I'm excited to share with you a little discussion about how we can go about opening our hearts.
When we understand the meaning of anything that we're doing,
Especially meditation,
But in anything else in life,
Really,
It actually increases the outcome of the meditation itself or anything else,
Obviously,
That we might be doing,
Right?
If we understand why we're doing it,
We'll have more motivation to do it,
And we will be more excited to sit down and do it,
And the outcome of the meditation will be increased and will also provide greater benefits.
So this discussion today is all about opening our heart.
So why would we want to open our hearts?
Well,
When we relax into the heart,
It opens up our brain,
And brainwaves then can build upon other brainwaves.
Research shows that most of us use only about 4 to 7% of our brain at any one time,
But when we practice opening our heart,
We're actually using our brain at about a 26 to 27% capacity.
We've all been bruised.
We've all experienced hardship and heartache.
We've all been under stress,
But no organism can continuously live in a state of stress or fight,
Flight,
And freeze for an excessive period of time,
Because if we do,
We're going to be headed for disease without question.
What most of us don't realize is that our own thoughts alone can turn on the fight,
Flight,
Freeze response.
Most often,
We aren't even aware that we're living in a state of constant or chronic stress.
This state of being becomes so commonplace to us that we actually aren't even aware that there might be another way to live.
The long-term effects of living in a state of chronic stress will cause some of our systems to become dysregulated and ultimately downgrade our very selves.
Chronic stress actually pushes the buttons that turn on disease.
It's not a conscious process,
Not at all,
And most of us have become so accustomed to listening to and becoming captive to our own thoughts that the thoughts themselves end up becoming an addiction for us.
Sometimes it's as if we crave the drama that gives us a little dopamine hit just so we can keep that fight,
Flight,
And freeze response turned on.
And again,
This is not conscious,
But when it happens,
Our autonomic nervous system ends up staying in an activated and continuously heightened state.
And when our bodies are consistently in a hypervigilant state,
Our attention stays out there in the environment,
Always at the ready,
Waiting for the next fire to put out or the next challenge to solve or drama to relive.
Just think about how many times you repeat that same story you've told anyone who'll listen a hundred times before.
That continuously repeating that story or that drama or that situation keeps it alive,
Keeps our systems activated in a hypervigilant state and a survival state at that.
And over time and without consciousness,
Somehow we actually might even become addicted to a life we don't even like.
This is partially what makes the practice of meditation so difficult for so many of us.
When our body's in a constant state of fight,
Flight,
And freeze,
The very last thing we want to do is actually close our eyes because when we close our eyes,
It would make us vulnerable.
And if we're stuck in survival mode,
Closing our eyes would make us vulnerable to some sort of attack,
Real or imagined.
So when we're stuck in fight,
Flight,
And freeze,
Our brain fires incoherent brain waves,
Which narrows our focus.
It would stand to reason then that the obsessive quality of being in the fight,
Flight,
Freeze state naturally makes our energy levels decrease.
Have you ever experienced a day where you just feel really,
Really stressed and by the end of the day,
You're just exhausted?
That's what I mean.
We're expending a ton of energy just being in survival mode,
Even if we don't know or realize that we are.
And when we're in survival mode,
We also become a little bit selfish.
And by that,
I mean all the things that we're worrying about become centered around us and how we feel and what we want and what we're getting and what we're not getting,
Why we're not happy.
We feel envious,
Afraid,
Worried,
Guilty,
Hopeless,
Depressed,
Even.
All of these feelings are derived from stress and the body then ultimately becomes altered.
In our perception,
There's danger in our outer environment.
And then when that happens,
Then trauma is no longer in the brain because it then now moves into the body itself.
In short,
Stress causes our autonomic nervous system to dysregulate.
I recently saw a billboard advertisement that said,
Your body follows your mind.
And you know what?
That's true.
Think about that,
Right?
You wake up and you think,
Ooh,
I'm going to go make coffee.
And pretty soon you're walking into the kitchen,
Putting coffee grounds into the coffee maker and turning it on.
So your body just followed your thought to make something happen.
So if our body stays mired down in a state of stress,
Our mind will follow and continuously try to survive.
And it's impossible to create from a place of survival.
Our hearts are our very center of wholeness,
Our center of oneness,
And the center of where our divinity actually begins.
When we're able to slow our breath and our heart,
It helps to order our heart and causes our hearts to become coherent,
Ordered,
And integrated.
In turn,
When our hearts become coherent,
It helps entrain all of the other energy centers in our body.
So if we relax our heart,
We're going to be able to awaken our brains.
So the meditation that follows has its own podcast and its own recording.
Be sure that when you turn on that meditation,
That you're sitting in a quiet spot where you can be undisturbed for about 20 minutes before you begin.
Clearly,
We don't want to be driving either.
So the objective of this meditation is to restore and balance our hearts.
Research shows that once we balance the heart,
The energy moves into balancing the brain.
And once in a state of balance and coherence,
If it's true that our body follows our mind,
We can come from a state of creation versus a state of stress.
And then once we've been able to settle our hearts,
We will want to ultimately bring that energy up to our brain.
When we do that,
It will intentionally set in motion the coherence between our heart and our brain.
It's a super simple meditation,
But research shows that it will produce profound changes in your physiology.
In fact,
There's going to be a study published shortly in the medical journals from research currently being done at UCSD about these very benefits of meditation.
And yes,
I promise to pass that along the moment I become aware of it.
This data shows that when we can sustain an elevated emotion and activate our hearts and our brain centers,
It actually resets the baseline of trauma and emotional experiences we've had from the past.
It also causes our immune system to become stronger and actually signals biological changes in our cells that suggest to our bodies that we're actually living in a different environment.
That's because the research has proven that factors in our blood,
Those of long-term meditators,
Actually cause the neurons in our brain to grow and change.
And your nervous system is actually the greatest pharmacy in the world.
So if the mind influences the body and the body follows the mind,
Then when we increase the state of our heart,
We're actually expanding from the narrow to a much wider viewpoint.
In essence,
We're broadening our focus so that we're no longer caught in a loop of analyzing,
Worrying,
And reacting.
Our bodies then start to actually believe we're living in a new environment.
Pretty crazy,
Right?
So if your biological body is living in a new environment that's no longer predicated on survival,
It can then begin to repair,
Restore,
And regenerate itself.
So let's settle into the meditation that follows this.
It's recorded on its own link,
Its own track.
Obviously,
You won't want to be driving when you start.
I personally can't think of any better and more natural way to change your body,
Mind,
And spirit than to spend a few minutes each day in the stillness of meditation.
Enjoy.
I look forward to your feedback.
