Perhaps Charlotte Brontë was ahead of her time in the 1800s with her views on the heart. Additionally, experiencing a positive emotion by asking yourself what you have gratitude, appreciation, compassion or care for, will result in creating heart-brain coherence and the flood of benefits will follow. Once the focus is centred to the heart a breathing rate of ‘in for five seconds, out for five seconds’ is applied. Many religious or spiritual practices do this and almost all yoga classes will open and close with the hands together in a bow of ‘Namaste’. The act centres your focus, and therefore your energy, on your heart. Many people do not realise why we bring our hands together to our chest when we pray. This technique begins with sending your focus to your heart. So how does someone create heart-brain coherence?Ĭombined with a healthy diet and regular exercise, the primary method to achieve heart-brain coherence is a simple 10-second breathing technique. As a result, oxytocin reduces cortisol levels, blood pressure, anxiety and promotes all kinds of positive social reactions. Oxytocin, also known as the ‘love hormone’, gets released in the heart inhibiting the stress response and its relative hormones. The healing powers of the heart begin to take over. The body starts to go back into a state of homeostasis where the body has an internally stable state irrelative to influences of the external environment. Anti-ageing hormones kick in, the body gets a powerful immune response and cardiovascular benefits develop. An efficient conversation starts to take place between the brain and the heart and a cascade of over 1,300 positive biochemical reactions in the body takes place. When we are in a state of heart-brain harmony our body understands this as healing and love. But even more fascinating is what happens when our brain and heart function together, in harmony. This means that we have a form of intelligence in the heart that can function completely separately from the brain. These cells are able to learn, feel and think of their own accord. Sixty-seven percent of the cells in the heart are nerve cells which can receive and compute organic stimuli and then autonomously send information to the brain. Scientists have nicknamed them ‘the little brain in the heart’. These neurons are concentrated in such a way that they act as an extension of the brain, yet they can act completely independently. We have 40,000 neurons and a whole network of neurotransmitters located in our heart. But in fact, the heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain does to the heart, influencing a person’s emotions, memory, high-level cognitive functions and problem-solving. It’s typically understood that the brain is the main control centre over the whole body, sending different instructions to the organs through the nervous system. Surely when someone knows all the lyrics to a song, it’s because the knowledge is stored in their brain and not in their heart? ‘Speaking from the heart’, ‘learn it off by heart’ or ‘having a heartfelt conversation’ are all sayings we are familiar with although initially may not make complete sense. Now through modern science and multiple leading studies from the HeartMath Institute in California, scientists are coming to the agreement that the heart plays even more of a role in the human body. However, within many cultures, ancient and current, philosophers, poets and prophets have looked at the human heart as the source of love, wisdom, intuition, memory and emotion. Until the late 1900s, mainstream science perceived the heart as solely a pump that regulates blood flow throughout the body. “The human heart has hidden treasures, in secret kept, in silence sealed.” - Charlotte Brontë
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