Transcriber: Hélène Vernet Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
This is about the power of our energetic heart,
and the embodiment of our energetic heart,
and of course, the power of rhythmic entrainment
at the very nature of our beating heart.
It's also for anybody who has felt the fragmenting effects of stress.
Right now in America, we can all feel this in some way or another.
There's a kind of epidemic of stress.
Fifty percent of Americans have some health issues driven by stress,
particularly between the age of 18 and 33.
Young people find it difficult to sleep at night
because of these high levels of stress.
We know that in the beginning of the 1900s,
heart disease, which is very much affected by stress -
hardly anyone died of heart disease.
And we know now that it is the number one cause of death
for men and women in America.
We all counsel each other to speak from our heart,
to listen to your heart.
And if you are like me, there's something inside us that doesn't quite trust this.
This is some kind of folk wisdom, even though we feel it deep inside.
I think that's partly
because our education about our heart is outdated.
And mostly, we grew up hearing that our heart is an incredible pump.
It pumps some 60 gallons of blood
through over 60 thousand miles of veins and arteries through our body.
But we know our heart is more than a pump.
And when we look at all of the world's spiritual traditions,
we find this reflection of the heart fire, a light of consciousness,
an intelligence, a radiance in the heart.
And within the yoga tradition, there first we saw the flaming heart of Jesus,
this image of love,
the fire altar of the heart in Judaism,
the burning flame of the Beloved in Sufism.
Within yoga, the heart chakra system has a beautiful understanding
that the beating of our heart comes from the ''samgatha'',
the fire in friction, the desire of the divine masculine-feminine
within our own heart.
As long as we explored the heart in Western medical tradition,
from ancient Egypt, ancient Greece through Renaissance times,
the intelligence of the heart was still part of the understanding.
And in the 17th century was the beginning of what we've partly now been educated -
that the heart is an extraordinary machine,
but it became devoid of intelligence,
became devoid of being connected to our emotions.
I feel that everyone of us now is the site of a kind of a cultural turning point,
where the new science of the heart,
which is now able to measure the electromagnetic field of the heart,
is now causing these outdated views, of the heart as a machine, to change.
So I want to share with you briefly, in the TED fashion,
some of the extraordinary understandings of our heart.
We all know that we are born in desire,
in sacred union,
and when we're in the womb,
when the pacemaker cells begin our heartbeat before the brain is formed,
that's when this power, this incredible power of entrainment
creates the electrical charge
which then creates the electromagnetic field of the heart.
I believe there's some movement that goes with that.
And the thing about the electromagnetic field of the heart
is that it actually, from that electrical charge,
from the specialized cardiac cells in our heart,
it actually radiates beyond our body, it bathes our entire body
and has an extraordinary communication between our heart and our brain.
And this, I think, is really important for us to understand,
that when our brain waves and our heart rhythm -
and some of you have seen this in the other presenters -
when our brain waves and our heart rhythms come into sync,
we're in our highest state of flow;
we're in our optimal functioning.
All the 1,400 physiological functions that get disrupted by stress,
when our brain waves and our heart rhythms come in sync,
we come into our optimal flow.
And for me, when I see the dissonant rhythms,
that's, for me, what stress does feel like.
It's this fragmenting rhythm.
And then, particularly through emotional states
that have already been mentioned today,
our body comes into a kind of state of coherence
almost instantaneously.
So, for me, this rhythmic understanding of the power of our energetic heart
is something that we can all tap into.
And what's so extraordinary is that the electromagnetic field
extends beyond our body, and that, actually,
when you're even sitting next to someone or in your relationships,
we can feel whether we are in sync or we're out of sync.
This attention is really the underlying basis of meditation,
in all its forms.
It's to bring us back into the natural desire our body has,
the biological, you could say, intrinsic desire of our heart and brain -
of course, heart, brain, belly, all of our cells -
of coming into this rhythmic state.
So, what is extraordinary is that music, of course,
has a tremendous capacity to bring us into this heart coherence,
that when we're listening to music, our heart rhythm also begins to syncopate.
This is what I'd love for us to go into now
because we can access this very simply
through some very key ways to enter into this connection
to what is also referred to as the heart brain.
So, I'd love for you to stand for our last meditation.
You can give yourself a little bit of space so you don’t smack someone.
And the very simple practice of bringing your hands to your heart -
we know it, it's already part of our culture -
just bringing your attention to your heart center,
begins to initiate the syncopating process together.
So, just take a moment and drop in.
You can open your inner gaze. You have so much external stimulation.
Opening the inner gaze, closing your eyes
begins to facilitate
the heart, brain-heart rhythm connection.
Then our breath is the incredible pulse
that brings these two rhythms that we're focusing on into sync.
And so, let's feel the wave of our breath as it enters us.
Deep inhale ...
And a long exhale ...
And just notice if you begin to feel some sensation in your heart,
if the fragmentation that we often unconsciously or consciously ignore
is not being as important as whatever we are doing externally,
then if we can feel this intrinsic desire towards this coherence
and how simple it is how we place our attention, how we breathe.
A third method is to actually move, even move like the pulse of life itself.
And that's as simple as - if you can move with me -
as we inhale, opening your arms,
just as you inhale, opening your arms -
it's so simple -
and as you exhale, slowly bring your hands back towards your heart.
This also begins to facilitate this state of flow,
the triad between our breath rhythm, our heart rhythm, our brain wave rhythms.
This is just even our third breath.
Just notice that even in three breaths,
you can begin to feel the state of optimal flow.
And now, if we add one more dimension
which is to generate openness,
good will, generosity of spirit;
we all feel this when we move through the world
whether someone - it's in our language - whether we feel someone is openhearted.
And as we do this, we open ourselves to this incredible,
we move through this incredible ...
like a charging station all around you.
And then here is the other thing,
which is perhaps a little more radical -
depends on which culture you come from.
Whoever is to the right or the left of you, give them a hug!
Give them a hug.
Just give them a hug and just notice what you feel.
(Laughter)
Yes.
Sometimes a hug feels radical
when you're in a cool, hip, intellectual environment.
But if we knew - yes, you can keep hugging.
If we knew how good love is for us,
if we knew how good love is for us
and how debilitating stress can be for every level of our systems,
then we would perhaps follow our heart
and follow this intrinsic biological desire.
For me, I'm dedicated to providing these resources as far as I can,
to as many people as possible.
Because this is - you know we've lost a great, great being, Nelson Mandela -
as he describes it:
''No one is born hating another person
because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.
People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate,
they can be taught to love.''
We're giving more space to love, because this is our intrinsic nature,
It's more easy to follow what the heart does naturally.
So, let's bring our hands back to our heart.
This is ''Tending the Heart Fire,'' our intrinsic desire,
of our own heartbeat, our own biological intrinsic nature.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)