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Activating Your Heart’s Intelligence

Monday, January 31, 2011

Week One: Increasing Resilience

Stephen: Good evening everyone. Welcome to Activating Your Heart’s Intelligence.

I’m really looking forward to this following seven weeks. This is Stephen Dinan the
CEO of the Shift Network. It’s really an honor and a pleasure to be introducing our
faculty for this course which is going to focus on the science and practice of health,
resilience, high-performance and living from love. You probably read a bit about
them. First I’ll just do a quick intro to some of the team members you are going to
be hearing more from over the course of the coming seven weeks. I want everyone
to just have a moment to greet Alison Weeks who is the new Director of Shift
University Programs. She is going to be helping to facilitate this course and host it
and insure that you have the optimum learning experience. So, Allison, you can say
hi.

Allison: Hello. Good evening everybody. Welcome. I’m very happy to be here and
look forward to knowing you.

Stephen: I also want to introduce Ben Hart who is going to be the course manager.
You’ll see him a lot on the website and probably be getting e-mails from him. You
will probably interface with him through customer support. Ben is a great guy. I’m
sure you will enjoy getting to meet him as well. Say hi, Ben, as well.

Ben: Welcome everybody. I look forward to getting to know you all.

Stephen: Great and so each week we are going to have about an hour and a half
with our main faculty who are Deborah Rozman, Howard Martin, and Sheva Carr.
You probably read their bios already but they are basically the top teaching staff of
HeartMath. Deborah Rozman has 30 years of experience as a business executive
here, an entrepreneur and she’s been the Executive Director of the nonprofit
Institute of HeartMath and now is the Founding Director and President and Co-CEO
of Quantum Intech. Howard also has 30 years of experience. He is the Executive
Vice President for Strategic Development at HeartMath and also works very closely
with Doc Childre from the beginning. Sheva Carr is a licensed doctor of Oriental
Medicine and the founding CEO of Fyera! and HeartMath’s Heart Mastery Program.
That was a quick introduction of all of you. Welcome and it’s so great to have you
offering this course.

Deborah: Thank you for having us. It’s great to be here, Stephen.

Sheva: We really appreciate it. We appreciate so much what the Shift Network is
doing. I’m very glad to be part of this.
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Howard: I would also like to say that. This is Howard and one of the things you
guys mentioned before the introductions is about getting to know you and I hadn’t
really realized that until right now the fact that we will be together for seven weeks.
And through this process of breakout sessions and questions and answers and
things like that, I know we will get to know each other a little better. That’s the fun
part of this project and this program that I hadn’t really thought about until right
now. That’s real cool.

Stephen: A quick note about that is the website for the course, who you have all
been invited to, I see about 95 people have already signed up and we have close to
250 in the course now. I really encourage people to get on that site to put a picture
of yourself up and introduce yourself, share what you are excited about, bios,
information from your life because the website can really become a great place to
practice what you are learning, make valuable connections from around the world
and really make this a deeply interactive journey that we are on. I encourage you to
do that. We are also going to have time after each session in groups. For people
who aren’t familiar with MaestroConference, the technology that allows us to do
partner work, breakout groups, polls; we basically create smaller rooms in which
you can engage two or three or sometimes more other people. We’ll give you a little
bit of information about how to do that. You don’t really have to do anything just
don’t be surprised if we tell you that you are going to be in a small room with people
and then you are talking to some others. We will usually give another option for the
people on the webcast. With all that orientation I think we are good to begin.
Howard or Deborah, you want to just lead us off with where you want to take us?

Howard: I sure will and first of all, thanks everyone for coming tonight. It’s great to
have you and I know you probably come from all over the country and maybe other
parts of the world and it will be fun to get to know you and find out more about
where you are from and things like that. But as I mentioned, when I was on the
introductory teleseminar a couple weeks ago with Deborah and Stephen and Sheva,
we are excited about this course. There are a couple reasons why we are.
First of all, this is an important time in the history of our world. We are at a
choice point. 2011 thru 2012, this is a time period of a window of great opportunity
where we need to come up with a new understanding about ourselves, about each
other and about the world in order to have an opportunity to move through some of
the challenges that we face as a global society and as a planet itself. With that said
HeartMath, which is what you are going to learn about in this course, was designed
over the last 20 years and implemented across a wide variety of sectors and really in
the background of all of this our founder, Doc Childre, always had in mind being
ready, being prepared to offer whatever we could during these changing times
especially during a period like right now. So in a sense, HeartMath was really
designed for these times. What it really is, the system you are going to learn about is
a system consisting of methods and techniques and even technology all
underpinned with science; scientific research that we’ve done over these last 20
years. All designed really to help empower people through these changing times.
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To give us all the tools and techniques, the insights and the understandings that we
need to ride these waves of change in a state of more poise and more grace.
And so, what we really want to accomplish in our program with you during
these next seven weeks is that we can give you all that we can, all that we possibly
can of what we’ve learned over these years about heart and about the intelligence of
the heart. It’s really been our life’s work and it’s something that we really value the
opportunity to share with others. And my hope is that you come out with a deeper
understanding of this intelligence that you have within yourself in ways in which
you can apply it to make life easier for you, to reduce the stress, to improve your
health and ultimately to find a new level of fulfillment that’s waiting there, really for
all of us. That’s something I’m sure that Deborah and Sheva also share in is the
desire to really give all that we can to you so that you achieve that and that you find
these experiences for yourself.
It is going to be all about heart. To me heart is many, many things. It starts
with the physical heart which is as we all know an amazing organ, the most amazing
pump in the entire world that pumps blood through the veins and arteries from the
time we are born until the time we die. We also know through modern science some
of which we’re going to share in next week’s program, that the heart does certainly a
lot more than pump blood. It sends commands to the brain and to the rest of the
body. It is essential to everything we have physiologically; all the organs in the body
synchronize to the rhythms of the heart. The heart sends information to the brain
through a nervous system that influences brain function and brain function is
literally critically dependent upon these signals and a lot more which we will share
in the future. Heart in an energetic level is also the source of the emotions that we
revere the most, the ones that really provide fulfillment for us like true care and love
and compassion and appreciation; those kind of emotions.
And then for me, what I have learned is that my heart is really my own best
friend. It’s really my most reliable guide that I have for making decisions that I need
to make either big or small. And it’s that place inside me, and I think the place inside
all of us, where we find the power to do the things that we usually can’t. Where we
find that ability to move beyond our mediocrity to something grander, when we
have the ability to shift out of emotional states when we find ourselves upset or in
discord and make a shift into something where we know that we are renewing
ourselves, where our behavior and our perceptions change and we are really being
the best that we can be because to me, heart is where the hero within us is born
from. It’s that place inside that births that in us. It takes us to a new place in our
existence where we manifest our highest values and visions. And all that is heart
and more and that is what we want to share about during the next seven weeks.
But to begin this I want to turn the program over to Sheva. Sheva is going to
take us through an interesting exercise to help us all get a better understanding of
heart and what we are going to accomplish in this course.

Sheva: Thank you, Howard. It’s such a pleasure and a privilege to be here with all
of you. We’ve had our introduction but really what tonight’s course and the next
seven weeks are about is you, all of you who are here on the call tonight. And just for
fun, I want to conduct a little poll here and ask each of you to take a moment and
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point to yourself. Just notice where you are pointing. If you are pointing to your
heart, I want you to press “1” on your key pad now. If you are pointing somewhere
else, let’s say if you are pointing to your head, press “2” on your key pad now. If you
pointed to your heart when I said point to yourself, press “1” on your key pad. I’m
scrolling through here, Debbie and Howard on our online dashboard and I am not
seeing any 2’s in the list.

Howard: There is one 2.

Sheva: One 2. You know, I have the privilege of traveling all over the world and
teaching HeartMath or introducing HeartMath to people in all walks of life, from
street children who have no shoes to Olympic athletes to high level political leaders.
Everywhere I go and everyone I meet, when I ask people to point to themselves,
they point to the heart unless I am in Japan and then people point to their nose,
which, in Chinese medicine, is a reflect for the heart.
So, something of the essences of who we are alive at the heart of our being
and we know that intuitively whether we think about it in that way or not. So, the
next seven weeks is really for each of you at the heart of who you are. And what I
would like each of you to do and in the future for each call we want to make sure
that you have a pen and paper with you because this is for you. There will be a lot of
exercises for you to do to come to know yourself at the heart of who you are more
closely. I want to invite you to get a pen and a paper now and just write down the
first things you think of when you think of heart. What does heart mean to you? As
Howard mentioned, heart means a lot of things to him. He has over 30 years of
working intimately with many dimensions of heart. Seven weeks from now the
word heart may mean something very different to you than it does tonight. It may
mean the same thing but this is going to be part of our fun and adventure together.
We are going to have you craft intentions for the course. And you will be able to
track over the next seven weeks how those move in your life with the support of this
whole community. Take a moment right now with your pen and paper and just
write down the first things that come to you when you hear or think of the word
heart.
Heart has been in our language and our religions and our medicines
throughout history. We have so many phrases; put your heart into it. We are
entering the month of February where all you have to do is go over to a drug store
and there are heart shaped boxes full of chocolates everywhere. So, heart and
emotion and love are all intertwined in our poetry and our language but, now also
thanks to HeartMath and our science and in our understanding of who we are and
heart’s desires. Home is where the heart is. These are all ways that we use the word
heart in our language. Two hearts that beat as one which now we know is a
scientific fact. And now on this call tonight, it looks like we are actually 112 hearts
about to beat as one with a common purpose to enter this adventure together of
exploring and discovering deeper heart.
But, I want to begin with your heart’s desires because as I said, this course is
for you. So, on this piece of paper where you’ve been writing your associations to
the word heart, I want you to pause and identify if seven weeks from now this
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course could give you anything you wanted at its completion, what would that be?
What got you here? What do you hope to receive for yourself and for our planet and
for our human family? What are your intentions for being here? What do you want
manifest or achieve in your own life but also in our world? And give yourself a
moment now to anchor those intentions by writing them down. You could have
anything at all that you wanted out of your investment and time and energy and
money and being here with us on these calls, what is it that you are here for? Write
that down now.
One of the key distinctions of heart that’s very important through the shift
that’s happening now is being able to identify the difference between a true heart’s
desire and something that I might call mind candy, that is something that you think
you want but you might climb that ladder only to find out it was up against the
wrong building when you get to the top or you might strive for something that isn’t
a part of what we’re going to talk about in later classes in this course; your heart’s
blueprint, your unique heart’s journey. And so, we want to give you an exercise here
at the beginning of the call to get to your true heart’s desires underneath your
intentions. Those are important for the next seven weeks of our journey together
and they are also very important for tonight’s topic which Deborah Rozman is going
to share more with us about in a few minutes on resilience. So, what we are going to
do is I want you to take your intentions to heart. We are going to give you an
exercise now to do in pairs on the phone. If you are calling in on the webcast then
you can do this in your notebook.
You’re going to ask each other a repeating question. And the question is; if I
got what I wanted at the end of this course what would that give me? Or if you are
in a partnership you are going to ask your partner; if you got what you wanted at the
end of this course, what would that give you? Let them respond or write it down in
their notebook and then ask them again. If you got that; what would that give you?
If you are with your notebook you can just ask yourself this question. If I got what I
wanted, whatever it is, what would I have? What would that really give me?
Is the exercise clear? Stephen, maybe we could just open up the lines if there
is any question about the exercise and then if you could break people into pairs so
they can?

Stephen: Yes, it’s actually a little better to have them raise since we have quite a
few people on the live line. So, if you have a question touch “1” right now on your
key pad and other than that we will go into groups of two in a moment. So, you are
all now in groups of two and we will un-mute you in a second and you can go ahead
and engage the exercise. Sheva, do you want to?

Sheva: Yes, we will give them each two minutes with the repeating question and
then so in two minutes if we could give them a signal to switch. And again the
repeating question is; if your intention were fulfilled, if you got what you wanted,
what would that give you?

Stephen: We’ll ring a bell every two minutes so, you are now in groups of two. You
will have two minutes each to explore this question in a repeating way.
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[Bell ringing]

Stephen: Okay, Sheva.

Sheva: Thank you so much, Stephen. So, the first thing that I want to invite
everyone to do is, just pause and notice how you are feeling right now. Do you have
more energy than when the call started or less? Notice what happens inside your
own experience when you touch your heart’s desires? We got to eavesdrop on some
of the conversations here and there and I found it very moving what people were
sharing. And some of the deeper heart’s desires, we call this the trap door game.
What do you really want? If you got what you think you wanted what would it give
you? Some of those deeper heart’s desires were clarity, fulfillment, delight, great
joy, forgiveness, and understanding. Qualities that at HeartMath we know have
something to do with the heart. And I’m just curious, if you notice that if all of those
things that I listed that we overheard were people’s deeper heart’s desires had
something to do with an internal state of being, a feeling or a quality of being rather
than something outside of ourselves to get. And so, if you or your partner’s deeper
heart’s desires, the things you wanted by being here, that you would get if you got
what you thought you wanted. I want you to press “1” on your key pad now if those
were emotions or states of being for you or your partner?
Let’s just see how many people, looking like about 95 or maybe 99 percent of
you, your true heart’s desire, what you really wanted was an inner state of being, a
sense of center inside your own clarity, your joy, your fulfillment. Those feelings we
call heart feelings, coming back to the heart of who we are. We can source and
generate from inside ourselves and that’s what the HeartMath skills you are going to
learn over the next seven weeks and collaborate and creating for yourself and the
world together as a group will produce. In order to do that, to attain that, we have to
have something called resilience, resilience that brings us back to the heart of who
we are. In a moment Deborah Rozman is going to talk about resilience and how it
relates to your heart’s desires. What I want to invite each of you to do is take this
piece of paper with what heart means to you with your intentions for the course and
your heart’s desires written on it and I want you to fold it up. And put: Not to be
opened until seven weeks from now. Not to be opened until seven weeks from now. I
want you to put that in a place where you will find it at the end of our course on
March 8th.

Stephen: March 14th.

Sheva: Oh, thank you Stephen. March 14th. So you can write March 14th on it. You
can keep it under your pillow. You can keep by your computer. I don’t know but
wherever it will remind you of the intention you’ve set over the next seven weeks
facilitated by over 240 people and their heart’s to manifest your heart’s desires.
Debbie I want to pass it off to you to talk about the role resilience plays as we enter
the shift.
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Deborah: Well thank you Sheva. I think doing that exercise together and it helps us
get more in touch with what we really, really want. That’s really important in the
shift. It’s also important to this whole course in terms of what is going to help us
find the most intelligence, direction and state of flow during this shift. Because I
don’t know about you all but, with the changing energetic and speed up of what’s
going on around us and in the world and in the people around us who spin out
through disappointment reactions and stress, this is a challenging time for a lot of
people. It’s challenging to hold your own center in these times. You may meditate at
the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. You may do all sorts of personal
development work but, it’s very easy for the acceleration of these times to get any of
us caught off guard and actually challenge our deepest heart and our best use of the
practices we’ve done to be able to move in a flow during these times. I want you to
ask yourself a question before we talk about resilience and why it is so key to what
we are going to be learning in this course and why we have it as a first topic. How
often, be real honest now, do you feel in charge of yourself during a day in a flow?
Meaning mentally, emotionally, physically you feel you can move in a flow when
stuff comes up. It may not be like water off a duck’s back but, you can bounce back
quick and flex and flow without a lot of drain? How many people, we can ask for a
show of hands here, would say they feel in charge 50% of the time or more? Raise
your hand.

Sheva: Press “1” on your key pad if that’s the case.

Deborah: There we go. Thank you, Sheva.

Sheva: Yeah, you bet.

Deborah: Okay?

Sheva: Debbie we are seeing about 43%.

Stephen: About half.

Deborah: Okay. Alright and then how many people feel, press “2” on your key pad,
if you feel like you are just behind it a lot. Meaning you have to struggle more than
you would like to be able to get back to flow and stay in flow and not spin out, press
“2”.

Sheva: People are pressing their key pads now, looking like about 30%.

Stephen: About a third.

Deborah: Okay. Well, and some of you may not really know yet, but what is
important about this is that we can all improve. We can all build our resilience so
that we can get back to flow when we’re out and we can move into flow more
readily. And resilience, a lot of people have used images of resilience being like
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bamboo. It can move and it’s a very resilient tree because it flexes with the wind.
But resilience, what’s important to understand about resilience is it’s not just for
bouncing back. Building resilience, which we’re going to give you two tools today to
do that, actually helps you to maintain and increase your energy levels so that things
don’t get to you as much so you don’t have to bounce back as much or recoup and
recover. The most resilience physical organ in the body is the heart. Imagine what
we do to our poor hearts, all through our lives. It’s also, I would call, the most
resilient emotional organ. Our heart starts beating in the womb and it doesn’t stop
until we are no longer alive, as we say. It’s constantly beating and it constantly has
to deal with the physical and emotional and mental pressures of life. What we put
into our body, what we do with our bodies, what we do with our emotions. What
our emotional diet is and heart attitudes.
The heart is such a sensitive organ. It is responding to all of that. So, building
resilience really does involve the heart. One of the primary reasons we want to
engage our heart in building resilience right now is a prep for the next few years of
our lives and for activating our heart’s intelligence. Is that during these turbulent
shifting times, the heart and building resilience creates an energetic cushion.
Doesn’t that sound good? At least the words energetic cushion feels good to me.
That helps us to prevent and reduce the stress effects of overload, time crunch, too
much to do, unexpected change; the whole list of things that can drain our energy
and can cause us to get out of flow. And this is a real important baseline tool to learn
to take us through the shift.
You could think of your resilience level like the amount of gas you have in
your car. The more you have the farther you can drive. It’s something you can
replenish and it’s also like a reservoir. Resilience can be a type of energy that you
can draw upon in challenging times. So if you can fill your gas tank and you run with
a fairly full tank of gas and then suddenly plans change or you have to drive farther
than you had planned, you’re still fine because your reservoir is full. But when we
are low on resilience we tend to dramatize problems. We tend to feel victimized.
We become overwhelmed. Our perception changes as our energy drains.
Have you ever notices how you see life differently, you might even see the
glass half full when your energy reservoir is full and when you feel resilient. But,
when we’re drained and cranky everything looks like the glass is half empty or even
more empty. So, a lot of it has to do with perception, energy, resilience and the
power and the intelligence of the heart. It’s a lot easier when we have drained
energy to then turn to unhealthy reactions, behaviors and coping mechanisms.
What we want to do is learn how to build our reservoir of resilience to give us
adaptability and flexibility to offset stress overload so we can maintain our balance
through our day to day challenges and interactions and stay in flow because in flow,
we have more access to our heart’s intuition. To that internal heart guidance to that
compass or GPS that our heart can guide our life and really help us fulfill our deeper
heart’s desires. One reason we’re starting with resilience is so that we can take a
new look at it. What it really means and learn some tools to really build up or
resilience reservoir. Howard, Sheva, you want to add to that?

Howard: Sheva, do you want to add to that?

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Sheva: I so appreciate the conversation you initiated on resilience here, Debbie.

Resilience took me awhile to understand as a word until one day I was doing
something very mundane, and I think this is so fun how the heart works, because so
often I’ll ask my heart for guidance about something and I don’t necessarily get it
right away but it shows up in some random way. Like on this day I was doing my
dishes and putting away a loaf of bread. I didn’t have whatever those little plastic
clips are for the bread so I was sealing the bag with a rubber band. I pulled the
rubber band our of the thing and awhile back I’d been like gosh, you know, I don’t
know if I’m getting this new HeartMath concept of resilience. So I was putting the
rubber band on the bag and I realized it was an old rubber band. You know the kind
once it gets stretched out where it doesn’t have its resilience anymore. So it doesn’t
hold things. It ended up breaking and I went, oh, that’s what resilience is. It’s a new
rubber band.
Resilience is the ability for us to come back to our integrity. To come back to
our center where our heart’s desires are actually fulfilled in the moment because we
are in that state of heart feeling and flow that brings us clarity, fulfillment, delight,
great joy, forgiveness with ease spontaneously in the moment. It’s not something
we’re going after in the future. What I think is so valuable and here we are on the
Shift Network, right? The planet is going through a shift right now. I know in my
own experience, that’s changing my whole sense of self and it’s changing what I
want from moment to moment. It’s also changing how my desires come to fruition
from moment to moment. That requires a lot of resilience in me to bend and flex.
Imagine if the rubber band thought it was the plastic bag it was wrapped around.
Then when it gets taken off to go do its next job, which is what’s happening to many
of us. We’re moving from one activity to another and if we are identified with a
relationship as our source of fulfillment or a job then we won’t have that snap back
that a new rubber band has.
And so resilience in my own experience as you guys have taught me at
HeartMath has been learning more and more about who I really am and who I’m
not, learning who I am at the heart of my being and that I’m the source of my
fulfillment rather than relying on something outside. That keeps me flexible as well
as strong like a new rubber band.

Howard: Wow that was great, Sheva. I appreciate that. I’d like to refer back to
something Debbie said as well. Resilience is a reservoir of energy that we build. It’s
a reservoir of energy that helps to deflect stress and also it keeps us more in our
flow states. It is both the quality of being able to bounce back when things take us
out when we need to come back to balance and be able to get back there more
quickly like the wonderful rubber band analogy that Sheva laid out. It’s also this
buffer, this energetic buffer that’s going to make life easier for us. We all have these
experiences. For me today, a business meeting today things were going on in the
business meeting where I could feel my emotions going this way and that way and
rising up a little bit about certain things that were said etc. But, I just had come off
the week-end. I had time to be at home. I had time to do my heart Lock-Ins and to
work on myself spiritually. I had more resilience in the tank. So, those things did
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not bother me so much or take me out as much.

Later in the week after the week has been built up and a lot of things have
been going on then, hey, who knows, maybe those reactions would have been
stronger. What I’ve learned is that I’m responsible for building my own energy
reserves, my own resilience energy reserves. And that’s done through really looking
at how am I spending my precious mental and emotional and physical energy.
There are a lot of ways we can discern that and a lot of ways that we can look for
making changes and how we spend those energies. But what I’ve found is that doing
from sort of a logical linear based process does not work as well as doing it from the
intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the heart, one of the aspects of it, it is
high speed, it is intuitive and it is highly discriminating. It allows us to see into
things with a new view. That’s especially true of seeing into ourselves. For me
seeing into myself to see where am I really on my game internally and where am I
not. Where am I playing games with myself? Where am I fooling myself? Where am
I compromising on certain things? Where do I need to step it up?
All of theses things are really important to me in terms of how I manage my
inner energy reserves and how I feed that energetic buffer called resilience. That is
the link that I want to make with all of you right now between heart and resilience.
This course is about activating the intelligence of your heart. What we’ve done in
our course design is we’ve started with the major benefit of activating this
intelligence. We will work back into some other things and add a lot more benefits
as we go. We felt that resilience was such an important aspect of and concept
necessary for us to be able to move through the shift in the way in which we want to
move through it to contribute more to society, to maintain our balance, our poise
and our health and our wellbeing that resilience was important. We all need to learn
how to increase this energy accumulator, to add more energy to it and that comes
from the heart. It comes from making heart choices. Discriminate choices from the
heart. We have all done this in many ways in our lives, often sort of randomly.
We are going to share techniques with you along the way that gives you
quicker access to the heart. I’m going to share the first one with you now and then
after I’m through with that we’ll take some questions and comments. This is a very
simple technique but very useful. It’s a utility technique. What I mean by that is that
you can use it any time, anywhere to get back in touch with your heart. To reboot
your system from that place of self security inside and then go back into whatever
you are doing. When you use it throughout the day, when you find yourself off a
little here or there it accumulates energy that goes into that energy reserve that
adds to your resilience. Then you can achieve the benefit of resilience. This is an on
the go tool. It’s easy to do. It’s very useful. It’s called the Quick Coherence
technique. I want to share that technique with you now.
The first thing I’d like you to do is obviously be in a comfortable position and
then if you’d like it would be helpful when you’re learning a technique is to close
your eyes. Now I’d like you to focus your attention in the area of the heart, just the
area in the center of your chest. Feel your energy going down in terms of where you
are focusing to the center of your chest. This is called heart focus.

(Pause)
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Now you are focused in the area of the heart and now I want you to breathe actually
normally but just a little bit deeper than you normally would. As you breathe, I want
you to pretend as if the breath is flowing in and out right through the center of your
chest, right through the area of the heart. This is called heart focused breathing.
Let’s do that for a few breathes together now.

(Pause and breathing)

Now I want you to maintain your heart focus and continue with your heart focused
breathing while doing this I want you to feel a positive emotion. It can be a feeling
of appreciation you have for the good things in your life. Perhaps it’s a feeling of
love and care you have for someone or something in your life. It can be recalling a
feeling like when you know you accomplished something and you know you felt
good about it. What did that feel like to you when you had that feeling? Maybe it’s
just a good old feeling of wellbeing. The end of a good day when you’ve worked in
your yard all day and you’re sitting on the porch and you are admiring how the
grass looks and the flowers look and everything feels alright. That’s a positive
emotion. Just find a nice positive emotion that feels good to you. Focus in the area of
your heart and breathe in and out right through the center of your chest and feel
that emotion as best you can without making it a forced thing. A very gentle easy
does it process.

(Pause)

Okay, now open your eyes if you would. Very simple technique and we’ll explain the
physiology, what occurs in the body when you do a technique like that in our next
session just next week. Basically you are really sending different information from
heart to brain to the rest of the body. You are creating an inner alignment that is
synchronizing all of your body’s systems. That is accompanied by the sustained
positive emotion. You have to do it yourself. This is really cool because it’s an
empowering type of an act that you have to do. You have to make an effort of some
kind to feel that positive emotion. When you do some very interesting shifts can
occur. I want you to press “1” on your key board now if you feel calmer than you did
before you did the technique? Just a sense of calm! How many of you feel a greater
sense of calm after having done the technique?

Sheva: About 80%, Howard.

Howard: Okay, so about 80% did. How many of you found it difficult to feel a
positive emotion? You can press “2” on your key board to answer that question.

Stephen: More like 10%.

Howard: Well that’s good. That’s normal. Sometimes it’s a little difficult. One of
the things that I’ve found in working with people in my travels around the world as
 12

well is that for a lot of people it’s just harder now to feel a positive emotion. It’s
okay. The first positive emotion that you can feel if you didn’t feel one in the
exercise is to have compassion for yourself. Sometimes it isn’t easy. There are a lot
of factors involved in that. Even just the day in which you’ve experienced during the
course of your day can make it a little difficult for people. Everybody has their days.
First of all know that it’s okay if you didn’t and the feeling that you can have for
yourself right now is just self compassion. That’s a wonderful thing.
How many of you can see that there is an easy application during the course
of your day for a technique like this, when you can find that one minute or two
minutes just to do that? Press “3” on your key board if you think you can use this
technique in your daily activities?

Stephen: It’s in the 70s.

Howard: Okay, good. Hopefully before the course is over we’ll have techniques that
everybody can use and we’ll have 100% of people that think that they can find a
great application for this. For me, I use it all the time just kind of naturally during
the course of my day. I start out in the morning with the greatest intentions and I do
a heart Lock-In in the morning which Deborah is going to share in this course
tonight. I do that every morning before I start my day and then the day starts.
Of course you know a day is an adventure in many ways. It can be adventurous in
ways that please me and adventurous in ways that are more challenging. What I
find very important and useful is that I take those moments. It doesn’t mean I have
to stop and go somewhere and close my eyes. I can do it while I’m walking from one
office to the other. I can actually do it with my eyes open while I’m driving in my
car. It’s just that consistent keeping in touch with my heart that I find very useful. I
do it through that simple process. Just heart focus, heart focused breathing and then
the activation of a heart feeling.
I think one of the keys to this is to make that heart feeling activation and easy
does it process. If we try to force it we are really not getting to the heart feeling.
Sometimes it takes a little effort to shift out of the rambling mind or whatever is
going on for us at any given time to find that feeling. It can be an easy process and an
easy does it process. It becomes a natural process as well. We’ve been doing a lot of
talking, myself, Sheva and Deborah. What I would like to do now for the next five
minutes is just to allow everyone that wants to, to ask questions of make comments.
You can direct those questions or comments to any of the three of us. I’m sure the
Maestro team here and Stephen and his crew will handle this but if you would like to
ask a question raise your hand and you guys I’m sure will randomly select questions.
Correct?

Stephen: Yes. Touch “1” to raise your hand and we’ll take a few from the audience
here. Let’s see, Linda. Why don’t we go with Linda Hayes first. You’re live.

Linda: Oh, thank you. I was wondering what effect physical pain has on this
process? The other question if people have time is I wondered in terms of
meditation and how the instructors, how that fit into their lives. Thanks you.
 13

Howard: I think, Sheva, you might want to answer the question with your
alternative health background on pain and then Debbie I think you would be good to
answer the question on meditation being that you have written books on
meditation.

Sheva: Sure, I’d be happy to. Thank you for your question, Linda. So, I’m going to
invert your question and say; what effect does the process have on pain? And for
anyone who is interested, we actually have an article on the encephalin and
endorphins that amplify the pain response and how bringing yourself into a
coherent state, which means what we’ve all been experiencing in ratios of degree on
the call tonight as we contact our heart’s desires. As we’ve contacted what Howard
is calling heart feeling is a state of inner coherence. In fact all the things that we
heard you talking about earlier, clarity, fulfillment, delight, joy, forgiveness,
understanding and others. Those feelings, even resilience, the ability to come back
to our center and experience those feelings create an inner state called coherence
that is driven by the heart itself as the heart, which we’ll talk more about in weeks to
come, goes into a coherent pattern in the beat to beat changes or heart rate
variability of its rhythm. That coherent pattern changes over 1400 things in your
body from the way your brain and heart communicate, which activates your heart’s
intelligence, the topic of this course, how your autonomic nervous system works and
your hormones. How your nervous system and your hormones are very linked to
your pain experience. There is data that shows that getting in a coherent state
actually reduces a person’s subjective experience of pain as well as some of the
biomarkers of pain.
Rather than looking at it as pain affecting your ability to get coherent you can
look at it as your proactive and genuine intentions to work toward the coherent
state or activate a heart feeling or even just breathe as Howard mentioned. The self
compassion for yourself and your pain and the heart actually reduces the
biomarkers and the subjective experience of your pain. I do have a document I can
send to you, Linda, and anyone else who is interested, that outlines that in greater
detail. Did that answer the pain portion of your question, Linda?

Linda: Yes. Thank you very much.

Deborah: On the meditation portion, what I found: I’m a forty year meditator
myself and I’ve written books on meditation for children and for adults from the
1970s on and have been really deeply committed to meditation for those many
years. When I first looks at the research that was discovered at the Institute of
HeartMath on the critical link between the emotions and the rhythms of the heart
which Sheva was describing, which we will talk about more in future sessions of
how our emotional states like joy, love, genuine care, appreciation, gratitude change
the heart rhythm pattern into this smooth coherent state, thus the term Quick
Coherence. Learning that self generating those smooth coherent heart rhythm
patterns through positive emotional shifts and how stress, frustration, anger and
anxiety etc. create incoherent rhythms. It was a light bulb that went off for me as far
 14

as the effectiveness of my meditations and the people I was teaching meditation to.
So often we think of meditation as set aside ten minutes, twenty minutes of time to
just observe and get detached from and relax and visualize thoughts and feelings.
That time to go within. So often if we are being hijacked by emotional disturbances
a lot of that time is trying to just quell those feelings, just trying to calm down, just
trying to shut the mind off that’s processing all that.
Especially now days those kinds of lumps and bumps as we call them in our
lives can happen very rapidly. So, Quick Coherence is a tool that harnesses the
power of your heart rhythms to move into that smooth ordered state quickly to set
up your meditations so that you get more effectiveness out of them. I always use
Quick Coherence in the morning at the start of my meditations because it gives me
that deeper intuitive access that connects with my spirit. It activates my heart
intelligence. It’s like a quick setup to connect deep into my heart.
As you practice it over time, coherence is like resilience. It builds. It’s like it
is building all sorts of hormonal and immune system changes in your body and
synchronizing heart, brain and nervous system. It’s building up your reservoir so
that your coherent base line actually increases over time; this has been proven in
the lab, so that you have more natural coherence appearing in your system which
gives you broader perspectives, more resilience. It gives you more ability to stay in
flow and create flow which is another topic which we’ll get to. It is a technique that
can take you to where years of meditation is trying to get you too. Now I can bolster
any type of meditative practices neutral that you might be doing by getting you in
sync, by getting your heart, brain and nervous system into that coherent pattern.
It’s so simple that it’s deceptive. People say, “Well I’ve done this before. I do this all
the time.” But, really making that shift from head to heart in the first step, heart
focus and really letting the mind go to keep focusing on the heart and then doing the
heart focus breathing and then activating a positive emotion.
If you can’t feel it, that’s okay. Activate a positive attitude because that still
gets your heart rhythms coherent, that powers up the next types of meditations or
intention practices or other practices you may do. You are coming to it in a more
synchronized resilient state. You will get a lot more out of it. I’m at the point where
I use this technique to kind of reset myself throughout the day or to reboot when I
need to, to keep my resilience reservoir full or to recoup and fill it back up if I’ve had
something that got to me and drained me and where I overreacted. It makes such a
difference because you can observe yourself and see and feel when you are in that
incoherent state or when you are coherent and as you get to practice this technique
it’s so short. It’s one minute.
If you do it several times a day you will start to see how it changes your
relationships to what we call the video grid of life, the day to day activities. It
gives you much more sense of empowerment in the whole process and keeps you
connected with your heart’s intelligence.

Sheva: Debbie, the one quick thing I’d just add to that too is that the Quick
Coherence tool, since you can use it as Howard mentioned in the car or at the office
or wherever you are in the flow or your day, can be a way that your meditation can
take motion. So that the wonderful feeling world that you generate in your
 15

meditations, you can re-access when you need that reservoir of resilience that
mediation gives you in the flex and flow of your activity.

Deborah: Good point. Linda, does that answer your question on meditation or did
you have another take on it?

Linda: Yes it does. That was very helpful. Thank you.

Deborah: Good.

Howard: How about another couple questions there, Stephen.

Stephen: Sure. Let’s go with Lev. You’re live.

Lev: Alright, Thank you. I have a question about the relationship between this
technique and thinking. The mind, you mentioned in meditation, this is a good
technique for quieting the thinking. I’m curious if there is a way to continue, if I’m
sitting at my computer or having a conversation or I am engaged mentally, how to
access this energy source, this intelligence. I guess to channel the heart’s
intelligence into my thinking? I guess my question is, is this only about building the
reservoir so shifting away from my proactive activities and then going back to them
once I’ve built the reservoir, is there a way to actually channel while I’m doing
something, to channel that energy right into the activity?

Howard: Yes, absolutely. Let me just say that in the process of integrating more
heart into our system the brain is one of the big winners. It actually improves our
cognitive capacity. It gives us the ability to access really more of that part of our self.
What’s important is to not let the activities just totally absorb us. That’s where we
sort of lose contact with the heart. I certainly do. That happens to me. We can
integrate very easily this type of intelligence into the process of daily living.
That’s one of the things that we’ve been really working many years, and during this
whole twenty year period with HeartMath on; how do we make this practical and
normal integrated into our daily activities. Taking little short breaks like doing the
Quick Coherence technique, it doesn’t take long. It doesn’t take us too much out of
the flow of our mental activities but it can add another level of quality to what we
are thinking and what we’re doing. It is especially useful in creative projects. It’s
especially useful in problem solving. It’s especially useful in decision making about
things. That’s where I find it most useful in those areas.
You can do it kind of casually. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. You can
integrate it into whatever you’re doing working at your computer. My only
suggestion would be just to do it. Actually slow down enough to do the technique
and put some authenticity and some geniuses into it and then you get the benefit of
it and then you can move right back to it. You can learn to do that, when you get
skilled, you can learn to do it with your eyes open and it doesn’t take but just a little
bit of time.
 16

Deborah: I would add to that, if you are engaged in a mental activity, if you do this
technique it’s like taking a pause, shifting to the heart which is letting go of that
mental activity for that moment, rebooting your heart connection, connecting with
the heart focus breathing and shifting to a positive feeling or attitude about anything
in life. The mental activity you were engaged in or someone, something and then
when you go back to the activity, again we are only talking about a one minute
break. So often you will find that your mind is now infused from the heart
intelligence with a different perspective, with a bigger perspective, with another
nuisance, with more insight.
It is an enhancement, like Howard was saying. It’s like dipping into your
heart’s intelligence through the Quick Coherence technique to give you a bigger
view of what you were working on. That can take you in a more effective direction
or confirm the direction you are on. I do that all the time when I just do Quick
Coherence. I do that with what I call in-between. In-between e-mails or activities.
It doesn’t take a long time but it keeps me in flow. What I mean by flow I also mean
intuitive flow, that intuitive heart guidance that gives me more clarity as I move
moment to moment through life. That is a huge benefit to the mind.

Howard: You here with that, Lev? Is that okay?

Lev: Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you.

Howard: Alright, our pleasure. What I want to do now is just summarize the quick
coherent technique and then give it to Debbie to teach us the next HeartMath
technique in our program tonight called Heart Lock-In. Again, Quick Coherence is a
quick way to integrate heart and mind and body. It is a technique you can use in the
moment during the course of your daily activities. It is something that you can do
on the fly since it’s got a high level of utility and practicality which is what it’s good
for. It’s a practical useful technique you can do easily. The three steps are, and you
can certainly write these down, heart focus, heart focused breathing, heart feeling. I
will say that the third step, heart feeling, is the most important part of the technique.
The first two steps really set the stage for something else to happen and that
something else is an emotional shift. Within the context of that emotional shift is
where a lot of energy is gained or a lot of energy can be lost if we don’t make the
shift that contributes to the resilience reservoir and then gives us the ability to
access more of that energetic buffer and move more smoothly through the shift.
With that said I think we’ll go to the next technique and I’ll give the program to
Debbie now to teach us all the Heart Lock-In technique which is a technique that I
found for my last 30 years to be essential for me. So I’m glad we can share it with
you tonight.

Debbie: Consider Heart Lock-In your second resilience building technique. Both of
these techniques, Quick Coherence and Heart Lock-In do much more than just help
you build your reservoir of resilience. That’s a very important thing that they do.
To start this seven week course we want you to be immediately be practicing these
with the intention of building up that reservoir so that you can move more in flow in
 17

connection with your own heart. The Heart Lock-In technique is designed especially
to help you rebuild what we call your emotional energy accumulators especially
after they have been drained. What is that? Well if you can look at emotional
energy, when we our emotional energy tank is full, we can feel more joyful and
exuberant.
We’ve got more energy to love and care with. When they’ve been drained we
pretty much feel burned out emotionally. We can’t put the kind of care that we’d
like to in our relationships. Our emotional energy really does accumulate just like
resilience or just like physical energy in our cells. What we want to do is be able to
sustain and build that. Heart lock in is also like an extension of the Quick Coherence
technique. It helps you learn to sustain those coherent heart rhythms for longer
periods of time. It also, another benefit, helps you sustain or lock in your intentions
and new attitudes. We call it Heart Lock-In because you are really locking on more
to the heart energy, the coherent heart energy, those heart feelings.
What you do during the Heart Lock-In is you are going to generate in yourself
a positive attitude and energy of appreciation and caring. Then you are going to
radiate or send that energy out from your heart to your body, your cells, your whole
self and to others. What that actually does, and we’ll go into more of the science of
that in the future, is it actually changes the energetic environment within and
around you. Again the Heart Lock-In technique is going to sound a lot like
meditation. When people do heart focused meditations of radiating loving, kindness
and care and compassion they are in essence doing what researchers call the Heart
Lock-In.
We’re going to teach you a step by step technique for how to do this and we suggest
you do it just five minutes or longer a couple times a day. Either as part of your
meditations or if you are not a mediator do it as a meditation where you sit down,
close your eyes, take the time to really connect deeper in the heart in order to
accumulate and recharge your emotional system. This also helps cushion the impact
of day to day stressors. This is a huge preventer. Like Doc Childre calls it,
sometimes an analogy he’s used, it’s like it kind of creates a snow plow in front of
you shoveling the stuff away before it gets to you.
I do find that is what happens as I deepen my heart/brain alignment and
activate my heart intelligence and that flow. Then you can have more clarity, more
intuition comes in and how to make better decisions and how to make
improvements in your life. What I would like you to do in this technique again is
step one. Shift your attention to the area of your heart like we did in Quick
Coherence heart focus. Breathe slowly and deeply through the heart area, heart
focus breathing.

(Pause to breathe)

Now as you are combing those heart focuses, heart focus breathing slowly and
deeply through the area of the heart, activate and sustain a genuine feeling of
appreciation or care for someone or something in your life. Activate and sustain a
genuine feeling of gratitude, appreciation or care for someone or something in your
life. If you can find the feeling, just breathe into it. Deepen it. Sustain it. If you can’t
 18

feel anything activate an attitude a genuine attitude of appreciation or care.

(Pause to breathe)

Now what we want to do is send these feelings or these attitudes of care and
appreciation toward ourselves, our self, radiated out to others. Radiate it beyond
your own body to your loved ones, people who you know that could use some extra
love and care, to the planet, to your workplace. As you are radiating it out this
benefits them but it especially helps to recharge and balance your own system.
We’ll keep doing this for about five minutes. If you mind starts to wander during
Heart Lock-In you simply refocus. Don’t judge it. Don’t get impatient. It’s a gentle
refocus your attention in the area of the heart and reconnect with your really
appreciation or love or care for someone.
You build heart power as you keep pulling your attention back to the heart.
You build your power to stay in coherence and build that resilience reservoir. It is
fitness, an emotional fitness but it’s a heart training tool and I’d like you to keep
doing this. Keep radiating out that love, care and appreciation because that keeps
the heart energy flowing. If you have experienced anything stuck or heavy or
uncomfortable as you are doing this just befriend that feeling and send compassion.
Hold that feeling in your heart and send compassion because that can release any
blockages. Resistant feelings can come and go as you keep doing this you will find
them released and you will gain more insight about them and how to release them,
radiating that love, care and appreciation.

(Pause to breathe)

In this state you can even ask your heart for questions or any guidance because you
are more aligned. Practicing Heart Lock-In really helps you build that centeredness,
the courage to carry out your heart intentions to stop judging, blaming, worrying
because it lifts you into a bigger view and it fuses your heart into the situation.

Right now I’d like you to open your eyes and write down any insights, feelings,
thoughts, and the first things that come to you. Any intuitive ideas that you want to
remember to act on.

(Pause to breathe and reflect)

Any difference that you notice in your body and your emotions in your attitudes,
write that down so that you acknowledge them. Heart Lock-In any shift anything in
your perspective or perceptions. Did it bring any old unresolved issues up?

(Pause to reflect)

Okay. Now I’d like to open up the lines. You can raise your hand.

Stephen: Press “1” if you. Just touch “1” if you would like to raise your hand.
 19

Howard: Or if I make the suggestion if we can, that we’ve got a little time to put
people into some groups and let them discuss what they may have experienced in
the Heart Lock-In and then we can take some questions or comments.

Deborah: Do we have enough time?

Howard: We sure do.

Stephen: Well we actually left people in the previous groups of two so you don’t
have to introduce each other. What we can do is just do a quick scan and see if there
is anybody that maybe somebody dropped off and need to be reassigned. Basically
everybody is in the same group still as before so we can just do a quick back and
forth again.

Deborah: That would be great. Let’s do that and I’d just like each of you to take just
60 seconds to share one thing that you wrote down or that came to you from your
Heart Lock-In. Each of you make sure that you have a chance to share that and then
we’ll open up the phone lines by pressing “1“after that.

Stephen: Great then, Ben, if you can un-mute and so I’ll right the bell at one minute
and we will be back in two minutes.

[Bell ringing]

Deborah: Ok, so I would love to hear from some of you. I’m sure we all would to
see if we had some similar insights or to just understand what people experienced
in the Heart Lock-In. Did anyone have any type of insight experience that they
would like to share, press “1”?

Stephen: Press “1”. I see Tina has got her hand up. Let’s go with Tina.

Tina: Oh, hi. This is Tina.

Deborah: Hi Tina.

Tina: I have been doing some of these techniques. Not these specifically but
meditation and stuff and I had a hard time with this one. I didn’t really feel anything
except I did feel a little bit tired. I noticed I was tired and then when nothing really
came to me I just had compassion for myself. I just kind of felt compassion but that
was all that came up for me and I kind of feel like, well is this okay? Is this what’s
supposed to happen the first time?

Deborah: You know it can for all of us. I have to tell you that these days’ energies
are changing and shifting. You sometimes won’t feel as much sometimes as you will
other time. Especially is you come into something tired anyway but know that even
 20

just the practice of shifting to the heart and activating an attitude of love or care,
appreciation or compassion and then sending that out to your cells and to your
brain and your body and then to whoever is doing a lot to your system, a lot of
positive good hormonally and immune wise to your heart. Sometimes we can’t feel
it as much. You are not always going to get this gagged emotional juice and payoff
emotionally.
That’s okay. It’s about understanding that no love, no care, no compassion is
ever wasted. It is always affective for you emotionally, mentally and physically.
Don’t doubt yourself or doubt the technique because as you said, it’s a core
technique for many, many systems is putting out love and putting out care. It’s core
for your own health in your body. We call it Heart Lock-In because in these three
simply steps you can spend more time in any one of the steps to really heart focus.
To make sure that your intentions in your deeper heart are not wandering all over
and really take the breathing to another level genuinely. That helps lock in your
attention in the heart area. That can help power up the emotional shift. Again, this is
just what we’ve seen in the lab really works but it does take practice and some days
it’s easier than others. Don’t worry about it.

Tina: When I do this technique can I use any of those positive emotions?

Deborah: Any one.

Tina: Any one, okay.

Deborah: Any one. In fact we send or suggest appreciation or gratitude because it’s
usually the easiest one that people can click to. The heart just wants you to pick one.
Whatever makes you feel right and good, any one of them? Whatever is easy for you
to love or care or appreciate. Like Howard said earlier, if you can’t feel anything, it’s
one of those days, just feel compassion.

Tina: Okay, thank you.

Deborah: Alright.

Stephen: Joyce.

Deborah: Does anyone else have any insights or any challenges they may have like
that?

Stephen: Right. Joyce.

Joyce: Yeah, I had a sense of that my heart needed coddling. That it needed a very
gentle environment. I did have a heart attack in August and as I let love come in I
felt quite a bit of pain, actually, from old hurts. It felt like a beginning of heart
cleanse
 21

Deborah: Very good, very good. That’s your own heart intuition telling you that
yes, please give me more love, more coddling, more comfort, and more compassion.
You can send that gentle energy to your heart. We call that a soft heart. Learning to
stay more in a soft heart and that helps to release the old hurts and pains and as you
practice these techniques and the ones we will be sharing in the next seven weeks,
you will actually gain more heart intelligence about those old hurts that will enable
you to have the ahas as you need to let them go more.

Joyce: Yes and I have had to have a sturdy life and I had to harden my heart as I a
demanding job and five children etc. So, I am wanting to soften my heart.

Deborah: Wonderful. This is the technique to start with and I really suggest not
only for you but for all of us to really spend at least five minutes a day. A can go
longer, five, ten, fifteen minutes. You can put music in the background as you do
this. That helps you open your heart. Spend at least five minutes a day, at least five
days a week if you can, nurturing your heart.

Joyce: It felt very happy but satisfied.

Deborah: I understand. Satisfied is a good word.

Joyce: Thank you.

Deborah: Thank you. Anybody else?

Stephen: Sure. How about if we go to Menucha?

Menucha: Menucha, yeah. I’m having a problem maybe because my heart

intelligence is not at such a high level. Just really understanding it, really what it is.
I still don’t understand it as heart, as a muscle but not as having intelligence. I guess
that’s why I’m in the course so that even when you are talking about meditating and
feeling and sending out energy fields, I can’t possibly imagine any of that happening
in any other part of my body than my brain.

Deborah: Well, I’m so glad you asked. You know the research at HeartMath really
made this fundamental awareness that there is a shift that the heart is an intelligent
system. It’s not just our research but in the early 90’s is when the whole field of
Neuro-Cardiology was started. They have found since the 90’s, so this is really
relative resent, that the heart has its own hormonal gland, its hormonal system. The
heart has its own intrinsic nervous system they call the little brain in the heart with
sensory neurons that sense, feel, and remember. The heart is an energetic system
that talks to the brain. We are going to be talking more about that in the future so
I’m not going to get more into that science now, but it’s really confirming what the
ancient metaphors and the ancient wisdom always talked about the heart. It really is
a center of intelligence. But I will ask you this. It’s a center of feeling because most
of us feel feelings wherever they originate from, the brain or somewhere else in the
 22

body. We feel it in the center of our hearts. It’s that place we go to find deep
answers. They say go to your heart to find an answer. So, subjectively that’s the
place that we say is our center of being. For example; we say I love you with all of
my heart. We don’t say I love you with all my head. Right?
People know inside that there is some point of reference there whether right
now at this point until you take more of the course so that you understand how the
heart’s intelligence doesn’t matter. What matters is go to that place inside where
you felt those deep feelings before. That’s going to start unfolding your own
intuitive understanding.

Howard: Let me jump in if I could and then we’ll move to closure. Menucha, you’ve
got a really good point there and it’s one of the things that we knew when we started
HeartMath. We can talk about heart in a lot of glowing ways and we can talk about it
philosophically and there is all kinds of energetic language that can be used around
it. This has been thousands of years that people have been talking about that and it
has instated heart in a really dynamic way but it’s time for some new understanding
about heart. When we started HeartMath one of the first things we did was we
began to do scientific research to really try to understand the physical heart more
and what was going on inside the body. That body of research is a huge body of
research now. It’s gone into many different areas. It’s spawned research all around
the world from other researchers. It’s that type of research that gives us the ability
to talk about heart in new ways.
That’s why we work in places like Fortune 100 companies, the US military
major educational institutions, places that are not going to just blindly follow
philosophy. The science part of HeartMath is one of the strongest parts in a way
because it gives it a solid empirical understanding of things.
In the next course, next week actually, we are going to go more into the
science of things. Next week is the Science of the heart. That’s our subject which
will happen on February 7th and we are going to talk more about those sort of
things. I think your point is well taken and during this seven weeks we want to
blend in a lot of different information because at the end of this we want people to
really have a new comprehensive multifaceted view of what heart is and how to
apply it in their lives. Does that help?

Menucha: Yes. Do you think that it’s going to prevent any growth? I mean for so
many years my intelligence was based on mystical qabalistic Jewish traditions
which really put the brain as the vessel for the divine intelligence as apposed to the
heart which has more of an animal instinct. I hope that I can just be open. I
appreciate it.

Howard: We’ll help you. One of the other parts of the way we designed HeartMath
especially came from our founder, Doc Childre, this has to be a really neutral system
that allows for other people’s belief systems. My feeling is simply that HeartMath is
something that adds something of value but it’s not in competition with other things
that people believe or practices. It’s really a friendly facilitator of many different
systems. That’s sort of one of our strengths as well. That’s what I hope you gain
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from it. Is that it facilitates your work in the spiritual path that you are on and in no
way competes with it.

Menucha: Thank you so much.

Deborah: So before we close I would like to invite everyone to practice the Heart
Lock-In. Be your own self scientist. Use these two tools every day. Use Quick
Coherence during your day. Use Heart Lock-In to set up your day or before bed at
night or whenever you have time to spend five to ten minutes. Each week we’re
going to give you a different point of focus for the Lock-Ins throughout the course.
This is just the beginning on how to direct that heart energy, how to use it to
manifest and unfold your intentions and be clear about your hearts desires and
choices and how to use it in many different ways. How to help people around you
and the planet? That’s going to unfold over the next seven weeks. The basics are to
practice and learn and get to know Quick Coherence and Heart Lock-In and build up
your reservoir of resilience. Okay. Thank you so much.

Howard: Sheva, do you want to take us through some closing things before we sign
off tonight?

Sheva: Sure. I want to thank everybody for their attention and participation. I
think it’s important that we understand the real difference between Quick
Coherence and Heart Lock-In as Debbie just said. Heart Lock-In is something that
over the course of the next seven weeks that we’re going to invite all of you to start
your day with at least five minutes a day, just time with you and your heart. It’s not
necessarily time where you have to pump yourself up into a particular feeling. It’s
an oasis time where you get to be unconditional with yourself, whatever you are
feeling.
If you are uncomfortable, if like Menucha, you’re feeling awkward in any
space or not feeling anything or feeling more connected to something else than your
heart, that’s a time that you can bring a heart feeling of acceptance, that five minutes
is oasis time for you and your heart. Then Quick Coherence is something that we are
going to invite you to do throughout your day. There are a number of ways that you
can do that. It’s important to know that when the static of stress comes on line and
the part of your brain, the higher cortex, that learned this new tool called Quick
Coherence, shuts down. That’s what makes us furrow our brow when we get upset.
It’s actually not just something that is happening on your forehead between
your eyebrows it’s something happening inside where literally the part of your own
intelligence, the brain that will remember the steps of the tool is no longer available
to you necessarily in a state of stress. It’s unfair to ask yourself to remember Quick
Coherence when you are stressed even though that is when you most need it. What
we are going to do this week to help you instate Quick Coherence so that it becomes
second nature and it becomes a tool that you can rely on when you are in a state of
stress is invite you to set some sort of reminder. Actually, if you Google online
“mindful clock” there is a clock that you can download for free that will just do a
gong. Sort of like what Stephen has been doing during your discussion groups, at
 24

whatever frequency you wish. We recommend once an hour. It will just remind you
that this is a moment that I can just do a heart focus, heart breathing, allowing the
breath to come in through my heart and go out through my heart, and activate a
heart feeling. Even if that heart feeling is compassion or self acceptance or whatever
I’m feeling right in this moment.
There are some specific hearts feelings that I want to invite you to work with
for five minutes every morning and once an hour or whatever frequency you set
whether it’s a mindful clock on your computer or a watch alarm that you set or on
your cell phone to remind you to just come to my heart. Be that rubber band that
comes back to center in this moment. The heart feelings that I want to invite you to
work with this week are the true heart’s desires that your heart buddy helped you
identify in your first dialogue. The answer to the question if I got what I want from
this course, what would that give me? If it was clarity, experiment this week with
really breathing in a feeling of clarity. If it was fulfillment, experiment with
breathing in feelings of fulfillment and radiating that out. To help you access more
of the feeling worlds that you identified in that first exercise I want to invite you to
do something right now. Grab a pen and paper again, whatever feelings you
identified. Whatever true heart’s desires you identified at the beginning of this call,
you couldn’t want those feelings without having some reference point in your
experience of them in your past.
You couldn’t have a desire for a state of being without having in some way or
other experienced that state of being before. So, I want you to recall peak moments
in your life. Moments where you experienced those heart connected feelings in the
past. I just want you to write key words down that invoke of remind you’re of those
peak moments in your life. Take a moment to do that now. If there are any
questions about this list you are compiling or anyone is feeling challenged in it, go
ahead and just press 1 to raise your hand. Stephen we could answer questions as
people are writing down these peak moment experiences.

Stephen: Do you want to take some?

Sheva: Yeah, great.

Stephen: Diana is live.

Diana: Thank you so much for this course and the insight that we are gathering.
I’m a bit unclear about this particular exercise to recall peak moments in my life
where I experienced what?

Sheva: Great. So, Diana, let me answer your question with a question. What did
you decide earlier or what’s true for you right now in this moment if you got what
you wanted from this course at the end of seven weeks, what would that give you?
What’s your answer to that question?

Diana: Do you want me to actually tell you?

 25

Sheva: Yes.

Diana: Okay there are a number of things but, ok, peace within myself.

Sheva: Let’s just start with peace within yourself even if that was the only one you
focused on this week. Peace within yourself. What I want you to do in this moment
is identify where you felt peace within yourself, even if it’s been a fleeting
experience for just a flash of a moment.

Diana: Oh, I see, okay.

Sheva: Make a list of those life experiences, those moments in time when you felt
peace within yourself. Does that answer your question?

Diana: Yeah

Sheva: Great, thank you Diana. Stephen, do we have another one?

Stephen: We have Menucha again.

Menucha: In the beginning when you called in the percentages I guess I was in the
5% of people who didn’t have an emotion or want to get an emotion out of it but the
desire is more to not be in my brain so much.

Sheva: Okay, let’s just start with that, Menucha. If you weren’t in your brain so
much what would you be experiencing?

Menucha: Sleep

Sheva: Okay, great. So if you got more sleep, and Menucha is giving all of us a gift
here, because many of anyway, I certainly can make the mistake trying to follow the
GPS of the heart by telling it where we don’t want to go. Anyone who works with a
GPS in your car imagine if you are trying to get to Boulder Creek to visit HeartMath
and you plug in to your GPS, I’m not going to New York. That’s not going to get you
to HeartMath is it, Menucha? Having less going on in your brain is telling your GPS
where you don’t want to go. But saying what you’d like is to get some sleep that tells
me your intention is to experience rest. To feel rested. Is that true?

Menucha: That’s true.

Sheva: Okay, beautiful. So then the focus for you this week, Menucha, because you
couldn’t want to feel rested unless you had felt rested at some point in you life. I
want you to remember in this moment.

Menucha: I really okay go ahead.

 26

Sheva: No, please go ahead.

Menucha: I don’t think, I don’t know. I don’t really think, I may not have.

Sheva: So you don’t think you have ever felt rested but what you would like is some
sleep. Is that right?

Menucha: Well, sleep is the only thing I can think of when I’m not actively engaged.
Once a week on the Sabbath there is an overall feeling of being on another planet
even though it’s not sleep it’s another complete feeling. I guess I can say I do have
that in the periphery.

Sheva: Isn’t that beautiful though, once a week. That’s not periphery, Menucha.
That’s security in your life. I work with people who haven’t had a good night’s sleep
or a sense of rest in years. But you have access to that once a week. That’s beautiful.
That’s exactly what I want you to write down right now and you are going to
connect to the feeling you have on the Sabbath every morning when you do y our
Heart Lock-In and once an hour when you do your Quick Coherence techniques this
week. Just focus your attention on the heart and I want everyone to do this with
Menucha and I right now. Focus your attention on the area around your heart. If it
helps you, Menucha, you could put your hand there.

Menucha: Yeah, it does help.

Sheva: Good. You can do this eyes open or eyes closed. Howard said whatever is
more comfortable for you. As you keep your attention on your heart, so really feel
your hand there. To get a sense, Menucha, that this is a feeling and not a conceptual
idea in your mind, I want everyone to just put your attention in your big toe and
wiggle it, your right big toe. Now stop wiggling it and think about your big toe. It’s
different right? Wiggling your big toe requires that you put yourself in it. Put your
attention there. Feeling it versus thinking about it. This is the meal we are giving
you not the menu. You don’t want to think about dinner you want to eat it. You
don’t want to read about it you want to eat it. That’s what Quick Coherence is going
to give you is the direct experience of your heart. So, Menucha, in just the same way
you put your attention in your toe to wiggle it. Were you able to do that?

Menucha: In my heart.

Sheva: Yeah, exactly, put your attention in your heart just the same way even
though you’re not wiggling your heart. Now allow the breath to come in through the
heart and to go out through the heart. All that means is paced breathing. You are
breathing evenly in and evenly out while you continue feeling where your hand is on
your heart. Now each one of you on this call I want you to activate by looking at this
list of peak moments. Reactivate the feeling and Menucha in your case; this is going
to be the feeling you have on the Sabbath, the feeling of rest, yes? Touching that
even if it’s your intention if you don’t feel it right away and breathing that in through
 27

your heart and out through your heart. Beautiful, now everyone got a chance to
practice. Does that answer your question, Menucha? Does that give you a point of
focus for this week?

Menucha: Absolutely.

Sheva: Everyone, because we all learn from each others’ questions. As you work
with those feelings there is one point of caution I have for you. If you are feeling
nostalgic about those peak moments or if they had to do with a person that is no
longer in your life and when you go to connect with them what you really feel is not
the heart’s desire, the heart feeling that you activated at the beginning of class but
instead a feeling of loss or nostalgia, then that’s not a heart feeling.
You have to be careful when we work with memories to contact the heart
feeling but it can be a valuable portal, one that can help you access these feelings as
you engage the practice this week. In a moment we are going to have you transition
into group discussions and I want to invite you in your group discussions to
introduce yourselves by sharing one of your peak moments and the heart’s feelings
associated with it. I mentioned earlier that part of resilience is knowing who you are
and knowing who you’re not. Through the shift our roles, our identities, our
activities are going to change. That’s great news because we are stepping into new
times where there are new possibilities available to all of us. To receive the benefit
and the potential of the new possibility we have to be willing to let go of the old.
That is where resilience comes in, knowing who we are and who we are not. We can
let go of our old goals and see what magic and gifts and treasure the heart holds for
us in the new.
Often when people introduce themselves they introduce themselves at least
in the cultures I grew up in by saying their name and their job, their profession or
their role in their family as a Mother or a Father. Tonight, I’m inviting you to
introduce yourselves in your discussion groups from your heart, from your heart
feeling. From the heart of who you are, sharing one of these peak moments in your
life and the heart feelings and the heart’s desires that are fulfilled by those feelings.
Are there any last questions or anything that anyone needs in regards to the
homework or wants to say to complete what we did tonight?

Stephen: What we can do is if you have another question for Sheva we can create a
side breakout. Just touch “4” on your key pad. Otherwise what we are doing is
putting the groups of two together with other groups of two so you will have already
connected, hopefully if the person you were with was able to stay on to this time, so
you will still have the same other person and two other people so you can share
from that feeling of deep resonance of the peak experience and connecting to your
core purpose for being in the course. What we will do is ring the bell here and Sheva
can answer questions specifically for folks who want to be in room 4 with her, if you
touch “4” on your key pad. The rest of you will have about 15 minutes here to
connect with three other people. Really use this opportunity. Be vulnerable to open
up to share about the question and we won’t actually shut the room down so if you
are really engaged feel free to connect beyond the 7:00 end time.
 28

Howard: Stephen, before you ring the bell I think Deborah and I will need to go. I
want to thank everybody for being here tonight and looking forward to next week as
well. It’s been an enjoyable process for me. I learned from you so that’s wonderful.
We’ll see you all next week. I know you’ve got some private time now in your group
chats and practice Heart Lock-In and Quick Coherence and next week we’ll talk all
about the science of the heart.

Deborah: And hear how your experiences were. Thank you.

Howard: Thank you so much.

Stephen: Good night and be careful. So you will now be in groups in just one
second.

[Bell ringing]

Stephen: Stephen here just bringing your awareness to the fact that it’s 7:00. This
is our stated end time so if you need to go you can go. I will leave you in the groups
that you are currently in so you can say your goodbyes or if you would like to
continue the conversations or discussions if there is a richness developing, feel free
to stay on as long as you like. We will be sending out a recording from tonight within
24 hours usually and a transcript within a week. I encourage you to deepen the
practices shared tonight with Quick Coherence and Heart Lock-In over the coming
week. I look forward to connecting with you on the Ning site which is the main way
we can connect with each other between calls. Thank you all so much and have a
beautiful evening.