Heart disease is the single leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more lives than the combined next four causes of mortality. Fifty-eight percent of all deaths are directly or indirectly related to cardiovascular disease, as 2,500 people die of heart disease each day or one every thirty-five seconds.
Health care related to heart disease costs Americans 403 billion dollars a year with one in every three persons having some form of cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association's 2006 statistics. Two-thirds of all men and women who die suddenly of a heart attack had no previous symptoms, and 65 million people have high blood pressure that is due to unknown causes in 95 percent of cases.
Our Hearts are in Trouble
Hopefully, the shock value of these numbers has gotten your attention, for these alarming statistics indicate that our hearts are in trouble and that the cause is more than diet and lifestyle. According to heart surgeon Dr. Philip Bhark, only half of heart attacks are caused by known risk factors like tobacco and obesity.
What, then, is causing such massive heart disease? Could it be that we are dying from broken hearts? And if so, what is causing them to break?
Stress Creates Tension in the Heart
The heart is made up of 10 billion cells that synchronize in electrical wavelike patterns. Dr. Bhark says that more than half of heart-related deaths are from sudden cardiac death, which is an abrupt disruption of the electrical pattern in the heart. It seems that high levels of stress interfere with the electrical rhythm of the heart.
Stress is not just a fight or flight reaction. It can also result from tension created in the body while having to process varying degrees of ever-present external challenges, thus disrupting our inner connection with the laws of nature and even affect the synchronization of our natural rhythms. Additional tension can also result from the interference of manmade electrical fields. The natural wavelike pattern found in nature is one cycle per second, which is the same rhythm as the heart's. Could it be that our loss of connection to the natural world, created by modern life, is the original wound and this primary separation is causing our hearts to break?
The Heart: Primary Organ of Perception
New research, much of which is discussed in the HeartMath Solution by Doc Childre and Howard Martin, shows that the heart is the major organ of perception instead of a mere mechanical pump that circulates blood throughout our bodies. In a fetus, the heart starts beating before the brain has completely formed; therefore it is a primary organ.
When the brain does begin to develop, it does so from the bottom, the location of the primal brain that houses the emotional centers, and moves upward. As Childre describes the process, "the thinking brain grows out of the emotional regions." A beating heart is present far before the brain, and the emotional part of the brain far before the rational part of the brain.
Data enters through the heart first and is transmitted to the brain, which categorizes it and sends it to the body—including the heart—so that a two-way communication constantly occurs between the heart and the brain. There are four ways the heart communicates with the brain: neurologically (the transmission of nerve impulses), biochemically (hormones and neurotransmitters), biophysically (pressure waves), and energetically (electromagnetic field interactions).
There are 40,000 nerve cells in the heart as well as neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline and dopamine (known emotional mediators), that the heart synthesizes and releases.
"With every beat of the heart, a burst of neural activity is relayed to the brain," Martin explains. "The heart senses hormonal, [heart] rate and pressure information, translates it into neurological impulses and processes this information. The neurological signals that the heart sends the brain have a regulatory influence on many of the autonomic nervous system signals that flow out of the brain to the heart, to the blood vessels, and to other glands and organs."
The signals do not stop here though; they continue to the higher centers of the brain that affect emotional processing, decision-making, and reasoning.
When atrial naturetic factor (ANF) was discovered in 1983, the heart was officially reclassified as part of the hormonal system. Childre explains,
"This hormone regulates blood pressure, body-fluid retention, and electrolyte homeostasis. [It] exerts its effects widely on the blood vessels, the kidneys, the adrenal glands, and many of the regulatory regions of the brain. In addition, studies indicate that ANF inhibits the release of stress hormones, plays a part in hormonal pathways that stimulate the function and growth of our reproductive organs, and may even interact with the immune system."
As the heart beats it produces pressure waves that precede the flow of blood because they move faster. This is at the foundation of what is felt when a practitioner "reads" a pulse.
"Pressure waves force the blood cells through the capillaries and provide oxygen and nutrients to all our cells," Martin describes. "In addition, these waves expand the arteries, causing them to generate a relatively large electrical voltage. The waves also apply pressure to the cells in a rhythmic fashion, causing some of the proteins contained therein to generate an electrical current in response to the ‘squeeze.' All of our cells ‘feel' the waves of pressure generated by the heart and are dependent on them in more than one way."
The energetic connection between the brain and heart is created by the heart's electromagnetic field, which is as Childre describes,
"by far the most powerful produced by the body; it's approximately five thousand times greater in strength than the field produced by the brain. The heart's field not only permeates every cell in the body but also radiates outside us; it can be measured up to eight to ten feet away."
Measuring Heart Rate Variability
Overall health of the heart is no longer measured by a steady heart rate but instead by what is known as heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is the change that occurs in the rhythms of the heart and can be seen in patterns from one beat to the next. When the rhythms are in a unified pattern or in a focused order they are coherent, and, conversely, when they are random, chaotic, or jagged they are incoherent. Childre's research indicates that when the heart rate variability is coherent,
"increased order in the autonomic nervous system produces beneficial effects throughout the body-including enhanced immunity and improved hormonal balance." With incoherent rates, "blood vessels constrict, our blood pressure rises and a lot of energy is wasted. The health implications are easy to understand: disharmony in our heart rhythms leads to inefficiency and increased stress on the heart and other organs while harmonious rhythms are more efficient and less stressful to the body's systems."
Entrainment of the Heart with the Brain
The heart's powerful rhythm tends to entrain other body rhythms. To entrain is to "draw along with or after oneself," which is a curious definition when discussing the entrainment of the heart with the brain. When I read how the first entrainment was discovered, I fully understood this definition. It so happened that a pendulum clockmaker put all the clocks in one room and they all began to tick in harmony. This happened because the pendulum with the largest and strongest rhythm pulled or "drew" the others into synchrony so that they were all on the same wavelength.
Entrainment can also happen in music so that when many different instruments are in entrainment a beautiful symphony ensues, but without entrainment there is dissonance. Among people, when entrainment occurs, there is connection and true communication. When you say, "Oh, I get it," entrainment is occurring, and it is only during entrainment that true learning and understanding can take place. When the heart, the largest oscillator or pendulum in the body, emits coherent rhythms and the brain entrains with them, "we're at optimal functioning capacity," according to Martin.
The Heart is in the Driver's Seat
It is only recently that the heart has begun to move out of the arena of sentimentality and take its rightful place as the primary organ — the pilot, the one in the driver's seat — even though the mind still reins supreme in most circles. The exquisite discussion of the head and heart in Glenda Green's book Love Without End: Jesus Speaks... helps us to understand the head and heart relationship from the perspective of the Sacred Heart.
The abilities of the mind by itself are fairly limited. It is linear by nature in that it needs two fixed points of reference in order to function. It has no understanding of infinity because its two points of reference create polarities that result in dualistic action. The mind without heart brings about abstraction, causing a lack of connection to what's real which leads to chaos. Comparatively,
"the heart is a magnetic vortex through which the blessings of all essences and potentialities are received, integrated, and focused into living. Through the laws of electromagneticism, that power is converted into life energy. By comparison to the mind, the heart is a function of intelligence based on the ultimate in simplicity and synchronicity. Its matrix is a synergistic center of awareness which perceives a unified relationship with all that is."
Brain and Heart Working Together
It is not my intention to badmouth the brain; I am suggesting there has been an overemphasis on its singular abilities, and how we use our brains is what we must reinvent. When the brain and the heart work coherently, creativity flourishes, communication flows, and healing takes place.
Interestingly, I have discovered that both esoteric texts and scientific investigations use similar emotions to help elevate the heart to its true nature of coherence and harmony. Doc Childre and Howard Martin's research shows that the positive heart-based feelings of appreciation, love, compassion, and care "generate the smooth and harmonious HRV [heart rate variability] rhythms that are considered to be indicators of cardiovascular efficiency and nervous system balance.
Article Source:
Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness
by Pam Montgomery.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bear & Company, an imprint of Inner Traditions International. ©2008. www.innertraditions.com
Click here for More Info or to Order This Book.
About the Author
Pam Montgomery has been investigating plants and their intelligent spiritual nature since 1986. She is a founding member of the Northeast Herbal Association and is on the Advisory Board of United Plant Savers. The author of Partner Earth: A Spiritual Ecology and contributing author in Planting the Future, she is a practicing herbalist and plant spirit healer who offers trainings and treatments from her home in Danby, Vermont. Visit her website at www.partnereartheducationcenter.com.
Watch a video with Pam Montgomery: For the Love of Plants - Part 1 (includes links to part 2 and 3)
