 I recently attended an excellent lecture by Dr Rollin McCraty of the Heart Math Institute, where he talked about the importance of self-regulation. I share some of my insights here...
I guess the best place to start is to answer the question of what is self-regulation? Behaviourally, self-regulation is the ability to act in your long-term best interest, consistent with your deepest values. Emotionally, self-regulation is the ability to calm yourself down when you're upset and the ability to cheer yourself up when you're down. The fact that sticks out for me is this: failures of self-regulation are central to the vast majority of health and social problems. Because self-regulation is how we deal with stressors it lays down the foundation for all other activity. Learning self-regulation requires self-awareness, emotional intelligence, efficient filtering of sensory stimulation, coping effectively with stress, relating well to others, and sustaining focus. Ideally we’d learn this naturally in childhood simply from being around self-regulating adults, from playing and exercising, being in nature, eating well and getting plenty of sleep. Unfortunately that is often not the case and we only have to look around at our society to see the impact of dys-regulation, both on children and on adults. We have repeating patterns that are being passed down generation to generation.... Consistent self-regulation requires focus on your deepest values rather than feelings. Did you know that the heart sends more information to the brain that the brain sends to the heart? This means that our emotions affect our physiology (our body) much more than our thoughts. In fact, it is where we most waste energy. And our Hearts are amazing, with a storehouse of intelligence... a fact that completely inspired me from the lecture was finding out that a future event that is emotionally relevant will be known by the heart before the event takes place (the heart produces a measurable neural signal which has been scientifically tested). This shows that the Heart has access to a field of information that is not limited by boundaries of time and space! When we are self-regulated and coherent, our magnetic field is coherent, and our heart’s magnetic field acts as a carrier wave, impacting all those we come into contact with. Now there’s a powerful image for sure. Our nervous systems can detect these magnetic fields better than any technology currently known to man. Awesome! Somewhere, our hearts, physics, and the Earth’s electromagnetic field all connect—and their intersection is both incredible and intuitive. One of the primary resonant frequencies of the Earth’s field-line resonances is 0.1 Hz—and that is exactly the same frequency as the human heart rhythm when we’re in a heart-coherent state. So 0.1Hz is the human resonant frequency—the frequency at which spirit, heart, mind, emotions, and body are in resonant alignment with the planet. Yes, the earth Herself. So in a nutshell, the more heart coherent we are, the greater the resonant energetic connection we have with people, within ourselves, and with all of nature. What a powerful force humanity would be in this coherence.... But the most important thing I want to get across is no matter who you are, where you come from, where you are going or why you are here, at an individual level you can make a huge difference. You are not small and insignificant. Simply learning to self-regulate will feed into the larger Earth field environment. Becoming responsible for our own thoughts, emotions, and actions (and not blaming others) will feed into the larger Earth field environment. Being kind, compassionate and more appreciative feeds into the larger Earth field environment. These steps are available to anyone; and along with the health benefits, will go a long way towards social harmony and heart coherence for all. |