Resilience From the Heart: Gregg Braden
Our ancestors didn’t know the science of why things work the way they do. They simply knew how to apply the principles in their lives. Science is giving us the nuts and bolts of how things work, but science cannot tell us specifically how we apply it in our lives. This is why in the book, I married these two straight ways of knowing into a single wisdom: The best science of the modern world and the wisdom of 5,000 years of human experience, so that we have a wisdom available to us now of which I believe is greater than science can be all by itself. But it’s also greater than spirituality or the indigenous traditions can be all by themselves because it’s the best of both worlds.
OMTimes: Thank you for this clear explanation, Gregg, it all makes so much sense, and yet, the tools that are available to us to improve our Heart Rate Variability and therefore create resilience almost seem too simple to be effective.
Gregg Braden: That’s such a key factor Dirk and thanks for pointing that out. Some of these techniques are indeed so simple, they are deceptively simple. I think a lot of that comes from the age that we live in. We live in a technological age where we have been desensitized to the subtleties of what happens inside of our own bodies, because we are so accustomed to the machines and the technology outside of our bodies giving us such huge sensations. When we go to a theater and we’re seeing it all in 3D and we’re feeling the chairs vibrate because of the subwoofers and all of those things, and when we become accustomed to that, there’s a tendency to discount the more subtle experiences that we have when we close our eyes and go within because we’re not feeling them at the same level. Once we get deeply into these states, we start feeling much more than in that theater. I can’t think of anything more profound, but when we watch some action on a TV screen and then close our eyes and we go within it might feel boring. When we are immersed in the technology, the hustle and bustle of everyday life in the big cities today, we have to be conscious and we have to make an effort to still appreciate the sensitivity of our inner world as well so that we don’t lose touch with that.
