Re-air: The Practical Health and Energetic Benefits of Heart Coherence with Dr. Rollin McCraty [Episode #849]

This week’s topic is: Re-Air: The Practical Health and Energetic Benefits of Heart Coherence with Dr. Rollin McCraty

I am so excited to have my very special guest, Dr. Rollin McCraty, who is director of research for the HeartMath Institute, and a co-author of the book, Heart Intelligence; Connecting with the Heart’s Intuitive Guidance for Effective Choices and Solutions. Listen in as Rollin shares what heart coherence is and why it’s so important, how incoherence disrupts sleep, the benefits of coherence, and so much more.

TOPICS COVERED

• What heart coherence is and why it’s so important…
• Incoherence that can disrupt sleep…
• Benefits of coherence…
• Emotional regulation and its relation to coherence…
• Coherent and not peaceful versus being peaceful and coherent…
• How to be more productive without the rushed energy…

[FEATURED GUESTS]

About Dr. Rollin McCraty 

Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., director of research at the HeartMath Institute, is a professor at Florida Atlantic University, and a psychophysiologist whose interests include the physiology of emotion. One of his primary areas of focus is looking at how emotions influence cognitive processes, behavior, health and the global interconnectivity between people and Earth’s energetic systems. His research on heart rate variability and heart-rhythm coherence has gained international attention in the scientific community and is helping to change long-held perceptions about the heart’s role in health, behavior, performance and quality of life.

He is one of the primary creators of the Global Coherence Initiative and the principal designer of the Global Coherence Monitoring System and its international network of magnetic field sensor sites. He is a member of the American Autonomic Society, Pavlovian Society, National Association for Psychological Science, Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback and Society for Scientific Exploration.

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:00 Namaste, loves and Merry Christmas. I am so excited to be here with you today to personally wish you over the airwaves, the mest of Christmases May, the Spirit of Christmas, which for me is about joy and peace and connection and unconditional love rise up in you, in your life, in your family, in your environment. And I wish that for the collective as well. And because of this energy of Christmas, the Christmas Spirit, I am bringing back on our show today, we are airing this amazing show which is in accordance with this one of my favorite shows of the year, the Practical Health and Energy Benefits of Heart Coherence with Dr. Rollin McCraty. The ways in which I believe we can access true unconditional love is through the power of the heart. Each of us has an amazing energetic and physical heart, and I’m really leaning into this work.

01:11 This is a big part of the next book, hint, hint. And we actually did a heart aligned meditation study with Dr. Rollin McCraty, who is from the Heart Math Institute. He’s the director of research, he’s a brilliant scientist. And we did a study around a heart-based meditation, which I will be airing for you free publicly on the website. We’ll be offering the tracks. And it’s a very specific type of embodied meditation where we take some of the techniques of Yogananda and we pair it with some of these heart coherence techniques for really being able to go into create this heart awareness and heart guidance. And we measured the participants of the study physically, their HRV, we measured their with very sensitive equipment, heart math sensors, and there was a 29% increase in coherence over four weeks. So what this means is that when we go into our hearts, we can create real change in our lives.

02:18 Coherence means clarity, better decision making, finding better solutions, feeling more calm, feeling more emotionally in control, more emotionally intelligent, feeling, more love, peace, these heart-based emotions. So there’s science to this. It’s very much connected to spirituality, the energetic heart. So on this Christmas day, I wanted to bring this forward to you. Whether this is the first time you’re hearing this podcast or you heard it before, today’s a perfect day to go into your heart and to bring forward some of these tools and awarenesses so that love can rise up in your life as well as, again, clarity, focus,

Kimberly: 02:59 Better decision making. So I send you so much love. Without further ado, let’s get right into our show today with the incredible Dr. Rollin McCraty.

Interview with Dr. Rollin McCraty

Kimberly: 01:42 Rollin, thank you so much for being back on our podcast. You were back here I think a year ago, and since then you and I have had a lot of contact together. We have,

Roland: 02:12 And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Kimberly: 02:14 Me too. I’ve gone up to see you guys at HeartMath, which has changed my life quite honestly. Learning about all the amazing research that you’ve been doing, Roland and the rest of the team around heart coherence and integrating it into my life has had such a profound impact. It’s such a big part of my upcoming book. You and I have actually done a research study together and there’s this amazing global coherence conference, which we’ll get into in just a moment as well.

Roland: 02:46 Indeed. Lots

Kimberly: 02:47 Of stuff. Lots of stuff. Lots

Roland: 02:48 Of stuff.

Kimberly: 02:49 So let’s backtrack a little bit. I came across a lot of your research. You’re the head of research director of research at HeartMath. When I was doing research, actually Roland for my last book, which is called You Are More Than You Think You Are. And I started going into it and I said, why doesn’t everybody know about this? Why don’t people know about Heart Coherence? And then I reached out to Debbie, who’s the c e o, and we made contact and I started learning about the HeartMath tools and trainings and I started to incorporate into my daily life. And what I’ve noticed, Roland is feeling very intuitive, more calm, and just this centeredness, which is what I think we all want. So can you explain a little bit how that works? I know you can go on and on. Roland is one of the most brilliant scientists in the world, but maybe in the simplified sense for a busy mom or anyone that’s just running around trying to get the most out of their day. Why does this matter?

What heart coherence is and why it’s so important

Roland: 03:54 Okay, let me, the question, there’s so many ways to answer that question, Kimberly. Well, let me start by saying that I think it is really helpful to understand that it’s our emotions that run the show in sociology. What’s going on in our brain, our nervous system, our hormonal system. For example, just getting frustrated for even a minute or two sets in motion, 1400 biochemical changes in her body that deplete energy. And that was one of our early studies showed suppresses the immune system for up to six hours. And that’s not even getting angry. I’m just talking about frustration and impatience, these kinds of feelings. Now on the other hand, when we feel good, we walk out the door in the morning and we go, oh, I’ll call it that sense of what a beautiful day temperature blue skies, that feeling we have.

Kimberly: 04:53 Yes,

Roland: 04:54 We may not think it to ourselves or say it to ourselves, but we’re feeling appreciation.

Kimberly: 04:59 It’s

Roland: 04:59 That feeling right or that feeling when we connect with somebody in the heart, we just have that great connection to someone or we feel real compassion for what we may be seen on the news rather than being angry about it. That also sets in motion all these biochemical

Kimberly: 05:17 Change

Roland: 05:17 Activity in our nervous system, and we call those regenerative emotions versus depleting emotions. I just wanted to set that context because that’s so important in the amount of energy we have. At the end of the day, this is really important for a mom who’s looking after youngsters as you well know. Kimberly.

Kimberly: 05:36 Yes, Roland, let me ask you a question. You said that anger, and I loved that study, and the graph is very powerful when you see how anger for five minutes can throw off your hormones and affect your immunity for six hours. We get a lot of questions here about sleep and people feeling anxious at night and not being able to sleep. So what are some of the things, the emotions or the incoherence that can happen in the evening that throws us off watching the news or,

Incoherence that can disrupt sleep

Roland: 06:04 Well, let’s go back to what you were just saying.

Kimberly: 06:07 Yes

Roland: 06:08 And well known in the stress research world, and one of the first symptoms of stress is sleep disruption.

Kimberly: 06:16 Yes.

Roland: 06:18 Okay. And it’s the carryover effect of all those small activities or feelings we have throughout the day because those biochemical changes like cortisol, we all know, well, maybe not everybody knows cortisol, it’s nicknamed the stress hormone. It is kind of the top of the food chain because it sets in motion lots of other things. It modulates d n a, and we don’t have to get into the biochemistry here, but basically if we pulse extra cortisol into our system that we didn’t really need to because we added a little extra drama or a little frustration, those feelings around the small things,

Kimberly: 06:58 Those

Roland: 06:58 Effects last for hours. So sleep disruption is really what we do throughout the day and those carry over effects of what we’ve done to our biochemistry and our nervous system activity.

Kimberly: 07:09 Wow. Yeah. Sorry Roland, go ahead.

Roland: 07:12 Well, so one of the best things we can do is get coherent, which is the first question you asked me,

Kimberly: 07:17 Right? Yes.

Roland: 07:19 So I wanted to set the stage Kimberly for that because boy, there’s so many ways to go into this. Let’s start with that. The heart sends more information to the brain and the brain sends to the heart, and the heart is clearly involved in our, I’ll call it our emotional system as is the hormonal system, the brain of course, and all these different systems. I mean, why do we say I love you with all my heart. I’ve

Kimberly: 07:44 Never

Roland: 07:45 Known anybody to say I love you with all my brain. I probably wouldn’t go over very well. So we intuitively and instinctively know there’s something about the heart that’s more than just a pump.

Kimberly: 07:56 Yes.

Roland: 07:56 That’s involved in what we tend to think of as the emotions. We want more of wisdom and these types of things. Well, and actually the science is backing that up in a very powerful way. So when we feel those degenerative, not degenerative, but depleting emotions, frustration and impatience and anger and hate, and especially those kinds of strong emotions like that, that froze the activity in our nervous system literally out of sync. And that’s reflected in the rhythm of the heart as what we call an incoherent rhythm. It’s all chaotic and jagged. You can actually see this in real time with simple little devices. Otherwise, when we’re feeling those regenerative emotions, we’re connecting, right? We are now. We feel good about that. That creates coherence in our heart rhythms. And it’s what that simple little measure of looking at the beat to beat change in our heart rate, which creates our heart rhythm, is reflecting a lot of really deep information about what’s going on inside of our body. So as I said, the heart sends more information to the brain. Now when we’re in those incoherent rhythmic patterns, that information is going up to every major brain center and it causes the neural activity and all the neurons in our brain to get out of sync. And there’s a name for that. It’s called cortical cortex. Top of our brain that we get paid to go to work for is inhibited. This is why it’s the physiology, Kimberly, of why I can say it two ways. The plain speak way is why anger makes us stupid,

09:40 Or I can say it more nicely, why otherwise very intelligent individuals and people can make inefficient choices when they’re emotionally upset. But it’s the same thing.

Kimberly: 09:53 Amazing.

Roland: 09:55 You’ve never done that, right, Kimberly?

Kimberly: 09:56 Oh gosh. I know when we start talking about emotions, Roland, there is a lot of guilt. Sometimes we feel like, oh man, I shouldn’t have gotten angry or I shouldn’t have done this or that. But at the end of the day, we’re all trying our best. And that’s why I think these tools are really powerful because it’s giving us, I feel like a different point of strength and power. So what happened, Roland, I want to make this distinction when you talk about H R V, because there’s a lot of devices out there, but, and I’m not a big tracker person, but I started learning about coherence. Then I went up and saw you and the team and it was amazing at HeartMath, and I said, Hmm, I’m interested in actually tracking myself. And so HeartMath has this amazing tool called the mwa mwa Pro

Roland: 10:46 And Inner Balance is probably the more

Kimberly: 10:48 Inner balance which you can get on their website. And they also have an amazing app. And what I saw on my computer screen, Roland, was this proof. Because sometimes we think, well, I don’t know, like you said, it’s this feeling. But then when we can see it through the HeartMath tools, we think, oh, it’s actually working. So this isn’t something that you can track from some of the more popular devices out there, like the rings you wear and things like that. I want to make that distinction first. And then the second thing, Roland, is I said to myself, I’ve been meditating for years and I’ve been teaching people to meditate and I’m a student of yoga Nanda, and it’s amazing. Sometimes people need that discerning look at the research. This is actually doing something for me if I’m going to spend my time, if I’m going to get up half an hour earlier and do this.

11:37 So then I said to you all, I said, let’s test the coherence. So we created something together called the Heart Align Meditation, which is taking yogananda’s amazing meditations and then some of the HeartMath tools. And then you and your amazing team helped me put together this study of 30 people in LA and it was, we won’t get into all the data now we’re going to make these tracks available for people who want to try the meditation on our site. Rolling. But it was taking people through and it was even after four weeks doing the meditation, which was only eight minutes, four times a week, people’s ability to go into coherence went up 29%. And which is significant. We think about all these benefits. We’re talking about more energy. Can you get into some of the other ones, Roland? With coherence, there’s more clarity, more intuition. The more coherent we become, we’re not wasting energy.

Benefits of coherence

Roland: 12:30 Exactly. It’s really our capacity to self-regulate. Maybe a cleaner speak way of saying that is to take charge of our emotional diet. It’s really amazing. A lot of us would get into, and it’s appropriate to pay attention to what we eat and drink and get exercise. Those are of course important things. But if people spent a 10th of the time regulating and paying attention to their emotional diet that they do to their food diet, the benefits would far outweigh reading labels.

Kimberly: 13:06 Wow.

Roland: 13:07 Total. Yeah. And again, I’m not taking away from that. That’s important. But again, it’s emotions that run the show and what we call stress is always an emotion. It’s always the feeling. Right.

Kimberly: 13:22 And also, Ronan, a lot of people, we’re talking about coherence and heart brain communication in our society today. There’s so much around nootropics and brain training, and we’re not saying the brain isn’t important, but we’re saying that these two organs can be in sync. And that makes a big difference with your emotional wellbeing. Well,

Roland: 13:40 Exactly. I mean, anybody get me wrong here? I’m not putting down the brain or the mind. I want one and I want it to work really well.

Kimberly: 13:48 Yes,

Roland: 13:50 It has to in my line of work. But also saying that the heart and brain, in fact, if we’d look physiologically what’s going in in the body, the heart and brain are in constant communication with each other. And they’re more inner wired together through our nervous system than any other systems in our body. We really have to think of it as a system, a heart brain system. It’s not the brain or the heart. How they’re communicating the quality of the communication and how in sync they are together. Now it looked like you were going to ask something.

Kimberly: 14:26 So Liz and Roland today, there’s a lot of discussion around mental health and we talk about negative thoughts. Do you believe that this emotional regulation, which can come from coherence, informs the thoughts and therefore absolutely part of mental health?

Emotional regulation and its relation to coherence

Roland: 14:40 Yeah, this isn’t just a belief. This is well established in

Kimberly: 14:42 Neuroscience.

Roland: 14:43 In fact, we have emotionally responses. I’ll call ’em before we even have the thought in a lot of the thoughts. We have our mind trying to justify what we already felt.

Kimberly: 15:00 Does

Roland: 15:00 That make sense to you?

Kimberly: 15:03 And memories in our amygdala, right? Past reactions

Roland: 15:06 That gets into the physiology of it all.

Kimberly: 15:08 Okay, won’t go down there by,

Roland: 15:10 You can go down that path if you want. But I think for most listeners, well, what do I do about this? And step one is become more self-aware. Pay attention to what we are feeling. And we talk a lot about baselines as you know. In fact, your studies showed a shift in baselines of your participants, which is an awesome finding by the way, that they’ve really trained their nervous system into a new, more optimal state through these practices. But things like impatience, let’s just say, I’ll pick on impatience for a minute. It’s big, it’s huge. But we don’t even know. We’re feeling it because it’s become so familiar that it no longer becomes a conscious awareness.

Kimberly: 15:54 It’s normalized.

Roland: 15:56 Well, exactly. It’s part of our normal experience. It doesn’t get our attention anymore. And we can talk about all the emotions. Anxiety is another one that happens for a lot of people. We just have, I’ll call it a tone of anxiety and running around in our consciousness or impatience

16:15 Come so familiar. That’s where we need to kind of slow down and take a little look inward to really become more self-aware. And if we find ourselves running more of those depleting, I’m call ’em frequencies. They really are at the energetic level. So we can also measure, that’s another topic, but then we can shift those and that’s where we start taking charge. And especially becoming the meditation that you did in the study is awesome. And we teach heart lock in as a meditation, and that’s only part of the story. We want to do that because training the nervous system to that as a new familiar state, but it’s really about catching those under the radar or sometimes way above the radar, big reactions throughout the day,

Kimberly: 17:04 Especially

Roland: 17:04 Of sleep and shifting them right in the moment. So it’s not just about meditation.

Kimberly: 17:09 No, it’s

Roland: 17:09 Part of the formula, but it’s about that moment to moment self-awareness and shifting our emotional system throughout the day. We get cut off in traffic or where you hit a traffic jam. What do most of us do? Frustrated and patient, right?

Kimberly: 17:28 Hours. Yeah. Is

Roland: 17:29 That making the traffic move any faster? Of course not.

Kimberly: 17:34 Exactly. We can’t control so many things. Our child has a huge temper tantrum in the middle of the restaurant. The flight’s delay two hours. So that’s why I think this is so powerful and important for people to know about Roland, is that yes, we can meditate in the beginning of the day and the end of the day like I do. But then there’s this whole swath of time in the middle, and when I started learning the coherence tools and going into it, it started to create these shifts so that you stay in more of that centered state, this coherent state,

Roland: 18:06 Especially when the chaos out there is amped up. Because that’s the whole point. Being able to maintain, we can call it our heart centeredness or our composure in the middle of the chaos of the world.

Kimberly: 18:21 And right now, Roland, there’s a lot of upset obviously with world news and a lot of things are happening on a collective scale. And I can even sense in people around me that the baseline level of stress is amped up very much and there’s so much out of our control. And

Roland: 18:40 Control is what’s going on in us.

Kimberly: 18:42 Exactly. Exactly. And one of the things that I know HeartMath teaches and some of the amazing books that I’ve read is this idea of over care, where we can stay in coherence. You mentioned the word compassion before Roland, where we stay in a regenerative state versus, oh, this is so awful. Or we get dragged in or sympathy or whatever we want to call it, which then brings us down and doesn’t really help anything

Roland: 19:11 Well over care is I think a lot of us suffer from it. It’s easy to do. And I may be really clear, I’m not talking about not caring. The

Kimberly: 19:22 World

Roland: 19:23 Needs more care. It does. I don’t want that term to confuse anybody that that’s what we’re seeing not but a lot for a lot of us, especially people in first responder, community, nursing, healthcare, this is a bigger issue. We go into those professions out of a deep sense of care when that care gets out of balance and turns into anxiety and these types of things. And that’s what we mean by over care.

Kimberly: 19:52 Yes.

Roland: 19:53 And that takes away the power of our original care. It turns something that was regenerative into something that’s depleting and draining.

Kimberly: 20:02 There’s a lot of nuance. It’s powerful. But there’s some things to understand. Roland, and I assume that’s one of the reasons that you’re part of this amazing HeartMath Global Coherence Event coming up. And actually I’m part of it too. We had a,

We discuss the HeartMath Global Coherence Event

Roland: 20:16 You are

Kimberly: 20:16 Conversation that was practical about busy life being a working mom. What does coherence look like? We talked about more kindness and more flow through the day. And so I just want to emphasize this conference, which we’ll link to in the show notes, is not just about for scientists, it’s not for people that love data, but it’s really for everybody.

Roland: 20:41 It is. I went out of my way. I’m a co-host with Dr. Kathleen Schaffner on this. We have over 40 speakers in the art and science of cultivating coherence. Isn’t it neat that coherence is getting its own summit now? It’s

Kimberly: 20:56 Amazing. A

Roland: 20:57 Long ways since we first introduced that 30, 30 years ago, the concept of physiological coherence, getting ourself in sync, that’s what really coherence means. But for those that like the science, we have some scientists in there. I’m one of them. And we’ve got people like Jude Kervin, I mean just an astrophysicist who wrote the book, the Cosmic Hologram. So just wonderful, wonderful interviews on the science, Dean Radden, Greg Braden, people like that. But there’s an equal mix, maybe even a little bit more of the interviews and the discussions are about the practical side of how do we actually bring this into our day-to-day lives? And almost every one of the interviews I did anyway, and I think Dr. Schaffner did the same thing. We always wanted to make sure that there was a practical, how can I improve my own life today after hearing this? How can I walk away from this discussion that we just had with some tools or tips that can help me navigate the life of more ease, more grace?

Kimberly: 22:03 Well, and that’s what I really enjoy talking with you about Roland, is that it is very practical. It’s not heady. It’s not, oh, research and then I have to figure this out, or I’m supposed to do all these different things. We can start to utilize it today. And one thing I want to mention from my personal standpoint, Roland, is that you mentioned the coherence is physiological. And for me it started. It starts that way. My body gets in sync and my thoughts line up and I stay clear. But for me, spiritually and energetically, it opens up incredible connection. My meditations have come to a new level. I feel deeply connected to others. There’s a spiritual coherence.

Roland: 22:50 Absolutely.

Kimberly: 22:51 I dunno if it’s measured in science, but as we know, we’re the physical heart, then there’s the energetic heart.

Roland: 22:59 Correct. And when I said that, I mean the way we measure it through, there’s like the inner balance and in wave pro and things that we used in your study, those are physiological measures. But the neat thing is it is a physiological measure

Kimberly: 23:15 Directly

Roland: 23:15 Reflects the synchronization between the heart and brain and the system. Now I think it’s pretty common sense, Kimberly, to understand how getting our inner systems in sync, literally the activity in our neurons and our nervous system underlies all the things you just talked about.

Kimberly: 23:39 Yes,

Roland: 23:39 Right. Our capacity to maintain, our composure to feel better, to now there’s so many levels that’s going on, just energy levels. We’re not wasting energy. So the body now has more energy to use in the regeneration processes, cell repair, immune function, all these things are enhanced. So there’s a lot of personal come out here for our own health and wellbeing. But by far the biggest benefit to me is that when we get the heart and brain in sync, not just the activity in our neurons and nervous system, that opens the door to intuition, to our deeper intuition, to connect to who we really are.

Kimberly: 24:20 Yes.

Roland: 24:21 At our deeper inner levels, our energetic level of our beingness, which is where the real intuition that inner guidance system comes from.

Kimberly: 24:30 That’s the footnote or that’s the subtitle of my new book, is

Roland: 24:34 That right?

Kimberly: 24:35 Realize who you really are because I feel like it’s beyond words. This wholeness, this expansion, this place of no lack. Because so much of the stress and the running around, as you mentioned, the impatience, the hurrying is trying to fill this or this egoic identity and there’s so much self-sustaining power in the heart or the daily disappointments. I didn’t get this job or this person dumped me or this didn’t work out. We transcend all of that.

Roland: 25:06 I like where you’re going with that because once we really connect with the heart’s inner guidance system, the heart’s intelligence, one of the things that there’s so many benefits, but one of the ones that’s been most useful, or I’ll say powerful for me is that deep inner sense of knowing that whatever I draw in life or whatever life brings my way, I can deal with it and I will deal with it. And that just cuts out so much of the anxiety, the negative projections of the future, the rumination, all that kind of stuff. It’s the real deep inner security. Does that make sense?

Kimberly: 25:46 Oh, it’s priceless. Wrong to have that inner security. And also in today’s world, I think there’s a lot of loneliness and depression and people feeling like, and I have many friends, this is another topic on dating apps, just desperately trying to seek a partner feeling like I’m not complete unless I find someone and all of that. And that’s fine. Of course I’m married, I get it. It’s great to share life. But what I’ve also really felt as I’ve gone into these coherence tools is this bigger love, which is coming and coming from inside and it’s magnetic and it doesn’t need anything outside.

Your inner best friend

Roland: 26:29 That’s our own inner best friend. And when we connect with our

Kimberly: 26:32 Yes,

Roland: 26:33 And you can even be in relationships. And I have had this experience in my, I’ll say far past now because I’m very happily married as well.

Kimberly: 26:42 Yes.

Roland: 26:43 But you can be in relationships and still feel lonely and not connected at that deeper level, especially when there’s not the deeper heart resonance really isn’t there.

Kimberly: 26:55 So you and I have talked about this rolling, but can you explain, you can be coherence precedes, I just say peacefulness or how do I say this? You can be coherent but necessarily, not necessarily peaceful, but if you’re peaceful, you are coherent. Can you explain that? Because there’s let’s say athletes that have great coherence and aren’t necessarily, or they have great H R V patterns. But again, that’s a different kind of H R V measurements.

Coherent and not peaceful versus being peaceful and coherent

Roland: 27:21 So coherence is a term in science that we use to describe the harmonious behavior or coordinated behavior is a better way of saying it. Kimberly, of all the parts of a complex system, and we’re extremely complex systems as human,

Kimberly: 27:39 Yes.

Roland: 27:40 But it’s also a term that’s used in science to describe the activity within an atom or subatomic processes all the way to the universe.

Kimberly: 27:52 Wow.

Roland: 27:53 Because we live in a coherent universe. In fact, that’s what Dr. Carvan talks about in our interview in the summit. It has to be that way or life couldn’t exist. And I’m rambling a little bit here, but these are important. And urban laslow, I don’t know if you know Irvin’s work or not, but very, very famous person written 26 books, no nominated for multiple Nobel Peace prizes and these types of things. He made the statement in the interview with him that from the moment of the big bang or the big breath as Jude would talk about it, that there was an intelligence embedded in that that is continuously evolving the universe and everything within it towards increased coherence. That’s the

Kimberly: 28:37 Purpose.

Roland: 28:40 Now, the reason that I wanted to share that is coherence. I’m getting a long answer to your question, your comment, but coherence exists on multiple levels. So we can be talking about just the coherence within our nervous system over the parts within our body. We can talk about another level, the coherence between the heart and brain there in sync. We can talk about the coherence in our field environment. We can talk about the coherence in our social network,

Kimberly: 29:08 In our

Roland: 29:09 Family work team or our sports team. And it kind of easy to see that in sports teams when they’re coherent together, they’re the guys who usually work.

Kimberly: 29:20 Yes,

Roland: 29:21 You follow what I mean? But then we can also look at global coherence, coherence of communities, of nations. What’s the harmonious relationships in order? Are we getting along? Are we hearing each other? And I think it’s pretty easy to see. We’re in a very incoherent global world right now.

Kimberly: 29:42 Does that

Roland: 29:42 Make sense? So that’s why I wanted to just tie that back to what you were asking me that,

Kimberly: 29:47 So you just introduced a new word, Roland. Would you say coherence is synonymous with harmony? It’s an extension, right?

Roland: 29:54 If in a coherent system, harmony exists, coherent system, harmony is not as much. Now also in a coherent system, you already alluded to this actually earlier, but a fundamental concept in a coherent complex system is that the homeless or the output is greater than the sum of the parts. And energy efficiency is also assumed. Worst part of coherence.

Kimberly: 30:23 Wow. It’s life changing on many levels as you mentioned. And sometimes we want that physiological coherence and we see the graphs around and the summit covers all of this. I say, I want my nervous system, I want to sleep better. I want to have less stress hormones. But then when you get there or along the journey role, and then you think, wow, I’m just feeling so clear and inspired and connected and in awe aligned,

Roland: 30:55 I would say

Kimberly: 30:56 Aligned with all of life and spirit and other people. Some of these things you can’t measure.

Roland: 31:09 It’s true. You can’t cannot put a thought or an emotion that we feel or an intuition under a microscope. We really can’t measure those. It’s really there’s, and then what anybody tells you if they say that we can measure somebody’s inner experience or subjective state, that’s nonsense.

Kimberly: 31:28 The

Roland: 31:28 Way that can be measured, all we can measure are the physiological changes that occur with those emotional experiences or thought processes and these types of things.

Kimberly: 31:41 So when you’re, not we, but when you’re measuring coherence, emotional regulation, and so you said we can’t measure the negative thoughts per se, but then we measure, as you mentioned, how they

Roland: 31:54 Affect us

Kimberly: 31:54 Exactly. From a physiological standpoint. And that’s when we can see, wow, these tools really are evidence backed.

Roland: 32:00 Yeah, indeed.

Kimberly: 32:02 So let’s go back to the summit for a minute. How many days is it, Roland? And if you can click on the different talks that you’re interested in, can you listen to the playback just in practical terms, because people have such different schedule.

Roland: 32:15 It starts, I have to look at my notes. October 30th and runs through November 5th.

Kimberly: 32:20 Oh, wow. That’s quite a few days.

Roland: 32:22 Yeah. Like I said, there was over 40 interviews and speakers, and I’m on the first day I little interview with me. Wonderful. They’re full. And I’m not sure what day of the week it is, October 30th. But yes, there’s a number of speakers each and I think there’s up to 24 hours to hear the recordings of each day. But you can just go to the summit website and see who’s speaking, what day, and tune into the ones you want. And

Kimberly: 32:50 Beautiful. Your book Roland, sorry to get off track here. The Science of the Heart, is that available online?

Roland: 32:57 Yes, it is. You can go to the heartmath.org website and get that. That’s this book on the science and also heart intelligence.

Kimberly: 33:06 Yes. Both of those books I curled up with this summer in my writing cabin and went through line by line and it was really fascinating. But again, back to this conference, the material is practical because sometimes we don’t know what to do with the science role. I’m just speaking as the everyday person. We think, oh, this sounds great. And some of this is conflicting. But what I really appreciate about coherence and the way that you speak about it is that it’s digestible and exciting and fascinating. And then all the way to the holographic universe. And you shared with me a little bit about the global coherence initiative that HeartMath does with I think they’re called magnetometers all around

Roland: 33:51 You got it. You’re getting it.

Kimberly: 33:52 I’m cutting it, I’m getting it, Roland. But it’s really systems within systems circles within circles, and it’s such a powerful, it’s empowering, right? Because in today’s world we think, oh, I can’t do anything about this or the job market or This is disappointing, but this is empowerment defined

Roland: 34:16 And the how to simple steps.

Kimberly: 34:19 Yes. So would you describe yourself back in the day, Roland, as incoherent and now you live and breathe this coherence, but you’re still human. You must get off track sometimes come back,

Roland: 34:32 Of course. But I can honestly say I strive to be more coherent, to be kinder, to be more compassionate, to hear people at a deeper level, these types of things. And I have in my hopefully distant past, I had a reputation of getting things done. I’ve had a number of successful companies and I get stuff done, but I would often leave a wake of incoherent people behind, well, not incoherent people, but incoherence in a way. It affected the people behind me kind of plowing through to get stuff done. So I’m a little more collaborative, a lot more collaborative these days and hearing other people’s points of view before I probably secretly had the attitude, well, I’m smarter than everybody else. And if they would just understand I’m always right, everything would be fine. But none of that was true. Of course.

Kimberly: 35:33 Well, but now Ro, as someone who’s working with you, I see what you’re doing, hundreds of studies. You’re part of creating conferences and installing magnetometers and doing so much. So can you say from personal experience with coherence, with the state of flow, we can be productive, even more productive without that hurry energy that so many of us feel that pressure that’s squeezing.

How to be more productive without the rushed energy

Roland: 35:57 Oh, absolutely. In fact, here at HeartMath and in our training program, certification programs is a whole concept called speed of balance. Because when we have that inner rushed energy that has a correlation in our physiology with it actually measurable that out of sickness I’m talking about. So that’s when we make more mistakes ish. Hearing the important things in a communication or including the important things in a communication, I could go on and on. So rushed energy is one of the worst things for productivity. It

Kimberly: 36:33 Makes us stressed out,

Roland: 36:35 But it doesn’t mean that things actually, Ben, I can honestly say that things get done a lot faster when we can learn how to self-regulate our inner rhythms and be at that speed of balance. That inner coherence, what you said it earlier, it’s a flow state. And I don’t mean flow in the way that some people talk about it as that you’re highly absorbed, right? But being able to flow through, I’ll say the day-to-day challenges of life with centered with being in that centered state, you’re able to flow through the challenges in a more graceful way that doesn’t knock us out of our center.

Kimberly: 37:17 Amazing. It’s so powerful, Ron. I can’t wait for others to experience people that are new to coherence. If you’ve never heard of it before, if you’ve heard about it, you’ve read a little bit about it. I just want to emphasize that it’s not just wearing these H R V trackers in the rings. There’s so much more. And

Roland: 37:37 Yeah, in fact, it just means you said that the H R V devices, which we make measure coherence, not just how much H R V you have.

Kimberly: 37:44 Yes, yes.

Roland: 37:45 They’re training tools.

Kimberly: 37:47 It’s

Roland: 37:47 Not about the devices. They’re to help you learn the self-regulation skills.

Kimberly: 37:52 Yes. Beautiful.

Roland: 37:53 Not about walking around with a device, am I coherent? But it is about walking around, learning that inner feeling of coherence.

Kimberly: 37:59 Yes. Incredible. And so much of your work, Roland has helped, I can say personally me so much and so many hundreds and thousands of people. And this conference is a really great way to dip your toe in to hear, to be live or listen to the playback. So we will link directly in the show notes to registering for the conference, which you can do up until it starts. And if you miss some of the days, go back and play them back or listen to the ones that you’re interested in. Which honestly Roland, I think that’s what we all do with the conferences.

Roland: 38:34 And obviously Kimberly, everybody should tune in and listen to yours.

Kimberly: 38:37 Yes, of course. Do you know what day mine is, Roland?

Roland: 38:41 Let me look here. I have the website up.

Kimberly: 38:43 I had so much fun and we had such a fun conversation, Roland, and we talk about some of the really tangible ways that coherence shows up, which could be kindness instead of where irritation might have been at play, finding a win-win solution, because my workday gets really busy too, versus trying to push forward one person’s way. It’s helped create a lot more harmony in my marriage. My husband and I both have very different perspectives sometimes and we’re both strong personalities. But you know what it feels like, Ron? It’s not me and you, it’s us coherence in a family, like you mentioned, and in a couple is really life-changing.

Roland: 39:35 The family, the community, right?

Kimberly: 39:37 Yes.

Roland: 39:38 Family. You’re on day six, by the way, on November 4th.

Kimberly: 39:41 Oh, great. So we’re closing it up, but that’s the last day, right? Roland?

Roland: 39:48 No fact.

Kimberly: 39:49 Oh, seven days.

Roland: 39:50 I have the writing dates written down. I said October 5th, 30th to November 5th earlier. That’s a mistake I’m seeing. You’re on the sixth and it goes on through the seventh, actually. So it’s really October 30th through November 7th.

Kimberly: 40:04 Oh, amazing. Well, we will link in the show notes to the direct page, the webpage where you can sign up, where you can get all the information. I get invited sometimes to these summits and a lot of times I say, no, Roland. And sometimes I’m like, this sounds okay. But this one I’m very excited about. This one. I will be tuning in every day. And all of you guys listening, I can’t encourage you enough to sign up.

Roland: 40:29 And I wouldn’t have let you say no to this one.

Kimberly: 40:32 I know. I can’t wait to come up and see you and give you a hug and see the rest of the team. Thank you so much as always, for sharing your amazing wisdom, which has changing lives every day. I know it’s changed my life so much. And all the best. Roland, thank you so much.

Roland: 40:52 Thank you. I always enjoy our conversations, Kimberly, so have a great day.

Kimberly: 40:57 You too

I hope that you enjoyed listening or re-listening to our show today on Christmas. Wanted to wish you, again, the most marries of Christmases or however you like to celebrate this time of the year. Remember to please check out our show notes, my sauna.com, where we’ll have information about heart coherence and HeartMath, and their amazing work and our meditations, and specifically the heart aligned meditation, which we’ll be publishing soon. As well as other articles, recipes, podcasts I think you would enjoy. Thank you so much for being in the community, sending you infinite light and love, and see you back here soon. Namaste.