HeartMath

I am now introducing some technological advances into my consulting hypnotism practice. Private clients already know about my adoption of the HeartMath emWave Pro equipment, introduced into my hypnotic work over the past month. This blog article is to explain how it will help you achieve your healing and goals when working with me, and how this technology will be more deeply integrated into my practice in the months ahead.

I've been following the Institute of HeartMath technology for many years and I am a member of the Institute. The technology has advanced to the point where it can be merged into my hypnotic work, and I introduced the technology immediately. It replaces the older Thoughtstream equipment that was used to get a rough idea of the level of trance you had achieved. While the Thoughtstream worked by measuring the ability of your skin to conduct direct voltage (one of the core measurements of a polygraph), the HeartMath equipment measures the microelectronic activity of your heart which changes from moment to moment. This is called Heart Rate Variation and is a vastly more sophisticated and complex measurement.

The Institute of HeartMath has been doing research for decades on what is called "heart intelligence." This is a somewhat controversial concept, but one that appears well-supported in recent research. The scientific advisory board of the Institute of HeartMath is impressive as is the publication and research list. The conclusion is that your heart is almost a "second brain," and one that controls much of your body, including how your body integrates its different systems. When well integrated (a state the HeartMath Institute calls "coherence") your overall mental and physical health will improve. For those clients struggling with a physical illness or even a stubborn emotional issue, this can make all the difference in the world.

Your heart is a biologically privileged organ. For example, during a heart transplant the surgeons sever the neurological connections between the donor's body and the heart. When implanted into its new host, the heart resumes beating and repairs the severed neurological connections by itself. You can read about it in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery and other places. This is unheard of with any other body organ.

There are more neurons in your heart than in the lower centers in your brain, and the heart communicates with the brain using neurological impulses, pressure variations and electromagnetic pulses. The heart generates a measurable electromagnetic field that is thousands of times more powerful than the electromagnetic field generated by your brain, and the heart has been shown to be sending more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.

Measuring your heart rate variation gives us a proxy for your general level of health and stress. Helping you shift your emotional habits toward those things that smooth your heart rate not only puts you in touch with your own natural healing power, it helps clarify your thinking so you make better decisions. In my research the benefits seem almost magical.

The new HeartMath equipment allows me to see in real time on my computer monitor a graphical display of exactly how you are responding to every aspect of your hypnotic experience. I not only see how deeply you have been hypnotized, but how much time you spend at every level of trance. I am able to see your accumulated score which tells me how well your body is being retrained to handle physical and emotional stress, and I see a second-by-second tracing of how you have responded to every hypnotic suggestion I have made. This allows me to quickly determine what techniques work best for you, where your subconscious mind resists change and how best to overcome that resistance. At the end a graphical report is produced that I can send to you along with my written interpretation. This is a huge advance which I am calling Scientific Heart-Centered Hypnotism. 

At the present time this technology is available only to clients who are seeing me for private sessions at my office. However, within six months I will bring it online for clients who work at a distance over Skype. I will send you a device you can use at home and which uploads the data to my computer for analysis. This service is available to selected long-distance clients now, in return for an agreement to allow your de-identified data to be used in my research.

The scientists at HeartMath have developed a ten-point "HeartMath Solution" that helps with almost all physical and emotional issues. You can read about it in the introductory textbook, The HeartMath Solution as well as other publications. These techniques are very similar to the techniques developed by my original mentor, Bernie Siegel M.D. that have been popularized in his many books.

There are some terminology changes between Dr. Siegel's recommendations and those of the Institute. For example, Dr. Siegel talks about "setting boundaries" with other people, while the scientists at HeartMath talk about "overcaring." However, the core ideas are almost identical. What the Institute at HeartMath adds is a large amount of research data and a scientific formalization of the techniques, complete with objective measurement of progress using electronic equipment.

The practices and habits of "The HeartMath Solution" are being added to my hypnotic work now. Participants in my free group clinics will receive a lower level benefit from them starting with the April 2015 free clinics. While I can't utilize the scientific measurement of heart rate variation during group hypnosis sessions, I can incorporate some of the ideas into that work and I will. Obviously, the best results will always be obtained during my highly-focused individual sessions, and that is what I recommend for serious problems. But I anticipate a helpful result for everyone.

This is an exciting time when science and spirituality are starting to come together and discover that they are completely compatible. Every spiritual or mental state is reflected in the body and every body state is reflected in the mind and spirit. By changing one you can influence the other. I look forward to tremendous progress as these developments go forward.