As I woke up further, a memory of a dream that I’d had years ago swept over me: I was sitting on a mountain enjoying the view when my deceased father game swashbuckling over the hills and up a canyon wall and with a gleam in his eye and a smile on his face proceeded to LOP my head off with his sword! Before I could even wonder why, my point of view changed from being in my body to overlooking the interaction between me and my father and I saw that this pink and smoky ‘energy’ in my heart was now drawing up through my neck and it created a brand new ‘head’… a head made of the same pink ethereal essence of the heart. I had filed that crazy dream, 6 years ago, on a shelf labelled ‘very bizarre things that might make sense at a later date’.
The later date had arrived and my intuition/my heart was telling me that this was the answer to increasing my success in my own decision-making, well-being and peace of mind, and also importantly, assisting my clients with theirs. I had already begun focusing on the area of my heart in my personal morning meditations, but, this gave me the impetus to start incorporating what I had begun to call ‘heart-minding’ into my everyday living, decision-making, and now, my coaching.
THE HEART-MIND SCIENCE
As if to assure me I was on the right track, later that week a friend of mine sent me a link to the website of HeartMath. The HeartMath Institute is a non-profit scientific organization formulated in 1991 to research and educate people on the role of the much overlooked ‘heart intelligence’ in our health, happiness and global coherence for the good of all.
I found many tools in the HeartMath literature (www.heartmath.org) that resemble (one, almost identically) what I called my ‘heart meditation’. I was and am still elated to have arrived to this information – it greatly enhanced my own self-trust and I was able to more confidently encourage my friends and clients to ‘follow their hearts’, more literally than ever before. Here I had intuitively come across some of what the HeartMath doctors and researchers had been utilizing for extending health and well-being for the public at large since the early 1990’s and even before on a less formal platform.
The Institute of HeartMath has scientific data showing that tools like “Attitude Breathing” – simply deeply breathing with attention on the heart and thoughts of love (as in many ancient traditional meditational practices) greatly enhance the psychological well-being of people and lead to significant improvements in autonomic and hormonal function, ease of decision-making, increased hormonal balance, mood elevation – and the lists continue to grow (Clinical Research, Institute of HeartMath, 2001).
Their studies (Institute of HeartMath 2001) have shown that we are only on the threshold of an entire new paradigm in the way in which we perceive our intelligence, our senses, and our lives. For instance, the heart emits an electromagnetic field significantly more detectable – extending well outside of the body – than the brain. It is believed that this field is a sort of ‘informational’ sensory field that may connect with ‘other fields’ — into what (McTaggart, 2002) quantum physics scientists now call THE Field or the ‘zero point field’. HeartMath studies also suggest that for every neural pathway descending from the human brain to the heart (transmitting information, it is believed, from the brain to the heart), there are more than 100 of the same originating IN the heart and ascending to the brain. Could this mean that our ‘heart-brain’ is really in the ‘master’ position that we always assumed the brain was in?
HEART AND HEAD and COACHING
The Tibetan Monk and teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche (Rinpoche, 2012), in his book, Open Heart, Open Mind, brings the ancient Buddhist teachings of the importance of the heart energy right home to meet the 21st century science. His community, being steeped in the practices of opening the heart to free its guiding energy into everyday living, often substitutes the word for ‘mind’ for the word for ‘heart’ and vice versa. In fact, a visiting American doctor was quite confused when one of Tsoknyi’s village members expressed that he had a headache while continuing to point to his heart during his explanation of the pain.
I read many of the exercises in both Rinpoche’s book and the HeartMath literature and decided that it certainly could not hurt my clients and myself should I incorporate a heart exercise at the beginning of my sessions with them.
My very first experiment was profound. I was on one of my first Coaching Practicum classes at ICA in the Spring of 2012. Though we had only 15 minutes for a ‘laser’ coaching session, I felt it important to center both myself and the client, maybe even moreso because of the time crunch, in order to maximize the remaining 13.5 minutes and actually incur a benefit for the client. The results were fairly astounding.
I began with my formulation of the ‘attitude breathing’ above and simply called it breathing through the heart. We took 3 breaths in and out of the heart and then I asked her (and myself) to keep a little attention on the heart area and pretend to be ‘coming’ from there rather than the head during the session. Then I asked her intention for and the results she might want to see during the session. As I heard her begin to describe the discomfort she was feeling in having given up her career for the raising of her kids – her disappointment in herself ‘only’ being a housewife, I purposefully brought myself out of my head and back into my heart with a little ‘tap tap’ on my chest/heart area. It was as if I could FEEL the energy of her heart and I simply had a ‘knowing’ that she loved being there for her kids and only felt badly that her life didn’t ‘look good’ to the 18 year old vision she once had.
Without any strategizing or thought process whatsoever, I asked her to first, visualize her old teenaged self and asked her how ‘that young girl’ picture her life today, at 40. I asked her if she would like to describe the feeling she had and if there were disappointments she wanted to describe. She described many around her loss of the ‘slickly dressed and wealthy career woman’ that she had always assumed she would become. I asked her to open her heart and feel the feelings. Then, to my great surprise, I found myself quickly walking her through a visualization of herself at 60 and I asked her to look back at her 40 year old self. She began to sob loudly, but, happily (I did too) as we both realized she LOVED exactly who she had become and she proclaimed (something to the effect of…), “I just needed to get that 18 year old’s somewhat ego-based dream out of the way to see that I adore my life just the way it is and will have no regrets over giving up a dream that never really involved my heart” ! She then described to me, quite excitedly, the thrill of and rewards in her volunteer work and her home life. She described her children as if each one were a unique work of art and the roles that she fulfilled for each of them – her desires in the ways she was hoping to help them all and the different ways in which she felt it so important for her to remain available to them every day.