these communities for making heart connections.
The Free Services section of HeartMath’s website is filled with personal assessment and growth tools, a wealth of articles, books, audio and video files, scientific data and more to complement your Heart Moments Calendar.
January – Resilience
Maintaining a good supply of resilience will help pick you up after life’s challenges and provides you the energy to keep going. Building resilience is the capacity to adapt successfully in the presence of risk and adversity. A coherent State is an effective way to build and store resilience is through what is known as coherence. View featured article, Resilience Picks You Up, Keeps You Going.
Perspectives on Resilience in These Changing Times webinar with Dr. Rollin McCraty: One of the most valuable tools of human beings, subject as they are to stress, disease, emotional highs and lows and other challenges, is resiliency. IHM Director of Research Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., discusses helpful perspectives for understanding resilience and how it is increased through emotion regulation and the practice of coherence.
February – Love
"‘Tis love, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round!’" – Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens’ last complete novel.
Arguably, to love and be loved have proved to be the strongest forces in all of human history, superseding and perhaps being the true motivations underlying fortune, fame and power.
Whether it is the love between intimate partners, children and parents, sisters and brothers or friends, the bond of love has been a sustaining force for as long as human beings have been around. People from all stations in life in all nations will attest to this timeless truth: Love will sustain you through sickness, sadness, hardship and sorrow.
Relationships Help You Live Longer: We know from a wealth of studies our relationships and the emotional support they provide do more than help us merely move beyond our trials and tribulations. They actually help to heal our bodies – our cardiovascular, hormonal and immune systems. (Read more about Improving our Relationships in the Institute of HeartMath’s Solutions for Stress section.
Many studies in the last 25 years have assessed the influences of relationships on human health. One of the most recent, a comprehensive review of 148 studies on the effects of social relationships on mortality, indicates there is "a 50% increased likelihood of survival for (study) participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow-up period."
The study, Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review, assessed multiple factors related to social relationships, including lack of, strength of and types of relationships.
March – Ease
Life feels richer in a state of ease. Stress levels are low and coherence is high, with mental, emotional and physical states all in sync. Ease is not a place where your challenges will simply dissolve, observes HeartMath founder Doc Childre in his booklet, The State of Ease. "Yet it creates an extra time window, allowing deeper discernment for competent choices – conscious choices that can help prevent and resolve many unnecessary challenges and unwanted predicaments," Childre said. "The state of inner ease helps us attune our mental and emotional nature to the most reasonable and effective way for responding to each situation that life brings us – challenging, normal or creative."
You can read more about the state of ease, its benefits and Childre’s simple practices for adding more of it to your life whenever you like in a free, downloadable copy of The State of Ease. Also, view the HeartMath Definition of The State of Ease including the Inner-Ease™ Technique, click here.
In the Navigate Your life with the State of Ease webinar, Deborah and Jeffrey will talk about the challenges people face on a daily basis during these increasingly stressful and fast-moving times. Learn why the "flow" is often hard to access and how to create it within yourself and how to "prep" before engaging in potentially stressful situations, projects, communications and complex decisions, and more.
(You must login to view)
April – Warmth
Soft Heart is a warm, calming place to regenerate and find renewed balance. How you feel can shift frequently during a day, week or month. Mood swings are commonplace as life becomes more complex, overstimulating and uncertain. Shifts in feelings and mood can be exhausting and confusing unless you have emotion regulation tools to use. When you learn to go to your Soft Heart, you’ll find an easygoing, warm place of compassion for yourself. Keeping your attention in a Soft Heart can allow more coherent heart rhythms to emerge, helping you recoup mental, emotional and physical vitality.
Another useful tool, Notice and Ease can help you identify and neutralize unwanted emotions and energy drain by noticing and admitting what you are feeling. The simple steps of Notice and Ease will guide you, teaching you to take the intensity out of negative emotions, ease them out and experience more good feelings such as joy, compassion and vitality. (Audio available also)
Respect the fact that you are human, living in a time of profound change as the planetary shift accelerates. Allow yourself to ease and rest in the comfort of your Soft Heart to recoup energy. You’ll find that your emotional energy delicately recharges and your vitality and heart buoyancy eventually will return.
May – Harmony
Each of us knows our thoughts, feelings and interactions influence our personal perspective and health, but researchers say they profoundly affect much more.
Every person affects his or her individual, social and global field environments with every thought, action and feeling, and the powerful energetic fields we all generate emanate to our immediate surroundings and around the planet.
No doubt you’ve witnessed people at a meeting, party or other gathering suddenly become livelier, more cohesive or perhaps more harmonious when a single personable, charismatic or ebullient person appears. This occurs because the person is emitting positive energy into the social field environment.
Scientists at the Institute of HeartMath and other organizations are measuring these energetic field environments and exploring ways to harness them to create greater global harmony.
Imagine the harmony you can create by smiling, being kind and courteous and thinking good thoughts.
The following article looks at how we affect the Field Environment.
