SGM Feb 2017 Weekly Message Three: “Research Reveals Heart Healing Secrets of Inner Smiling”
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Welcome to this week’s edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM!
Do you ever struggle with feelings of unworthiness, find it challenging to love yourself, or wonder if you’ll ever be able to overcome the heartbreak of losing someone you love?
Do you long to experience deeper, more loving relationships, but find that the pain in your past is like a wall of protection that keeps love away? Behind that wall is there a hole in your heart that nothing seems to fill?
And, did you know that heart attacks are precipitated by mental-emotional stress? It’s no wonder that more heart attacks occur on Monday morning, as the work week begins.
Healing Your Heart
What if you could connect with your heart in a way that was deeply nurturing, in a way that released the pains of the past, let down your walls of protection, and helped you feel safe to love yourself and others in a way that finally healed your emotional wounds?
What if this nurturing heart connection was the secret to unlocking your body’s natural healing powers and empowering you to step forward into the life of deeper meaning and purpose you are meant live?
In this week’s message, we’ll explore a centuries-old practice that’s recently been updated through extensive scientific research by The Institute of HeartMath®. This practice is “Inner Smiling.” It is a powerful way to reduce stress, improve your health and immune response, stay calm in the midst of chaos, connect more deeply with your spiritual essence and with others, and find inner clarity and intuitive guidance.
If you are already familiar with Inner Smiling, I’ll share some fascinating new research to help you deepen your practice. If this is all new to you, I’ll show you three simple steps to practice it!
The basis of Inner Smiling is actively self-generating positive feelings such as appreciation, gratitude, love, and trust. The Institute of HeartMath® has discovered the power of focusing on your heart while you generate these feelings. In the subtle energy meditation tradition of Qigong (“chee-gung”) in which I teach, we expand this practice to include cues from nature and our body as a whole.
To see just how powerful and effective this practice can be, let’s begin with some fascinating research by The Institute of HeartMath® that reveals a surprising new understanding of the heart. Here’s the first fascinating fact:
1. Did you know that your heart is more than a simple pump for your blood? It is a highly-complex information processing center that has a mind of its own. It is like a second brain, that is, in some ways, even more powerful than the brain in your head—and more capable of promoting deep healing.
As Director of Research for the HeartMath® Institute, Rollin McCarty, Ph.D. writes:
“The heart-brain, as it is commonly called, or intrinsic cardiac nervous system, is an intricate network of complex ganglia, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells, the same as those of the brain in the head. The heart-brain’s neural circuitry enables it to act independently of the cranial brain to learn, remember, make decisions and even feel and sense.”
(Science of the Heart, Volume 2: Rollin McCarty, Ph.D., HeartMath Institute, 2015, p.5)
This leads to a second fascinating fact.
2. The heart actually sends more information to the brain than it receives from the brain. This is why you can’t just “think yourself better.”
Your heart communicates with your body and brain through four pathways: neurologically through nerve signals, biochemically through hormones and neurotransmitters, biophysically through the pressure waves of your pulse, and energetically through electromagnetic field interactions represented in your emotions.
Because of the power of emotional signaling, the feelings experienced in your heart dramatically impact how you think and feel, as well as how well your body functions—and even how people react around you.
So, how can you put these two facts to work for you? A third finding tells that story.
3. Research has shown that self-generating positive, core-heart feelings such as appreciation, gratitude, love, and trust in your heart, shifts you into a state of optimal function and healing.
As McCarty says, “Self-induced positive emotions can shift psychophysiological systems into more globally coherent and harmonious orders that are associated with improved performance and overall well-being.” (SOTH, p.28)
“The feelings we label as positive actually reflect body states that are coherent, meaning “the regulation of life processes becomes efficient, or even optimal, free-flowing and easy,” and the feelings we label as “negative,” such as anger, anxiety and frustration are examples of incoherent states. (SOTH, V2, p.24)
We’ve all experienced these shifts into and out of coherence. In moments of euphoria, all-of-a-sudden our aches and pains recede, our stress and emotional hurts fade to the background—and we feel great. Yet, the next bad mood or emotional upset is only a careless word or random thought away. Our emotional wounds are still there and easily triggered.
Is it possible to heal our hearts so we create a state of coherence that lasts?
This brings us to the fourth fact.
4. Through the consistent practice of self-generating core heart feelings, as you do with Inner Smiling, you can create a new baseline state, a new way of perceiving the world in a heart-centered way.
The more you practice this, the easier it becomes to stay in a state of coherence for longer periods of time and the easier it is to shift back there when you are stressed or upset. Over time, you re-pattern your dominant outlook on life. You heal the effects of stress in your heart and create a new baseline. Calm, positive coherence becomes your new, chosen, default mode—the state you consciously rest in more and more of the time.
In addition, every time you consciously shift into core-heart feelings, you initiate healing. Healing begins with bringing your heart rhythms into balance. This in turn facilitates coherent brainwaves and integrated whole-brain function. Your parasympathetic nervous system comes online, which is your relaxation and recovery mode. This “relaxation response” lowers your blood pressure, calms your nervous system, improves hormone balance, and gives you a positive feeling of well-being.
When your “relaxation response” is active, your levels of muscle tension decrease, your digestive system receives more blood for doing its job well, and your immune system gets the energy it needs to function at a peak level. As your body relaxes, you decrease production of the stress hormone, cortisol, and increase production of DHEA, which regulates your body’s ability to repair itself. Your body begins to heal.
Your higher-level brain functions come online as well. This is in contrast to when you feel fear and stress, which shuts down your higher brain functions in favor of “hyper-alert” attention to the outer environment. In a state of relaxation, your intuition and creativity are heightened, allowing you to access inner guidance and solutions to any challenges you’re facing.
Pretty exciting stuff!
So, how do you practice Inner Smiling?
Here are three simple steps. I encourage you to practice the following steps for a few moments right now, so you can feel it for yourself.
1. Preparation: sit in a comfortable, relaxed, upright position with your feet on the floor and your hands resting on your legs. Lightly close your eyes. Take several, slow, deep breaths and feel the sensations of breathing inside your body. Breathe slowly and deeply until you come to a feeling of “neutral.”
2. Imagine the warm soothing rays of the sun shining down on your face. Smile as you appreciate this warm sunny feeling. Feel gratitude for this moment of soothing positive energy. Then, imagine and feel this warm happy sensation traveling down through your throat into your heart.
3. Imagine that you are breathing in and out through your heart to focus your attention there.
As you breathe in, imagine and feel as if you are welcoming warm, positive, smiling energy into your heart. Appreciate and feel gratitude for this soothing energy.
As you breathe out, imagine and feel the warm, positive, smiling energy expanding outward from your heart to infuse every cell in your body. Appreciate and feel grateful for this soothing energy.
Notice how you feel.
— — —
You can practice Inner Smiling as part of your daily meditation or for a minute or two anytime you feel stressed.
Now, for some people this positive feeling doesn’t come so readily. It’s possible that you may feel some resistance to feeling positive or some tension with focusing in this way. If so, that’s O.K. No worries.
If you find this at all challenging at first, you can spend a little extra time initially focusing on breathing deeply. As you inhale, imagine and feel that your whole body fills up with your breath. As you exhale, imagine and feel as if your whole body empties out. Allow any feelings of tension or irritation to dissolve in your breath. Do this until you really “let go” and come to a feeling of “neutral.”
Then, once your resistance has dissolved, you can focus on breathing the warm, smiling, positive energy in and out through your heart—and feeling appreciation and gratitude for this experience.
As you practice Inner Smiling more and more, you may find that simply smiling, focusing on your heart, and breathing there instantly shifts you into a positive state of appreciation and gratitude—any time you need. You may find that you are immediately “more yourself,” more in touch with your deeper spiritual essence, and more able to approach life from a peaceful, positive, loving, empowered place.
For me, this practice has helped me heal long-held patterns of worry and judgment, so I am able to more readily notice, appreciate, and be grateful for the gifts in the present moment.
I would love to hear about your experiences with Inner Smiling in our Discussion below.
Until next time,
Enjoy your practice!
Kevin