As Bob Dylan once said, “The Times They Are A-changin.” In that song are some revealing lyrics like, Gather ’round people, Wherever you roam, And admit that the waters, Around you have grown. Indeed, our world has grown and demands a new way of perception and engagement. In another verse he says, Come writers and critics, Who prophesize with your pen, Keep your eyes wide, The chance won’t come again. Being a writer and sometimes a critic I know the importance, and responsibility, of the written word. We are in critical, albeit amazing times and we have a window of opportunity and if we miss it, this chance won’t come again. Organizations like HeartMath are seeing much further over the horizon and would be the first to say that We are A-changin also. With any social, biological, spiritual or cultural change comes great responsibility on the part of individuals who’ve glimpsed at that far horizon, so listen in. Rahasya Poe, Publisher of Lotus Guide
Lotus Guide: Hello, Howard. I’m pretty sure that most of our readers know about HearthMath and the great work that you’ve been doing there for over 25 years; if not, they can visit your website at www.HeartMath.org. What I would really like to know about is: What is HeartMath up to today? There’s a lot going on on our planet that is precarious to say the least, but at the same time you can see a new sacred emerging consciousness bubbling up through humanity. Personally, I think that this emerging consciousness is the only thing that’s going to actually save this planet and us. So what I’m curious about here are your thoughts on this and how HeartMath is playing a role in it.
Howard Martin: Let me just say this—we are in the midst of a dimensional consciousness shift, the biggest one that humanity has ever experienced on our planet. And we are at a critical point in this shift and we’re going full speed. Things are going in the right direction, regardless of what we see from time to time. If you stand back you can see that there is an emerging consciousness that has a different set of values and a different set of beliefs; they’re seeing the world differently than they used to and are manifesting that in their behaviors. We watched the news and see all the abhorrent behavior and it may seem at times that things are getting worse.
It’s my belief that we’ve already crossed the line where the apocalyptic scenarios are not going to be a reality. There’s been enough love, compassion, and change of consciousness that we have gone past that point. We’re still in process where there will be ups and downs; there will be challenges. And to the point that you just made, we will need a different level of consciousness to meet those challenges, and I believe from what I’ve seen around the world that this consciousness is alive and well. And of course HeartMath has played a part in this process. I believe that the consciousness shift is about a new understanding of the intelligence of the heart, and this isn’t about HeartMath, it’s about the evolution of consciousness itself.
What HeartMath is about is developing technology that help people understand this process and through feedback helping to accelerate it. But there’s more to it than this; it’s about meeting the needs of this emerging intelligence or consciousness.
LG: It’s interesting that you used the word “apocalypse.” It’s one of those words in our language that has been hijacked, but the original meaning was “a lifting of the veil.” So actually, in a sense, if this is the actual meaning of the word “apocalypse,” we are in the midst of this as we speak. But speaking of HeartMath technology, I was amazed at the results by using the EM Wave device. Because of some other training I’ve done in neural feedback, I can recognize when I’m in alpha and this little device puts me there very quickly by bringing my brain and heart into coherence through simple feedback.
HM: Well, that little device, which I’m glad you have when you’re using it in the way you’re using it, has a lot of palpable and advanced technology packed inside there. It actually measures your heart rhythms, and the medical term for that is “heart-rate variability analysis.” The more ordered and synchronized those rhythms are improves almost every aspect of our life, physical, mental, and emotional. But probably more important, it puts you in a state where more of our spirit can merge with our humanness, and that merging represents the next level of intelligence; it’s an intuitive intelligence and that’s what it’s going to take to solve the problems that we face today.
LG: One of the questions I would like to ask you is something that I wrestle with personally. It’s really great to stay positive and think positive thoughts, but how do you stay positive and still look and deal with the reality that we are faced with almost on a day-to-day basis?
HM: Well, we need to look at a couple of things here. One is that we need to reduce the drama that we tend to attach to our perceptions of reality. We have emotional habits—something hits us a certain way or bumps into our vanity, we can end up adding a lot of drama needlessly. This is normal—normal feelings and reactions—but then we tend to dump all of our emotional energy into these situations and end up making something that we watched on the news a bigger situation than it actually is. Then, of course, the next step is that we start adding blame and judgment. What we’re doing is we are bleeding off excess emotional energy, but it ends up actually having an impact in our world. What this does over time is it lowers the vibratory rate of the collective consciousness; then we start seeing the world through a lower vibratory rate and our perception is our reality. The antidote to this is to see the world through compassion and how we do this is by seeing the world with our heart. The great thing about heart intelligence is it gives us the ability to regulate our emotions. I use the word “regulate” here intentionally because it’s not about suppression, it’s about how do we make emotional choices that keep us in a higher vibration, which in turn will keep us in a place of higher service to the world around us.
The intelligence of the heart works at a much faster speed so we can wrap it around these emotions and help guide us. It’s through this process of emotional regulation that we actually advance our consciousness. So many of us want a higher consciousness but find it difficult to deal with these lower emotions that tend to grab us sometimes.
LG: You know, Howard, this makes total sense to me because I find myself adding drama to some of the situations I see happening in the world today. It seems like the trick to living a more positive life is to look at the world, do what you can do, then let it go.
HM: Well, first of all, everybody tends to do this. This is standard human programming and I’ll tell you where it comes from, it comes from caring. If you didn’t care, this would be a nonissue. There’s a term in HeartMath that we use to describe this and it’s called “over care.” This is the place where the care that we started out with crosses the line and takes on the characteristics of worry, judgment, stress, and anxiety. But it all started with caring because you can’t have “over care” unless you started caring in the first place. I experience this in myself sometimes and end up having too much emotional feed into something. But then what I tried to do is go back to that original state of caring and find balance where the original caring is operating at a higher state.
LG: One of the words that comes up quite a bit in HeartMath is the word “balance” and it takes me back to the time when I was learning to ride a bicycle. When I was first learning to ride with what we might call my old mind or consciousness, it was all mechanical and a very conscious process. But then there came that magic moment when something shifted and what was once inevitable—falling—became impossible. And at that moment I realized that there was a conscious shift that took over this process and I sometimes wonder if this is what will happen in the next conscious shift, a sudden realization of a whole new level of awareness.
HM: Let me just add something to this. What people are looking for is actually right in front of their face. It’s right there for the taking and what we need to do is to want it and be willing to take those last steps within ourselves to go get it. And usually those steps are small steps, and we know what they are through our intuition to do certain things or to not do certain things. Once we make those self-empowering steps is when we find ourselves there in a new realm of conscious awareness. It almost reminds me of walking out into the ocean when the water is a little cold. We can take small steps and ease into it somewhat, but there comes a time when we just need to go for it and jump in. It’s kind of like that in this new consciousness. We’re already in the water, we know we’re in it, and we can feel it. It’s just taking that one last empowering step and jumping in. This is when we have a whole new perspective of life.
Something to consider is the fact that the shift, this new consciousness, is way bigger than humanity; it’s happening whether we like it or not. It’s our own resistance that’s standing in the way of making this a positive and gentle process. This is much bigger than us, or even the planet Earth. We’re right in the middle of it and making conscious choices of how we relate to it and many people struggle with this. These are usually the people who don’t have the tools to help them. They’re good people, but they’re struggling to survive and don’t have a lot of understanding of the process that we’re talking about right now. These are the people who we need to have compassion for and reserve judgment. And here’s the thing. By giving them compassion we are not only helping them; it’s also the fastest way that we can grow more conscious ourselves.
(At this point, Howard and I have an interesting conversation about the global brain and the manifesting and expanding consciousness, the same conversation I have had with Peter Russell, Bruce Lipton, and others. But it’s far too long and complex to transcribe for this article. If you are a Bruce Lipton fan … well, watch the interview. You can go to www.YouTube.com/LotusGuide to watch the whole interview.)
For me it’s all about energetic connectivity. We all live in this vast field of consciousness that’s reflecting back to us not only what we think in our minds, but what we feel in our hearts. And science is showing us now that everything is connected (this is called “entanglement”); every living system on this planet and throughout the universe is connected to this vast web of energetic connections. Part of the new consciousness is for us to see this and understand it and ultimately experience it. This has been in the spiritual writings for millennia and we understand this but it’s a conceptual understanding. It’s a belief that we have but now through science we are starting to see the evidence and this will take it to a level of knowing.
I really believe that the biggest service that you or I or anybody else in the world could do is to make these changes within ourselves. This consists of things like adjusting our attitude in the moment, going against the grain, breaking our predictable patterns. What happens when we do this is that it puts that energetic frequency into the field of consciousness, which modulates and emanates back down into the collective consciousness, which has an effect on everyone. We never see the total effects of our service because it happens at an energetic level. Part of the excitement and fun of what’s happening is the gradual understanding of this process and how we play a significant part in it.
Note from Lotus Guide: Howard and I went on to talk of the importance of this process in regard to addiction, emotional understanding, and the significance of conscious awareness in every moment. I really encourage you to watch the whole interview at www.YouTube.com/LotusGuide and also to visit www.HeartMath.org to see the technology that’s available that can assist you in your own conscious evolution. I’ve always liked the word “responsibility” because it literally means to have the ability to respond to your environment, and it seems to me that the environment that we all live and breathe in is drastically different from what most people perceive it to be. So your journey, your conscious evolution, your life, is your responsibility … no one can do it for you. So take that next step and jump in and join us.