This is post 25 in the Living Fully Alive blog series. Please consider reading the posts in the order they were published for the best learning experience.
The last post was focused on exploring the biblical truths about the heart. We found that the Bible tells us to love God with our whole hearts, we are to believe in our hearts, we worship God with our heart, mind and strength, the disciples had a burning in their hearts when they walked to Emmaus with Jesus. God also says he is taking our heart of stone and giving us a soft one and writes his law on our hearts. That is a lot of important things happening in a “deceitfully wicked and evil heart”. Hopefully you gained some perspective on this often misquoted verse about the heart and are comfortable learning more about how to work with your heart instead of mistrust it completely.
Unfortunately we have probably all seen people who “followed their heart” and ended up doing crazy and destructive things. So what gives? The heart is very complex and complicated. The Bible tells us to guard our heart. In order to guard it, don’t we also need to investigate and understand it? In fact, in Psalm 139 we read that God is asked to examine and know our hearts and show us if there be any grievous thing in us. It makes sense to take a close look at the heart. How can we guard it if we don’t understand it? We need to investigate it, understand it, guard it, keep it pure and clean. That is what this entire session was about.
It is interesting to look at what Science has discovered about the heart. Obviously we don’t know everything, and things we thought we knew get adjusted or changed as we do new studies and find out new information. One such information is that scientists used to believe that all decisions were made by the brain.
A study found that when people hold their hand over their heart, they are much more likely to tell the truth of what they believe about themselves. It’s not a lie detector test, however. Just a connection with the inner truth teller of your own beliefs. People who talk to their heart and hold their hand over their heart can get to what they believe is true. Hearts send emotional signals to the brain.
I believe that the terminology can get a bit confusing here. Some people say that the soul is all your emotions, personality, likes, dislikes, etc. some say it includes the mind. Dr. Leaf distinguishes between the mind that resides in the soul and the brain that resides in the physical skull. She has shown Bible passages about renewing the mind and taking thoughts captive to be true, that the mind is in charge of the brain and not the other way around. She actually states that the mind is designed to control the brain not the brain the mind. That we are not hostages of our biology. I think what she says pretty much backs up all of this background info that we are talking about here, but just has different words for it. I wonder if the way ‘heart’ is used in this book is what some of us have come to believe to be the subconscious part of us, the subconscious mind.
They also discovered that the heart makes decisions as well as the brain. In other words, they have found that the heart has its own brain. For more information on all the findings, please pick up a copy of Heartmath Solutions. I want to look into these studies more myself and gain a clearer understanding of how they came to those conclusions. I will probably write a review of the book once I have time to get around to that.
For now, I’ll just repeat what Abi quoted from the book to give a foundation for the heart and what is believed to be known about it by now.
“There is scientific evidence that our hearts send us emotional and intuitive signals to help govern our lives. Instead of just pumping blood, the heart directs and aligns many systems in the body so that they can function in harmony with one another. And although the heart is in constant communication with the brain, we now know that it makes many of its own decisions.” In other words, the brain does not choose everything, it is not in charge of everything.
To further show that the brain does not control everything, a discovery by neuroscientists was mentioned, where they found that the heart has its own independent nervous system, meaning there is a brain in the heart. It is a fact that the heart starts beating in the unborn baby long before the brain is formed. I would have to study how much the unborn baby perceives in the womb before the brain is formed, but we do know that the heart comes before the brain, and there are prenatal experiences that babies have, which could possibly have happened before the brain was developed. That would be another interesting study to do.
The John and Beatrice Lacey study found that the brain sends orders to the heart which the heart does not automatically obey. The heart is not subordinate to the brain; it reasons as if it has its own logic. Sometimes the brain sent signals to the body and the heart sped up, other times with the same stimulation, the heart slowed down. The selectivity of the heart response gave evidence that the heart is not just a mechanical organ carrying out orders, but responds depending on the nature of the task at hand. The heart is in constant communication with the brain and makes many of its own decisions. In the study where the heart was not obeying the brain, the heart was able to ignore the signal of the brain to be anxious and instead think it through on its own and respond differently. What is even more fascinating is that the heart was sending messages back to the brain, which the brain understood and obeyed.
In one study the high blood pressure in the tested individuals was reduced to normal levels in six months without using blood pressure reducing drugs, but solely using Heart Intelligence tools. (talking to the heart)
Several studies with people ranging from arrhythmia to mitral valve prolapse, fatigue, autoimmune disorders, autonomic exhaustion, anxiety, depression and PTSD all showed clinical improvements by teaching the patients the skill of accessing and connecting with their heart.
I have to be honest with you, having the topic of connecting to the heart introduced with some scientific background was rather a smart move on Abi and Justin’s part. I think that learning about some of these studies primed me to be willing to give some of their suggested exercises in the coming post a good try. I hope you are more open to try these as well, because I think there is some real good stuff around the corner for those of us who do.
In the next post we finally dig into how we can make all this relevant and applicable to our journey. See you there!
To learn more about the ‘Living Fully Alive’ course, please click the hyperlink.
