Resilience From the Heart: Gregg Braden
The techniques that I am sharing in the book are specifically designed to put us back in touch with this inner world and to do so in a very precise, methodical, sequential way. There are protocols to connect our heart-brain system in a way that is meaningful in our lives.
OMTimes: Can you tell us a bit more about the Intelligence of the Heart?
Gregg Braden: My new book begins with a new discovery that has caught many scientists by surprise, and it’s a discovery in the human heart. In 1991 scientists reported in the technological journals like in the Neurocardiology Journal, and the title of the journal tells the whole story – it’s about brain cells in the heart and that’s precisely what this discovery is all about. The report was published about the discovery of approximately 40,000 specialized cells in the human heart that we would normally find in the brain and in the nervous system. These cells are called ‘sensory neurites’. The reason this is important is because the sensory neurites are scientifically documented that they think independently of the cranial brain. The sensory neurites have a memory and can learn independently of the brain in our head. When you put all of this together, this concentration of neurites is a neural network in the heart, rather than in the brain. It’s so real and it’s so similar to the way that a brain functions that scientists actually call it ‘the little brain in the heart’. This is a relatively new discovery. It validates many of the ancient and spiritual traditions that emphasize our relationship to the heart and the different ways to access the heart. The existence of these cells in the heart tells us that we now have access to something that is called Heart Intelligence, that is separate from the brain.
We can train ourselves to use this heart intelligence and it’s much faster than the brain. When we try to make a decision or answer a question with our brain, our brain will go through a logic process using all the history, all of the fear, the bias, the judgements and the ego which slows things down. The heart doesn’t do any of that. When we are in a coherent state, the heart goes like boom, boom, boom and it has answers to questions often even before we finish stating the question in our mind. The heart has its own memory and has memories that in some instances are clearer than those in the mind because the mind will filter our memories through the conditioning that I mentioned earlier. So there is a completely independent memory and thinking mechanism available to us through the heart. When we marry these two neural networks together, the heart as one network and the brain as the other network, and they become one potent neural network, this is what opens the door to these extraordinary capabilities that we mentioned earlier in this conversation – Intentional deeper states of intuition, insights and intuitive connections with other people, not just incidental, but by intention. We don’t have to wait for nature to give us a spontaneous experience and catch us by surprise, we can intentionally create deep states of intuition, deep states of ‘heart knowing’ and get direct access to our subconscious mind. Many of the patterns that carry into our adult lives begin in the first six or seven years of our childhood, when we are in a brain state that is susceptible to the thinking and the habits and the way that our caretakers deal with life. If we were fortunate enough to have healthy caretakers that have a really healthy worldview, then we absorb those early in life and they are serving us today. But most people, in my experience, didn’t come from that family. What we find is that our caretakers’ fears, judgement, bias, about life, are being picked up in our subconscious by us early in life. They show up in our most intimate relationships, our marriages and our families, they show up in our jobs and how we deal with criticism from our superiors for example. If they’re healthy, there’s no need to do anything. If they’re causes problems in our lives and we want to change them, we’ve got to speak to the subconscious in a language that it recognizes and this heart-brain connection opens that pathway and gives us a hotline directly to the subconscious so that we can heal those unhealthy patterns.
