With Dr. Stephen Brooke
Carol: Hello it’s lovely to see you all
I’m Carol from the team at CJG Wellness and here we’re doing another of our video talks about health and Wellness. Today we have Dr. Stephen Brooke who is talking to us about your amazing heart, which I have found so interesting. He’s talking about your physical and your spiritual heart and how those two interact with your Wellness. I have found it so interesting from his book ‘An amazing heart,’ which is where I learnt about this idea of your heart being so involved with the Wellness of your physical and spiritual heart. So, Dr. Stephen Brooke, who was practised in General Practise. I’ll hand over to you, Dr. Stephen Brooke.
Thank you for coming today.
Dr. Stephen: Thank you very much, Carol. It’s a great pleasure to be with you and supporting your endeavour and providing a seminar for your listeners and viewers.
My name is Steven Brooke. I was a GP in general practise until four years ago and I retired but I’ve continued doing coaching and counselling. I’m going to show you my screen. We’re trusting the technology will work for us.
Carol: Yes absolutely.
Dr. Stephen: …and here is my introductory screen, which is my logo ‘leb Discover your heart.’ ‘Leb’ is the Hebrew word for ‘heart’ and my logo uses a combination of heart, brain and gut. That little squiggle at the bottom and although I shan’t say much about the gut today, I shall be saying a lot about the head and the heart or should we say the brain and the heart. I’ve been on a long journey, as a professional. I qualified as a doctor. I worked as an anaesthetist. Did some paediatric, children’s medicines and then became a General practitioner in Swindon in Wiltshire for 27 years. During that time I also trained in pastoral counselling and coaching and neuro linguistic programming and finally in something called heart mass, which I shall be speaking about, which is about getting head and heart in harmony and my professional journey, in a nutshell, is the road from the head to the heart. As a professional doctor, I was trained to use my head. I wasn’t trained to use my heart and I have discovered how important both are and the idea of using your heart may be a new concept for a lot of people.
The talk today is called ‘Head and heart in harmony for resilience.’ Resilience is what we all need in today's world, full of potential stresses from all directions and I’m going to be talking about heart and mind / brain / head. The idea that your heart can help your mind is perhaps new, as I said and I want to explain about the relevance of this session.
Now I may just have to do a little bit of un-sharing for a moment, so that I can get rid of some background interference of different parts of the computer. Okay, now I’m going to share it again. I’m back with you. So there should be fewer interruptions.
Relevance
4:55
This is going to be good for your well-being,
good for your mental health,
good for connecting heart and mind, and
I’m going to give you some tools to start using today.
Now there’s a target. What are our goals for today? I’m not sure what time of day you will be listening or watching to this. For me it’s an afternoon, so I can say, “This afternoon,” that will hopefully make sense to you. This is going to be good for your well-being, good for your mental health, good for connecting heart and mind, and I’m going to give you some tools to start using today because this is not all about you learning stuff or us learning stuff with our heads and our thoughts, and our minds but engaging our hearts in the process. Now the talk is going to fall into three main parts; the role of the heart, the influence of the heart and enlisting the heart. I’m going to start by leading you in a practical procedure now, involving your heart and we're going to do this four times over the next hour. So you will be quite familiar with it by the end and it has three parts.
Number one - is ‘Heart focus.’ You simply focus your attention in the area of the heart. Now it’s helpful if you put yourself into relaxed posture. So if you’re sitting down, it’s good to have both feet fairly and squarely on the ground, and sit comfortably, so that you're not distracted and now focus your attention in the area of your heart. Some people find it helps to put their hand on their heart, to give them that sense of connection and immediately you do this you're already starting to activate messages between your head, brain and your heart.
Second step - is what we call heart breathing and this is something which is very good for you, whatever you're doing with your heart and that is to slow down your breathing, make it slower and deeper. Imagine that your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area. That's not hard to imagine is it because your breath is coming in and out of the chest on your heart is right in the centre of the chest, slightly to the left. So as you're thinking about your heart, focus on breathing more deeply and more slowly than usual. Get into a rhythm of about five or six seconds to breathe in and about five or six seconds to breathe out and I’m going to do a couple of those breaths and give you a chance to just enter this rhythm of slowing down your breathing and if possible you need to allow your tummy to rise as you're taking the breath in because your lungs are pushing down your diaphragm and your diaphragm is pushing the contents of your belly down and forwards. So that's the second step.
Third step - is to do with what you're choosing to think about and right now I invite you to choose something that is positive to think about. Now something you appreciate or someone. I can, for example, think about my wife or my wedding day, or something I love, a member of my family and the important thing is that we identify something which has this positive emotion attached to it. Appreciation is a really useful and important one. There’s something that you love. There’s something you value. There’s something that you care for or someone you care for. When you think of such a person or such a thing, you feel better. So I’m going to invite you now to identify that one thing or person that you’d like to focus on and let’s go through these three steps.
Focus your attention in the area of your heart. Slow down your breathing. Imagine that your breath is flowing in and out of your heart and notice that thing or person you appreciate. So it’s a combination of breathing in, appreciating, breathing out. Focusing on appreciating this person in our heart. Some people can do this much more naturally and more easily and faster than others and that's perfectly normal and perfectly natural. Some people have to struggle to think of these three things or do these three things. “Oh I’ve got to think about my heart!” “I’ve got to think about my breathing!” “Ooo I’ve got remember something I appreciate,” but I can tell you that with practise it becomes very easy, very natural and very fast and having done it for many years, with one deliberate big breath, I can immediately get that sense of appreciation and greater happiness and joy.
So even that, even if I tell you nothing else today, this is something which is a very good habit to take into your lives and do it as often as you think of it. Especially when you’re feeling stressed. It’s what we call the quick coherence technique and it’s been created by the Heart Math Institute, who have their headquarters in California in the USA and they have been doing research for 30 years or more about the science of the heart and the heartbeat, and the heart rhythm, and how it relates to our emotions and our Wellness. I’ve learned a huge amount from them and I’ve become a licenced Heart Math practitioner in the last couple of years. So coming back to our subject of heart and mind or heart and head… interesting isn’t it, when we talk about our mind, we tend to think about our head or our brain but I’m going to suggest to you that our mind and our brain actually is not just inside our head. In fact our heart has a brain but we will come on to that.
How your heart can help your mind?
11:44
The first part, the role of the heart.
Secondly, the influence of the heart and
Thirdly, the practicalities in listing our heart as a partner.
How your heart can help your mind?
So the first part, the role of the heart. Secondly, the influence of the heart and thirdly, the practicalities in listing our heart as a partner. Your heart is not something you just have to protect from heart attacks and stop poisoning by eating the wrong foods. It's something that can actually help us to live life in an enhanced way, in many directions.
First - for the role of the heart. What is your heart?
It’s a hydraulic ram made of muscle that’s incorrectly described as a pump. Currently in terms of hydraulics, it’s around not a pump. Secondly, it has a powerful influence on your whole body and I’m going to tell you about that influence as we go through. Your heart has a brain. It has intelligence. It’s got a network of nerve cells attached to it, that integrate with each other and actually constitute a brain. So you not only have a brain inside your head, you have a brain at the back of your heart, which is integrally connected with the way your heart is functioning inside you. Your heart perceives. It’s part of folklore, isn’t it, that we sometimes perceive things not with our mind but with our heart and I’m going to show you how actually that’s a scientific reality, that we can work with. So a heart can perceive, communicate, can remember, can have deep beliefs and has a sense of identity and one clue to that set of truths, is the experiences of people who have a heart transplant. In certain proportion, those people find they have inexplicable beliefs and memories, and preferences that they didn’t have before, that comes from the person who has donated their heart and that might seem like impossible to understand but in fact it’s very easy to understand, when we look at the science of Heart and Math. Your heart communicates not only through sending blood and through sending a pressure wave but by sending hormones. Some of which it actually produces and sending messages along the nerves between the heart and the head, and a huge electromagnetic field that the heart produces. Some of you may have had an ECG done, which measures the electrical shape of the heart field. At your skin you have sticky stickers put on different parts of the chest and then it’s hitched up to a recording machine and it shows the shape of the electric wave. Well, we have both electricity and magnetism coming out from our heart and we’ll be talking about that in a little bit more detail. As I mentioned, our hearts house our long term memories and values, and our sense of self. I should be saying lots of things but I shan’t have time to go into detail about but hopefully whet your appetite about what more you could learn about the way your heart is an important part of you. A heart has a sense of boundaries and it keeps a record of our emotions and their effects. So the traditional understanding of the heart, is the centre of emotion, is not just wishful thinking or imagination but there is a great deal of science that supports it.
Your heart has a brain and for those of you who may be interested, this is a view of the back of your heart. If you were standing behind someone and looking at their heart, this is what you would see. You see that the great arteries come in and the great veins coming in and out of the heart, and basically there’s five areas there, each with different names, that have what’s called ganglions, which are collections of blood vessels… sorry collection of nerve cells, not blood vessels, which all act as a network, and together they act as a brain, and that's called the cardiac plexus. You can dissect it, you can identify it and we have many thousands of nerve cells that are connected in that way and effectively form a brain of the heart.
Secondly, your heart has intelligence. If you're looking for a spiritual connection, then it's quite interesting that the major religions of the world all give a place to the heart and the Bible, in particular, mentions about something called, ‘the heart stirring, singing, speaking, rejoicing, meditating, desiring, trusting and obeying,’ and this is more than just a metaphor because we now discover that the science that Heart Math have been demonstrating, shows that this area of our body, this mixture of muscle and nerves, and electromagnetic waves, is actually capable of perception, learning, remembering, feeling, responding, resonating with other people or resonating with ideas, thinking and communicating, speaking. Now that's just amazing. For those of you, probably most of you, who look for a holistic approach to health and you think of the body, the mind and spirit or the soul, what we discover is that actually the heart, in the fullest sense, is at the centre of all those things. It's physical, due to its connected with emotions and thinking, and it's connected also with ultimate values and spirituality. You may be aware that there’s different kinds of intelligence. There’s the IQ, that is often measured to see how intelligent you are but there’s also something called the ‘emotional intelligence,’ which actually has a larger impact on your success in life than your IQ and developing the heart in ways I shall be introducing, help to develop emotional intelligence. So the opportunity for us is to develop the wisdom of the heart because in this organ that we only ever thought was a lump of muscle that beats and pumps, lies an intelligence that we can communicate with and benefit from. That’s a diagram you don’t want to worry too much about. Brain on the top left. Heart on the bottom right. It shows the fact that there’s a number of nerves, nerve connections. Some involving the spinal cord and some involving the vagus nerves, which connect the heart and the brain. What's interesting is that in the vagus nerve there are more messages going from the heart to the brain than there are the other way around. In fact 10 times as many but the heart is sending 10 times as many messages and information, and wisdom to the brain than the other way round. It’s an interesting thought.
Now let’s just rehearse this quick coherence technique again.
Remember the heart focus, the heart breathing and the heart emotion. So focus on our heart and then, once again, slow down the breathing. As I’m talking, of course my breathing tends to be faster but now I, with you, have the opportunity to slow down my breathing, take a bigger breath deeper and slower, and let it out in a relaxed way and at the same time, remember someone I love, someone I appreciate or a happy memory. Maybe a concert tour. Maybe another person in your life. Someone you love. Someone in the family. So right now here’s another chance. This is a relaxation exercise but it’s actually more than a relaxation exercise, it’s increasing the amount of oxygen that’s coming to your whole body. It's giving you something positive to focus on, making your breathing more efficient, more regenerating and it’s giving you a chance to remember someone you love or something you love and to enjoy doing so, and it's kind of grounding this sense of appreciation with a physical activity that you can do yourself anytime. So, breathe in a couple of breaths, in and out of appreciation.
For those of you who are interested in technology, Heart Math produced quite a few pieces of equipment and I use one of those. You can put a probe or a sensor on a finger or on your ear lobe, which is then plugged into your computer and there’s software that shows you how coherent you are in this sense of coherence, which I’ll be explaining in a minute and it gives you instant and real-time feedback of the way in which your breathing and your heartbeat are becoming coordinated with each other. And those who do this exercise regularly discover increasing benefits.
So we've talked about the role of the heart. Secondly, the influence of the heart still in this great big topic of how your heart can help your mind. So what’s the influence of the heart? Well your heart has a rhythm. I’m sure you’re aware that your heart is beating. Sometimes it beats faster, sometimes it beats harder, sometimes slower but your heart is not just something that speeds up and slows down it has a beautiful pattern between the beats and in this diagram I’m going to have to explain a lot of concepts in a short time. The horizontal scale is the passage of time in seconds and the vertical scale is how fast your heart is beating and you see that this person’s heart it starts off beating 60 times a minute. So that’s about one beat every second. It rises to 90 beats a minute, that red line and then comes down again, and then you notice that in the second half of the diagram from the 100 seconds onwards, this subject is choosing the kind of breathing that we’ve just been doing, the coherent breathing. What he's doing is slowing and deepening his breathing, about five or six times a minute and his heart speed is responding because when you breathe in, your heart tends to speed up a little. When you breathe out your heart tends to slow down a little but you can exaggerate that difference between in-breathing and out-breathing. Right, what we've been talking about the heart focus the heart breathing and in- part emotion of appreciation. Now you see what the heart rate is doing when you're frustrated. It doesn't necessarily go very, very fast but it’s… you see the shape of it, its jagged, it’s up and down, up and down. It’s unpredictable. It rises, comes down again, its jagged. It’s like a set of mountain peaks and when you look at the pattern of the heart rate, on the half of the diagram on the right, you see this smooth transition from slower to faster, to slower to faster and that’s the pattern that I’m suggesting we learn to cultivate and make a habit of. It has so many benefits that’s called a coherent heart rhythm and it’s called coherent breathing and the ‘coherent’ simply means that things are ‘In Sync’ with each other. So I’m not talking about how articulate your speech is, when I thought about coherent or incoherent but an internal harmony inside your body.
Your heart has an influence.
Now there is a diagram there of the electromagnetic field of your heart because the heart is a very powerful beating organ it actually sends out a powerful electromagnetic signal and it's a bit like a ring doughnut or a bit like the magnetic field of a magnet and many of you will have, perhaps at school, put a magnet, a bar magnet, underneath a piece of paper and put iron filings on top of the paper and you notice that you get that pattern around filings, which is rather like the pattern you can see on the right hand. What's interesting is that it's hundreds times stronger than the electromagnetic field of the brain. So that’s just a clue that the heart is an important and influential organ. Your heart communicates, as I said, through the blood, through the pressure, through hormones, through nerves and through electromagnetism, and because it’s beating very powerfully and oscillating, it pulls the rest of the organs of your body into rhythm with itself and that's called ‘entrainment.’ Something you would notice in a shop that had a lot of clocks attached on walls that have pendulums or pendulae. They tend to get ‘In Sync’ with each other and they tend to get ‘In Sync’ with the largest and heaviest pendulum called entrainment. That’s what your heart does and if you had chosen a rhythm of tranquillity and appreciation, every organ in your body is going to get into rhythm with your heart. Rhythm of tranquillity, appreciation and love, which is a wonderful truth but you have an electromagnetic field around you, so does everybody else and they interact with each other and if you want to have a good influence on someone, if you want to bring a calming influence or a loving influence, the best way you can do it is to focus on your heart, to focus on this positive emotion and slow down your breathing.
Here’s a diagram showing the interaction of the different heart fields and the way the nature has designed us or God has made us, depending on how you perceive the ultimate cause of the way we are... it’s just tremendous that when we are engaging in an attitude of appreciation or love, or forgiveness, or care that is not only having a good effect on us but it’s increasing the good effect that we have on other people. More than that, it makes us more able to benefit and respond from good vibes coming from other people and I used the word ‘vibes’ cause we’re talking about frequencies and vibrations that are involved in these electromagnetic fields that are carrying waves from us or to us. Now, there are many benefits from this state of coherent heart rhythms and I’ve divided it into three. There’s mental benefits and if you go to the website of HeartMath.org they have a large number of research papers and reports of the research they’ve done, not only in laboratories but in organisations and in healthcare organisations, and they have documented how people who regularly do this simple practise, that I’m teaching you today and use it in different ways and develop it in certain directions end up with a number of mental benefits and then we actually perceive things more accurately, feel better, make better decisions and solve problems better, are more creative and have a more useful sense of intuition. Sometimes we get a sense that something is good or something is perhaps unsafe, ‘sixth sense’ we might call it. What's being noted is that that sense of just knowing intuitively, as it might be called, is enhanced when you cultivate this coherent breathing pattern regularly. As well as mental benefits, there are physical benefits and a number of heart conditions are actually improved by the people who are doing these exercises regularly, which is very encouraging because we might not have known until today, that actually you can have a benefit on the health of your heart, not only by eating the right things and by exercising appropriately but by also learning to manage your stress and also enjoying love. Love for yourself, love for other people, love from other people.
Other benefits
Various aspects of diabetes have been observed to improve in people who are doing this. There is a link there because in diabetes, the nerves themselves become damaged. Well it's the blood levels of sugar and what we're doing with this coherent exercise, is we are toning up and tuning up our nerves, as well as our blood and our blood vessels, and indeed every organ. We also improve our immune system. It’s been shown that some of the immunoglobulins actually are put out in larger concentrations when people are focusing on the heart in the way I’ve been talking about and also that some of our hormones get into a better balance
Thirdly, relationships benefit enormously when we have this coherent heart rhythm because empathy, which is that sense of understanding what someone else is feeling or having a sense of what it’s like towards them, or the other way round, if you’re with someone who is empathic they have a real sense of what it's like for you and what you're feeling. That's something that's very valuable in the world of counselling and therapy, and what we've noticed or what the Heart Math Institute have discovered, is that empathy between people improves when they're both practising heart coherence. Communication between them improves. It is as though they are listening with their heart or listening to the heart and not just the words. So that’s very powerful and I’ve been using Heart Math in my counselling and in my coaching, as well as in my medicine, by putting myself into this stage of coherence and it enables the person that you're trying to help to come into a more coherent state. It helps you to be more empathic. It aids the understanding and communication between the two of you.
So, how can we increase the influence of our heart?
Well, I’ve been giving you some clues and I’m going to pull them together. What I’ve been saying is that your heart has the greatest positive impact on other people, when you have a heart focus, when you have heart breathing and when you have a heart emotion, and the emotions to cultivate are 5 main ones. Appreciation or gratitude is a big one and even the action of choosing to appreciate someone or something, actually does us a huge amount of good. Imagine spending an hour, on the one hand, grumbling, being miserable, telling everyone how awful it is. Compare that with spending an hour or even 5 minutes, noticing what you appreciate, noticing what you value, what you're grateful for. Even right now, I can look around and I can see my study and you can see some of the books behind me. How nice it is to have a room big enough for a study and how nice it is to have books on the shelves, how nice to have a computer and a keyboard, how nice to be able to deliver something with PowerPoint, how nice to have a comfortable chair to sit on, how comfortable to have something to say, hopefully worth hearing, which you'll find out about that later and there are so many things. Just the fact that I can breathe. The fact that I can take a big breath and I can increase my breathing. The fact that right now, I can choose to breathe in or peace, or happiness, or appreciation. So many things we can appreciate and it's no surprise that people who spend most of their life appreciating things live longer and are happier and are more healthy, and the heart is the key.
36:18
You know that forgiveness is more of a benefit for you than the person you’re forgiving.
Forgiveness is an important one too. You know that forgiveness is more of a benefit for you than the person you’re forgiving. It’s when you decide to release hatred and anger, and bitterness, and those who practise Heart Math find that it becomes easier to engage with forgiveness. Now I’m not going to gloss over how difficult it is, when you’ve been badly and deeply hurt but what I’m saying is, and I’m not giving a talk about forgiveness, in particular, but it is possible to achieve a stage of forgiveness and your heart can help you do it any the way that we have been talking about. Lack of forgiveness may be something in your life that is actually holding you back and damaging you more from the person you need to forgive. The other thing is compassion and care. A sense of compassion for someone. When you’re feeling compassionate for someone and if at that same time you focus on your heart and you slow down your breathing, you can actually convey compassion and care to them and probably become more practical in the ways of how you might deliver compassion. So how to increase the influence of your heart, is exactly those things. It’s cultivating those five… we call them call ‘core heart emotions’ in Heart Mass. Appreciation, love, forgiveness, compassion and care. Care is not anxiety. It’s a desire for someone’s well-being and it’s not coloured with worry about their well-being but it’s a genuine desire to do them good, care. That is a heart building emotion. You can develop this ability with practise.
So let’s practise that again.
I want you to identify a person that you would like to have a good effect on. Maybe a person that is giving you a hard time. Maybe a person who is not giving you a hard time and you really love and they got a need and you’d just love to benefit them, to bless them, to help them. Well, I invite you to do this exercise.
So think about that person. Sense how much you appreciate them or how much you can love and how much you care for them and slow down the breathing. Focus on your heart. Put your hand on your heart, if that helps and breathe in. Have a sense of breathing in love, compassion and care and as you breathe out, imagine that you’re sending love, compassion and care to that person. Breathing in love and sending out love, care, compassion and if you can picture them in your mind's eye, that's wonderful. If you can, even picture them receiving your love. Picture them feeling better as a result of the love you’re sending them. Now what I’ve just described may sound like complete hocus pocus but there’s a huge scientific basis for it and people who do this discover that relationships are enhanced. Some of you already operate from the heart and you’ve already started doing it and what I’m teaching you is just confirming what you already know. It’s giving you a scientific support and a medical support, and maybe it’s encourage in you to do it more, and some of you, for whom this is totally new, well that’s great isn’t it! We’re all learning. We can all learn as much as we choose. We will learn at different speeds. Some of you will be learning this much faster than I am and that’s fantastic. Some of you might need help to learn it and you may need to approach someone who could help you to get in touch with your heart in the ways we’ve been talking about.
How your heart can help your mind
So the third and final part enlisting the heart, which is really just summarising what I’ve been saying. Your heart amplifies good emotions. Choosing emotions that you like, like love or compassion, or appreciation. Take it to your heart. In other words become aware of your heart, slow down your breathing. Get the benefit in body and mind.
Here are a few principles, a few more thoughts that you could develop about guarding and using your heart. There’s a verse in the book of Proverbs, which was written about 1000 years before Christ. It appears in our Bible, in the Old Testament that says, “Above everything guard your heart because out of it are the issues of life.” For out of it are the boundaries of life or from your heart emerges the factors that are gonna have a big impact on your life. So first off, feed your heart with positive emotions. Just take note how much of our time we spend feeling angry, frustrated or stressed, for example or resentful and then notice that we could actually choose. Like right now I’m going to choose to appreciate something. Right now I’m going to choose to remember how much I love such and such a person.
Second thing, is what's known as writing on your heart. Again in the book of Proverbs, it says, “Write good things on your heart.” Write truth and what you learn from the heart, what you really believe, if you take a sad example of a child who was told by an authority figure, “You’ll never amount to anything,” and they believe it. So you see they hear words and it's connected with an emotion, a strong emotion of rejection and not being valued and probably self-rejection. At that moment they write on their heart, as opposed to write on their head, information with emotion and that often becomes then a limiting factor for the rest of their adult life. Deep down there’s this subconscious sense that they’re not worthy or they won’t amount to anything and again, I’m opening up a huge area here, in terms of counselling and therapy but what I’m suggesting is that we have the opportunity to write positive messages on our heart, by the combination of words and positive emotions. Positive thinking has some value but not very much but positive speech together with engaging a positive emotion, like appreciation, while we’re saying positive things, has a much deeper impact on our life. Much bigger change in the way we feel about ourselves and we feel about the world, the way we engage.
Writing on your heart
Listen to your heart
Because I said that the heart communicates. If you put yourself in this coherent state and tune in to what your heart is saying, often you get at some wisdom, which doesn’t come when we’re rushing around breathing very rapidly and feeling stressed. So this just tuning in heart focus, heart breathing and heart emotion of appreciation, can sometimes produce some wisdom that we just notice coming in. An idea that comes perhaps or a person fleets across our mind, who might be able to be someone that we contact, for example.
Rejoice with your heart
Whenever I’m happy I try to remember to do this heart focus breathing because that’s going to make the impact of my happiness greater and it’s going to help me to remember that happy event more.
Meditate with your heart
Many people from many religions understand the value of meditation, which is slowing down and focusing on appropriate things, whether they be words or bodily sensations, or there’s a whole range of ways of meditating but here is a way of meditating. It’s to come in that coherent state and then just notice what our heart might be saying or simply focus on the breathing in and out, appreciating the fact that we can breathe in and out. How lovely it is. There are all sorts of meditations that can involve the heart.
Practise engaging your heart
I try to do it several times a day to slow down my breathing. Ah yes, focus plus breath plus emotion.
Now, coming towards the end. There's a hidden power struggle. Your brain says, “Dear heart, it's all in your head.” In other words, our thinking and our logic, and our brain, our rationality, sometimes, or quite often, overlooks the quiet wisdom of the heart and doesn't recognise the value of it. My journey is not from head to the heart but it is getting head and heart to listen to each other because both have messages for us, which are valuable.
You may be aware that our brain is divided into two. That's the brain inside our head and by choosing to alter our emotional state through the heart focus, in the way that I’ve been saying, we can modify the messages that go up to our brain and here’s an exciting thought. There’s a left brain and there’s a right brain, and they operate in two different ways. Some of you probably are aware of this. This is a gross oversimplification but it’s a useful one because it highlights the fact that we have different ways of functioning and they need to work in harmony with each other. With the left side of the brain that tends to be at the association of logic and things that are linear, one after the other and laws, things that are and are not and language, linguistic. On the right side of the brain, it’s more to do with relations and responses, art, rhythms, responses, reaching for the stars, risk-taking and see all those things beginning with ‘r.’ So what’s been noted by the Heart Math, is that people who are engaging the coherent heart rhythm, find that the two halves of their brain are working together better, producing creative results or a combination that gives you a broader perspective on an issue or on a decision, for example. So there's a thought, how your heart can help your brain.
Here's a quick list of some of the benefits that have been documented of the effects on mental health. Increased positive outlook and motivation, calmness, etc. Less fatigue, resentfulness and stress symptoms. Better ability to do these things, perceiving making decisions, solving problems, better sleep and in terms of common mental health problems, less anxiety, less depression. It’s a bit like physiotherapy. You can be given an exercise and if you do it regularly, next time you visit your physiotherapist you’ll have improved. If you don’t do it regularly, you go back to your physiotherapist and you won’t have improved. The only difference is that you've done it regularly. What the Heart Maths research found, was that people who make a habit of this coherent breathing, heart focus and actually had documented decreases in the measures of anxiety and depression and anger.
I’m going to just tease you with a new idea but I’m not going to go to into it in any detail because of the time. We have a brain in our head, the cephalic brain. We have a brain in our heart, the heart brain, cardiac brain. We have a brain in our gut, called the enteric brain. You may not be aware that your gut has a brain, as well. Three big brains that we’ve got. Well, they’re not all the same size of each other but good decisions and good living require us to be taking account of the wisdom of all these three brains.
Another qualification and therapy that I include in my counselling and coaching, is something called multiple braining, helping people to connect with the wisdom of the head and the heart, and the gut. With the head, one can sum it up in a way by saying creativity at the heart, you can sum it up with the word compassion, which is connecting with other people in a loving way and the gut is to do with courage. Now that's a huge top level oversimplification but just a reminder there's huge amount that we can learn and enjoy learning about the way we’re structured and we have access to learn about it.
There is some a book that I recommend if you want to explore that and maybe I can do a session in the future on the multiple brains but ‘Using multiple brains to do cool stuff.’ Based on neuroscience and using NLP and behaviour role modelling. In a nutshell, I will have to say this so quickly we won’t have time to do it but when you need to make a decision, the people who make the best decisions regularly, scientific research has shown, that they have somehow tapped into a particular procedure and they consult their head, their heart and their gut, about the decision but they do it in this particular order; go to their heart first, then their head, back to their heart, then their gut and then back to their heart. Now to learn how to do this would obviously take time. Just a teaser for you. For your professional development or maybe for your personal development.
So what's the conclusion
We can cultivate attitudes and we can use opportunities. We can cultivate appreciation and optimism. Love, compassion, care and altruism and forgiveness and we can cultivate it by using these heart focused breathing exercises and the times to use the opportunity are when we're stressed regularly and when we're with other people.
So, thank you very much for listening to this. I hope you have enjoyed it. I hope that you’ve learnt something practical, the heart focus, the heart breathing and the heart emotion. An exercise that you can put into practise anytime you choose and you can become more expert with it. So, there again, is the final reminder the heart focus, the heart breathing, slower and deeper, and the heart feeling, appreciation or care.
If you wish to contact me, that's my name and my personal email address stephen.brooks3@ntlworld.com Carol also has in her hand or on her desk, a book that I have written, which takes these matters a little bit further. It’s designed as a 15-day journey called, ‘Your amazing heart’ and each day there’s one short chapter of three pages, which includes… it’s got quite strong spiritual emphasis to it, which might attract some or not attract others, a little bit of science, a little bit of medicine and an exercise that you can do, a kind of meditation to which you can adapt according to your worldview. It’s written from a Christian perspective and that’s available. If you contact me I can post one out to you.
I do offer counselling and coaching, which is very much heart based and again if you’re interested in that then feel free to email me at stephen.brooks3@ntlworld.com
So, thank you very much, Carol, for this opportunity to share. I hope this has been enjoyable for everyone who’s watching and I hope it’s something that you can take and apply and learn to enjoy even more. So thank you very much and goodbye from me.
Carol: Well thank you very muc, Dr. Steven. Maybe you can stop screen sharing. That’s great, yeah. No that’s absolutely amazing and as you said you know it is in this book, which I’ve been looking at and found really useful myself. So I know that this is really something that can work and that people will find great benefit from it.
So thank you again and yes, just to remind our members, we will be doing, at the end of the month, on the group Facebook members’ page, answering any questions. So do put any questions in the Facebook group and then we will be answering them at the end of the month. So that would be great.
So I’d really like to thank you, Dr. Stephen, for this time because it’s just opened our eyes. The book has opened my eyes but even with your explanation it’s gone further. The heart is just amazing and how it really affects our Wellness in such an amazing way, that we’ve not really taken on board and how we can help ourselves with your exercises and really appreciate in your heart. So I’d like to thank you again, Dr. Stephen and encourage everybody else to put those ideas that have been suggested, into practise ‘coz they really do work.
Yeah, this is Carol saying goodbye for this month and remember to come back and have another look next month because we’ll be into new areas.
So thank you and goodbye.
Dr Stephen Brooke
Speciality
Stress/anxiety, Personal & Spiritual Development, Lifestyle & Time Management, Resilience Training, Holistic Wellness.
Services
NLP, EFT, MBIT, Pastoral Counselling, Life Coaching.
LIVE LIFE TO THE FULL.