Resilience From the Heart: Gregg Braden

Now that they are no longer working it’s important to embrace the new discoveries of the best science of the 21st century and this science has overturned those false assumptions and tells us that we live in a world of connection, not separation, that we live in a world where nature is based upon cooperation, not competition and conflict. These are huge shifts in perspective and it is these ways of thinking that offer viable solutions to the changes and the crises that we are seeing in our lives and in our world today.

OMTimes: We briefly spoke about resilience of the heart. What is resilience of the heart exactly and what happens physiologically and psychologically when we become more resilient?

Gregg Braden: What I found when I was touring, was even the word itself has different meanings in different languages and societies. In a traditional textbook of psychology the word resilience is generally defined as our ability to return to a healthy functioning after something happens that disrupts our lives. The ability to bounce back. When we have a loss of a loved one, what we say is that those who are left behind find the resilience to continue with their lives. So that’s the traditional definition and it’s good and it works in some instances. But what I found is that the Stockholm Resilience Institute is working with an expanded form of resilience where we don’t have to bounce back to healthy functioning. It’s a way of thinking and living, every day so that we incorporate the realities of the world in the way that we live and that means that we are more prepared for the extremes. One of the places where resilience begins is in the human heart.

When we’re young we have to adapt to the world and we have to change very quickly and I’ll describe in what way our heart accommodates that. The electrical printout of the human heart, also called an EKG or ECG, shows the squiggly line and the big peak and that is called the QRS complex. What’s happening is between one beat and the next beat and from that beat to the next beat? When we’re very young the time between each beat is different. It varies and that is called Heart Rate Variability (HRV). As we get older we become more set in our ways and we become more rigid in our thinking and that rigidity is reflected in our heartbeat. Our heartbeat becomes more regular and the time from one beat to the next becomes more regular and we lose heart rate variability and we lose resilience in life. It means that change becomes hard for people as they get older. It doesn’t have to be that way and we can literally reverse that in a heartbeat through techniques that have been demonstrated in laboratories and they also parallel what we find in some of the ancient and cherished spiritual traditions. The techniques are all about connecting the brain and the heart together. So the whole idea of resilience begins with the way how our heart functions. New discoveries in the scientific world are now giving us new ways to make that heart-brain connection so that we can become more resilient to the change in our lives and at the same time we become more resilient to life in general and we open the door to some of the most extraordinary capabilities available to us as humans. Things that sound mystical sometimes, things that sound miraculous and they are available to everyone – like deep intuition, direct access to the subconscious, precognitive abilities. But it also triggers a cascade of tremendously healing properties in our bodies, such as activating anti-aging hormones, the immune system is strengthened tremendously, over 1,300 biochemical markers are activated. This all comes from the same experience, connecting the heart and the brain.