Opening the Heart Gateway

Have you ever been with a loved one and felt your heart open with a rush of warmth and joy? Most of us have had that kind of beautiful experience at some point in our life. And doesn’t it seem like the heart has its own intelligence in those moments?

In our modern world, the scientists have primarily focused on examining the functions of the brain. But many ancient traditions thought of the heart as the primary seat of consciousness and the key to accessing our inner wisdom. The heart was viewed as the seat of the soul and the brain was viewed as the processor.

Part of our journey of self-discovery is to come back to our heart as the center of our being, rather than our brain. We need to live from the heart, to think, act and speak from the heart. The science is beginning to support the evidence that confirms what ancient wisdom teachings have known all along.

Let’s have a look at this scientific research.

Our journey into the heart takes us into the center of our being. We no longer think of the heart as just a muscle that pumps blood through our body and we are learning that the heart is much more similar to the brain than we previously thought.

Scientists discovered in the 1980’s that the heart is made of a huge number of glial cells and neurons, much like the brain. This has led some researches in the growing field of neuro-cardiology to propose that the heart functions essentially as another brain center in the body.

So what is the role of the heart-brain connection?

We find evidence on how the heart and brain communicate in the new fascinating research of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve runs from the top of the spinal cord down to all of the major organs of our body. It relates to our feelings of altruism, romance, love, joy and other feel-good qualities of the heart. The key ingredient in all these feelings is a neuropeptide called oxytocin. Oxytocin is called the love chemical, because our bodies produce it in higher quantities when we are falling in love or feel joy. Oxytocin is produced both by the hypothalamus gland in the brain and as well as by the heart itself. And the vagus nerve has an abundance of receptor sites that oxytocin unlocks.

Have you ever known someone who seems to be a really big-hearted person, who seems to have plenty of compassion, gratitude, love and joy to share with others? It’s likely that they have generally a high level of activity in their vagus nerve.

What else does the vagus nerve do?

We have all heard how meditation and mindfulness activities reduce stress and improve our health. Research on the vagus nerve has revealed a key piece of information on how and why this actually happens. It turns out that the vagus nerve is the primary nerve controlling our parasympathetic nervous system. As we stimulate the vagus nerve, our heart rate slows down and our relaxation kicks in. This stimulation produces a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine which reduces inflammation and helps to activate our muscles. Why is this so important?

Stress amplifies inflammation and the inflammation accelerates the breakdown of cells, the onset of disease and the ageing process. This is why when we are chronically stressed, we age more quickly and get sick more often. By stimulating the vagus nerve we can reduce the effects of stress.

So how do we stimulate the vagus nerve?

Through simple practices like meditation, qigong, chanting and slow, deep breathing into the belly as well as through positive emotions and connections with other people. That’s why these activities are promoted as anti-ageing, stress reducing and can minimize inflammation in the body as well as boost our immune system.

Our bodies truly have the potential to heal and repair themselves beyond what we can imagine. And the vagus nerve is one of the key players in this process.

So how does this fit in with the heart and brain connection?

The brain and the heart communicate primarily through the vagus nerve. And for a long time, biologists thought of the brain as the command center that directs the rest of the body including the heart. But it turns out that the communication isn’t just one way. Groundbreaking research by the HeartMath Institute has shown the heart actually sends more information to the brain than the other way around. And the heart actually responds to emotional stimuli before the brain does. Even more mind-blowing is that the heart registers a response up to 6 seconds before the stimulus is even presented to us. What does this mean? It shows that the heart intuitively knows what is coming just before it appears, especially if that stimulus might trigger an emotional response within us.

This puts a whole new context to the old saying Listen to your heart. The heart may be the primary driver of the brain, and not the other way around. Spiritual wisdom has thought this for ages – shift out of the brain and into the heart. When we are trying to develop ourselves on a spiritual path, connecting with the heart is crucial. We can’t do it from the mind. We must open the channel of communication to the heart and access this deep well of love, compassion and forgiveness.

Only when our hearts are open can we give and receive more love in our lives. Our heart is a centre of wisdom and connection to our true self. And the first important part on this journey is self-love. If we can come to love and accept ourselves, regardless of how others feel about us, then we can heal our wounds and keep our hearts open.

The heart has a really strong electromagnetic field that connects to our aura. Studies have shown that the heart’s magnetic field is 60x stronger than the brain’s and it extends several feet around the body in every direction. This magnetic field influences every single cell in our body.

Another remarkable aspect of the heart is it’s rhythm, or heartbeat. This rhythm is self-generated and doesn’t rely on the brain. The electrical impulses that establish and control this rhythm arise spontaneously from within the cardiac cells themselves.

So how do we tune in to the rhythm of the heart?

On our journey to accessing our full potential, we need to shift form being head-centred to being heart-centred. We want to let our heart take the lead. An effective way to tune into the rhythm of the heart is to synchronize our breathing with the heartbeat. The more we bring our attention to the rhythm of the heart the more our brain also starts to train into that rhythm. Heart-centered breathing drop us into a transcendental state of consciousness at the delta brainwave frequency level. And in such a state our sense of self disappears, and we come into a different state of awareness. We transition from our egoic self to pure awareness of being.

However, to sustain this coherence, we need to bring in our emotions. It has been found that gratitude and compassion influence our heart-brain connection in powerful ways. Our emotions help us maintain the coherent state and directly influence the energies of our aura and our connection with the quantum field. We need to reach and maintain coherence within ourselves in order to impact the field and this connection is essential for conscious creation and manifestation.

And this is why meditation is so important. With meditation we can train ourselves to maintain a coherent state and impact the quantum field. And our attitude is the major factor that keeps us there. Focusing on gratitude, compassion and love helps us bring our full attention into the heart and into the energies that get us into the coherent state. Creation of this state is a choice we make within ourselves.

How do we use the brain-heart coherence to create our reality?

The key is that we need to be it to attract it. On the spiritual level the rule is that like attracts like. So we want to attune to love, compassion and gratitude from the state of being that is within us. And it begins from us loving ourselves, being compassionate towards ourselves and living a sensory rich life that makes us feel fully alive. Then the hermetic principle of correspondence kicks in – as the inner, so the outer. And we attract more of the same into our lives.

As we come into this coherent state, we shift our awareness from the brain to the heart consciousness. This becomes the bridge to transcendental states as we achieve a full coherence state of our brain, heart and body.

This is something we can all cultivate trough a dedicated meditation practice. And when we access this peak state, we are connected to universal consciousness and we connect into pure joy, compassion and wisdom. It is an enlightened state of being.

Enlightenment is not an end state or a goal, but rather the beginning of an awakening to attaining our own spiritual mastery. And achieving mastery of the heart moves us closer to this state.

Our heart opens the gateway.

A gateway through which we connect with ourselves, with others and with the whole universe.

Let me guide you.

Magda