Howard Martin: The Purpose of Your Heart

Part of that new consciousness is a different kind of awareness and a different type of intelligence that is more intuitive in nature. At HeartMath, we’ve called that Heart Intelligence. It’s an intelligence that is more inclusive of the whole. It begins to consider things and possibilities not just from a self-centric position, as we’ve done that for many thousands of years so far. So the pull and the push inside ourselves to think larger and think more for others is part of what’s going on right there and part of why it relates to Heart. To me that intelligence is also the inspiration for certain emotional qualities that are the most regenerative. Emotions that have often been associated with the word Heart, like love, or care, or compassion, or forgiveness or non-judgment. Those type of emotional qualities are being inspired by this new intelligence. And when that happens they come more to the forefront of our daily activities and that relates to how we perform in the world, and especially how we relate to others but also the inner knowingness we have about ourselves.

When we started at HeartMath, we recognized that we had our own experiences for many years that were related to this intelligence. The goal of HeartMath was to put together a simple system that we could share with the world, which would be useful and help navigate us through these changing times. We were taking a heart centric approach. We recognized that we needed to build a bridge between what people felt intuitively inside and what had been said through spirituality and philosophy for thousands of years. We needed a bridge that could ground that and take it into the daily aspects of our lives. We chose science as that bridge. The reason we chose science is because in our society, scientific or empirical understanding, adds power to belief and then it’s more effective. So we needed to make Heart real, we needed to give it an association that could be more understandable for just about anybody. The science was never designed to take the heart out of Heart but it was designed to give it that empirical side.