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Learn practical solutions for expanding heart connections, accelerating personal growth and transforming stress into greater energy, better health and a more fulfilling life.
Learn practical solutions for expanding heart connections, accelerating personal growth and transforming stress into greater energy, better health and a more fulfilling life.
From time to time, we all need to take pause, a brief stillness, a moment to review "our initial reaction so we can move to the place where a calm, thoughtful response is born." – L.R. Knost
Through hindsight, we often realize how much stress we could have prevented by pausing to reconsider our choices before taking action. Many of us have learned this lesson many times over: for example, sometimes our heart nudges us to take a pause before releasing an angered response to an e-mail and we don’t listen. We mechanically press send and often second-guess ourselves the minute we click the mouse.
Continue readingDid you know geomagnetic and solar activity can affect your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls your breathing, heartbeat and digestive processes? It’s true: A recently published long-term study whose researchers included HeartMath Institute’s Rollin McCraty and Mike Atkinson, reached that conclusion.
"These findings," the study states, "support the hypothesis that these energetic environmental factors act as energy sources that outplay in different ways depending on an individual’s health status and maturity level and capacity of self-regulation."
Continue readingHeart humility – that is, knowing who we truly are and accepting our strengths with gratitude, our limitations without judgment and the world around us with appreciation – is a powerful and attainable quality. Heart humility can help us to walk through this world with confidence, integrity and wisdom.
Heart humility does not require reserve or timid postures in our interactions with others, but rather a quietness in our being, a quiet knowingness of who we are. Heart humility is being honest with ourselves and others, and expressing our gratitude and respect for all involved.
Continue readingBeing out of sorts, or off our game because of Illness or injury, anger or anxiety or when we become stressed out and overwhelmed can cause deterioration in our personal coherence levels. Likewise, dysfunction within a group – large or small – because of animosity, jealousy, judgment or other negative conditions can signal a weakening of social coherence and, ultimately, lead to a group’s success or failure.
"Social coherence," writes HeartMath Institute Director of Research Rollin McCraty, "relates to the harmonious alignment between couples or pairs, family units, small groups, or larger organizations in which a network of relationships exists among individuals who share common interests and objectives." McCraty, one of today’s foremost researchers of coherence and heart rate variability, was writing for the October issue of the journal, Frontiers in Public Health.
Continue reading"All biological systems on Earth are exposed to an external and internal environment of fluctuating invisible magnetic fields of a wide range of frequencies. These fields can affect virtually every cell and circuit to a greater or lesser degree." – Synchronization of Human Autonomic Nervous System Rhythms with Geomagnetic Activity in Human Subjects, a newly published study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
A research team that conducted the study cited above and published this month added further evidence to the scientific community’s understanding of how human autonomic nervous systems respond to environment influences. In this study, those influences resulted from, among other factors, changes in solar and geomagnetic activity, cosmic rays and the frequencies known as the Schumann resonances.
Continue readingEveryone loves that warm heart feeling they get when they do something kind for another. It's wonderful, right? Did you know kind acts – even secret ones – can do wonders for your physical, mental and emotional health? And there’s another curious thing about kindness: It’s uniquely contagious, kindness researchers say.
A study conducted among students at the University of British Columbia found that performing acts of kindness can help lower people's social anxiety, which often leads to negative self-beliefs and behaviors.
Continue readingEditor’s note: Besides discussing the rise of stress in the U.S., this article provides a few suggestions for not only weathering increasing stress, but also taking action to reduce and prevent it.
Feeling more anxious, frustrated or angry in recent months? You are not alone. Stress among Americans is on the rise, say those who monitor people’s emotional responses to political and other events. Continue reading
It’s becoming clearer to many of us that working together with kindness, compassion and acceptance are the missing pieces for resetting humanity’s fast and furious trajectory into separation and division. It’s also becoming obvious that we cannot create solutions from the same consciousness level that’s creating the problems. Raising our consciousness vibration for drawing peaceful solutions is an undertaking that calls for kindness, forgiveness and an inclusive love that respects our differences.
Continue readingResearchers at HeartMath Institute and elsewhere have undertaken numerous studies through the years that have demonstrated the ability of HeartMath® tools and technology to help people increase psychophysiological coherence. A recent one was a small study at a South African university in which people attempted to increase their positive feeling states and decrease their negative feeling states.
In a profile of the experience, one of the six participants who volunteered for the study, said: "Doing HeartMath makes me aware of my breathing and helps me to slow it down and breathe more deeply. It also helps me to focus and still my mind from fleeting thoughts and worries."
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