Feb 10, 2016
Scientific Support that Dropping from Head to Heart Focus is a Real Physiological Experience
In BMEM or Body-Mind-Emotions Meditation, we practice a technique known as the Head to Heart flip. This is a process in which you direct your consciousness away from the head and into the heart. It can be thought of as though the mind (not the brain) is leaving the head and migrating down into the heart. Spiritually, we discuss it in this way.
Those who practice flipping from head to heart will find the experience very intriguing. There is a different perspective when dropping out of the head and into the heart. One’s awareness of being in the heart has a different feel than the typical mode of thinking with the mind lodged firmly in the ‘head space’. The reason to develop this ability is to access a clearer understanding of oneself and one’s reality.
Just thinking about yourself while in meditation, while helpful does not give you a full nor accurate picture of who you are. If you are seeking liberation from negative patterns and emotional turbulence, you’ll need to know yourself emotionally as well as intellectually. Read below how science describes this phenomenon.
Excerpt from a 2001 study conducted by Rollin McCraty, Ph.D and associates entitled Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance. Click here to download the entire study as a PDF.
“The heart is, in fact, a highly complex, self organized information processing center. Traditionally, the study of communication pathways between the ‘head’ and heart has been approached from a rather one side perspective, with scientists focusing primarily on the heart’s responses to the brain’s commands. However, we have now learned that communication between the heart and brain is actually a dynamic, ongoing, two-way dialogue, with each organ continuously influencing the other’s function.”
“Research has shown that the heart communicates to the brain in four major ways; neurologically (through the transmission of nerve impulses), biochemically (via hormones and neurotransmitters), biophysically (through pressure waves) and energetically (through electromagnetic field interactions). Communication along all these conduits significantly affects the brain’s activity.”
“Neurocardiologists have found that 60 to 65% of the cells of the heart are actually neural cells, not muscle cells as was previously believed,” explains child-development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce in a 1999 interview in Journal of Family Life (Volume 5, Number 1).
“They are identical to the neural cells in the brain, operating through the same connecting links called ganglia, with the same axonal and dendritic connections that take place in the brain, as well as through the very same kinds of neurotransmitters found in the brain. Quite literally, in other words, there is a ‘brain’ in the heart, whose ganglia are linked to every major organ in the body, to the entire muscle spindle system that uniquely enables humans to express their emotions.”
“Our emotional cognitive brain has direct, unmediated neural connections with the heart,” Pearce reports. He explains that the brain ‘makes a qualitative evaluation of our experience of this world and sends that information instant-by-instant down to the heart. In return, the heart exhorts the brain to make the appropriate response…In other words, the responses that the heart makes affect the entire human system.”
Thus these scientists conclude, though the brain supplies the heart with perceptions, it is the heart, responding to the reports from the brain, that send positive or negative instructions back to the emotional reactive centers in the brain (and, through hormones released into the bloodstream, to the entire body). Publishers Note from Yogananda’s Second Coming of the Christ.
What can we conclude from this information?
Spiritually it affirms that the human being is created in such a way that communication between one’s thinking and feeling function is part of the highly ebeficial. Having these two functions in harmony fulfills a spiritual purpose of harmony and balance. The pathways are in palce for very sophisticated communication of the brain and the heart. Through conscious study and practice, you can master this communication while in meditation leading to dramatic improvements in decision making as well as an overall state of inner peace.