Contributor: Wild Divine

Tuning your heart for compassion and love.

By Dr. Bob Whitehouse

With the coming of Valentine‘s Day, our thoughts go to matters of the heart. To many cultures the heart is the seat of the soul, the center of who we are emotionally and spiritually. It is easy to see why that is believed when we look at what happens in the heart rate. Within this brief article you’ll learn how to influence your heart in positive ways and what your heart rate looks like when you’re feeling positive emotions like compassionate love or warm hearted.

The Journey to the Wild Divine measures your every Heart Beat to get your average Heart Rate (HR or pulse) and how much it varies. When you take your pulse, you get the average number of beats per minute. With a computerized monitoring of your HR, you not only get the average but a picture of the differences between the faster and slower beats. This difference is called Heart Rate Variability (HRV). This is important information for many reasons. When the HRV is very low while someone is resting, this pattern typically reflects higher stress levels, and if sustained most of the time, is predictive of many illnesses and causes of death. For people under say 50 years of age, a desired HRV is around 20 beats or more, e.g. your faster heartbeats might be 80 beats per minute (bpm) followed by slower ones of 60, or 90-70, with a rhythm that waves or alternates between them. For those over 50 an 11 beat HRV is acceptable. (When using the Wild Divine Grapher you can watch the averaging of your HR and HRV as well as watch every heartbeat. In many parts of the game you get things to happen when you increase your HRV, which might be called opening your heart.)

Negative Emotional States tend to be accompanied by low HRV. For example someone feeling broken-hearted or angry might find their HR bouncing around between 90-92-88-95-100…, so the average HRV would be 2-5. Constantly staying in a pattern of negative emotions may be predictive of later health problems, especially involving the heart.

Positive Emotional States like feeling love, compassion, deep connection, sense of purpose, gratitude, or warm-hearted, etc. tend to be accompanied by greater HRV, like 20-30. When you have high HRV it is easier for the brain and heart to synchronize and the brain to perform better, the immune system boosts, and intuition is more likely to happen.

Slowing and Deepening your Breathing, especially by extending the exhale, is another way to get greater HRV. (If you get light headed or dizzy, just ease your breathing, as you may be taking in too much). Breathing a Heart Breath of around 6 breaths per minute (10 sec from inhale to end of exhale) is deeply balancing and is a powerful way to get great HRV, with the HR going up as you breathe in and back down when exhaling.

When getting greater HRV either from slow rhythmic breathing or by accessing positive emotions or memories, a pattern shows up in a spectral analysis of the HR that is called the Resonant Frequency (.1 HZ) or Coherence (by HeartMath). This is a frequency that has great inner stability and strength, and is so powerful that it helps organize the focus and performance of the brain, it boosts the immune system, and has been shown in HeartMath research to accompany intuition, and to affect in positive ways the people around us. In other words we feel the positive vibes or intentions of the person in this Resonant Frequency state of coherence. No wonder the pattern of breathing that promotes this state and the positive emotions and intentions that accompany it are found to be the practice of many advanced meditators.

Your heart is smart and powerful. Trust it, exercise it, relax it, breathe into it your best intentions and positive feelings. Play the Wild Divine with the intention of befriending, strengthening, and nourishing it. Remember the harder you try to calm or control it, the more it races. Develop an allowing attitude and you will be surprised how quickly you can progress. Take heart, fellow sojourners, be hearty, warm-hearted, and as I learned from my 6 year old daughter, “fill your heart with love”. Happy Valentines Day!