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In their book published a few years ago The HeartMath Solution Doc Childe and Howard Martin reveal their fascinating research concerning the intelligence of the heart. Part of an interdisciplinary team of scientists, doctors and psychologists who have been studying the relationship between the brain and heart, Childe and Martin provide scientific proof for what smart people have known intuitively for centuries. The heart is just as smart as the brain, and really clever people are able to access both heart smarts and brain smarts and put them together. (In my book Approaching the Corporate Heart I call this weaving of brain and heart intelligence "braiding").
Childe and Martin tell us that the heart communicates in four ways: neurologically, hormonally, biophysically (through waves) and through its own electromagnetic field. Heart intelligence is more intuitive, has greater perspective and has the capacity to moderate stress and improve our relationships and our health.
In line with their scientific bent the authors summarise their research in an equation.
Activating Heart Intelligence + Managing the Mind + Managing the Emotions
=
Energy Efficiency, Increased Coherence, Enhanced Awareness, Greater Productivity
Heart intelligence also increases health and decreases stress.
Reading The HeartMath Solution I thought back over the years to all the people I have worked with who violently resisted any opportunity to activate their heart intelligence and manage (even acknowledge) their emotions. I was again struck how idiotic it is to try to run any business particularly large complex global enterprises without activating heart intelligence and managing our emotions. Only relying on our brains and our visible behaviours (competencies) is like going through life sitting on our hands or riding a bicycle using only one wheel. You can do it but why would you bother and how much more effective could you be using all your faculties - all the equipment that is available?
Travelling back from London recently I spent several hours watching documentaries on the in-flight video system. Each one was an account of how western medicine and science is discovering that the mind, the emotions and our energy systems are crucial parts of our effective functioning as healthy human beings and as a society.
Among the research is a fascinating study published in 2000 in Integrative Medicine by Pearsall, Schwartz, and Russek examined the startling issue of “Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients that Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors”. What they discovered were otherwise unexplainable post-surgical emotional and cognitive changes in heart transplant recipients that paralleled emotions and beliefs held by their heart donors.
Dr Candace Pert former Research Professor at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Section Chief at the National Institute of Mental Health (USA) is renowned for her work on neuropeptides and their implications for how we think about what we communicate to and effect other people. In an interview, Pert talks briefly about her research. It indicates that emotional responses occur all over the body, are concentrated in certain places, such as the heart, and that the electromagnetic charges produced by the functioning of our emotional neurophysiology can be detected by other people, in much the same way that air molecules carry the vibrations made by our vocal chords and carry information to other people’s ears.
From Physics to Sociology, there is a ground swell of theory and research letting us know that by sticking exclusively to the rational, visible and measurable parts of reality we have greatly limited our potential for success, health and happiness. HeartMath is another milestone in the journey of getting us limited, industrial-age beings to see what ancient sages and traditional medical practitioners have known for centuries. There is more to us human beings than we can see and have lately been prepared to admit.
The metaphor of the machine that has dominated the industrial era has so imbued our thinking that we have been blinded to our own psyches (mind, spirit, soul and emotions). Thankfully the science we trust so implicitly is catching up with ancient wisdom and letting us know that neither are we machines nor are relationships or society mechanistic. Once we accept this reality we open up a whole new way of operating that increases our potential for healthy success to levels most of us can't even begin to envisage. The rediscovery of the psyche will be as revolutionary as the discovery of the microchip. The implications for enhanced strategic thinking and functioning are just as profound.
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