Beyond the
Brain--
The Intelligent Heart
by Doc Childre
and Howard Martin
with Donna Beech
It was 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday morning,
February 6, 1995. We were at HeartMath's
business center in Boulder Creek, California.
Dr. Donna Willis, the medical editor for NBC's
Today show, had called the previous afternoon to
say that they'd decided to run a segment on our
work the next morning. They were going to call
it "Love and Health." Dr. Willis would start off
with an overview of the Institute of HeartMath's
research about the electrical energy produced by
the heart. Then she'd go on to tell Bryant
Gumbel and the viewers about our Freeze-Frame
technique, which uses the power of the heart to
manage the mind and emotions.
"We'll have only a few seconds to give
them your number," Dr. Willis said, "but you
might want to put some of your people on the
phones, just in case."
With little time to prepare, we quickly
arranged for our staff to come in early to
handle any calls -- and it was lucky we did! As
soon as the phone number appeared on the screen,
the switchboard lit up. For the rest of that day
and into the night, then all day long the next
day, we fielded calls almost continuously. Each
time the show aired in a new time zone, another
wave of calls came in.
We talked to thousands of people from all
over the country -- from anonymous parents in
big-city ghettos to leaders in science,
medicine, business, education, and religion.
Before it was over, we'd gotten calls from
around the world -- all from a four-minute segment
on a national television show that flashed our
phone number on the screen for five short
seconds. Why was that brief mention of the heart
so magnetic?
The people who called us knew
instinctively that the heart played an important
role in their overall well-being. "I knew it all
along," they said, and now they were eager to
find out more. They wanted to know how their
thoughts and feelings could be used to improve
their health -- mentally, emotionally, and
physically. Other people who associated the
heart with love wondered what they could do to
bring more "heart" into their lives. This
immediate response further confirmed our
long-standing belief that people are ready to
put the heart to work in their lives. Without
knowing the specifics, they sense that loving,
positive feelings are somehow related to health,
and they do their best to encourage those
feelings in their lives. Most people would
rather feel loving and appreciative than
resentful and depressed. But often the world
around us seems to be spinning out of control.
Despite our best intentions, it's hard to
maintain our emotional equilibrium when we're
confronted every day -- sometimes every hour -- with
stressful situations.
We've all been told, at one time or
another, to follow our hearts. And it sounds
like a great idea, in principle. But the problem
is that actually following our hearts -- and
loving people, including ourselves -- is much
easier said than done. Where do we begin? People
talk about following their hearts, but nobody
shows us how to do it. What does following the
heart really mean? And how do we love ourselves?
Aside from love's being a nice sentiment, why
should we love other people?
Over the past twenty years, scientists
have discovered new information about the heart
that makes us realize it's far more complex than
we'd ever imagined. We now have scientific
evidence that the heart sends us emotional and
intuitive signals to help govern our lives.
Instead of simply pumping blood, it directs and
aligns many systems in the body so that they can
function in harmony with one another. And
although the heart is in constant communication
with the brain, we now know that it makes many
of its own decisions.
Because of this new evidence, we have to
rethink our entire attitude toward "following
our hearts." At the Institute of HeartMath (IHM),
scientists have found that the heart is capable
of giving us messages and helping us far more
than anyone ever suspected. "Heart intelligence"
can have a measurable impact on our
decision-making, our health problems, our
productivity at work, our children's learning
ability, our families, and the overall quality
of our lives.
It's time to reexamine the heart. As a
society, we need to take the concept of heart
out of confinement in religion and philosophy
and put it right in the "street", where it's
needed most.
The heart isn't mushy or sentimental. It's
intelligent and powerful, and we believe that it
holds the promise for the next level of human
development and for the survival of our world.
 This
article is excerpted from:
The HeartMath Solution
by Doc Childre and
Howard Martin with Donna Beech.
Reprinted with
permission of the publisher HarperSanFransisco.
Info/Order this book
About The
Authors
Doc Childre is founder of the Institute of HeartMath
and creator of the HeartMath system. Howard Martin is an executive vice
president of HeartMath LLC. Visit the HeartMath website at www.heartmath.org.
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