You Gotta Have Heart

I have been totally self-absorbed in reading and learning and s t r e  t c h i n g   my consciousness so much that exactly what I want to write about is quite a calligraphy in my mind and heart, but you shall receive it as it forms its expression in the quiet within and finds its highway onto Napkinwriter.

It surely is about heart — yours and mine. It definitely is about our phiosology and our spirituality all adding up to our individual I AM. It is about your I Am and my I AM being part and parcel of ALL THAT IS. And it is about belief giving way to knowing (even sacred beliefs), so much so that I no longer can say I believe,……but rather, “I KNOW.”

Last week Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, “Stroke of Insight” arrived, and oh, how I stold moments of the day to put both my nose and my eyes into that book. It was on my wish list long before I was able to purchase it.

I want to get in my car, drive down to Bloomington, Indiana and find this woman and give her one big bear hug. For WHO she is. For the courage and determination she brought to her recovery….and FOR the true insights  she offered us readers and listeners that came to her after her stroke. 

I will be writing several themes just from this book alone in the near future.

Today, because Valentine’s Day skipped by me as a writer, (but not as a celebrator of love), I am offering  a guest writing from HeartMath Institute, another source of incredible learning and path-sorting for me.

Both HeartMath Institute and Dr. Jill know HOW SMART our hearts and our brains are and how, if we could only listen closely enough to them….we would discover that…

 peace is a natural STARTING PLACE for our body to be……not an end goal that many of us put great effort into achieving. 

I was not gifted in the appitude for Science in school, nor later on in my life, so the scientific language and disclosures are still challenging for me from both these sources. Yet the exciting thing to me is conclusions in the sciences of physiology are coming up with confirming many of the spiritual beliefs I hold are truth.

So here, from the Institute of HeartMath’s Connecting Hearts & Minds Newsletter, written by Sara Childre, President:

Dear Susan,

That first moment of recognition, when we know that fondness has turned to love, is an occasion for celebration! We have found someone who can make us laugh, bring us a joyful tear, sustain us through life’s trials and accept us for who we are. This recognition of love brings a deep contentment and knowingness that something precious has been stored deep within our heart.

Some of us have had this experience more than once in our lives, while many are hoping it will come and wonder when or how to find it. In my experience, we don’t have to wait for that magic to happen; we can learn to cultivate it in our current relationships, and as we do, we draw more fulfilling love to us.

It starts with considering the qualities we value most in friendship. Perhaps you feel a special friendship or love flourishes because you and the other are always willing to accept each other as he or she is. Or maybe it’s the person’s kindness, compassion or forgiveness toward you and others. Or do you attribute a lasting relationship to honest, open and respectful communication? All of these qualities contribute to the foundation of true love and friendship. They are qualities of the heart.

February is Heart Month and Valentine’s Day celebrates the heart, love and friendship. There are myriad magazine articles and books that offer advice for cultivating true love. What if we add a little science to the mix, research that could perhaps help us cultivate the love we want to experience? The Electricity of TouchResearch at the Institute of HeartMath (IHM) has found that the heart literally can make sparks fly between people. When two people are in resonance, there is a powerful transfer of energy produced by the heart. In fact, the heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, about 100 times stronger in amplitude than the magnetic field generated by the brain. Maybe this is why our heart speaks louder than our thoughts at times.

Think of the heart as a radio station, broadcasting a pattern of information on a radio wave through its electromagnetic field. That pattern changes based on what we are feeling. The pattern that’s broadcasted through the heart’s electromagnetic field can be detected (measured) in another person’s brainwaves, when two people are touching or in close proximity. In other words, we are always transferring nonverbal emotional information to each other. This research gives scientific meaning to sayings like, “You could feel the electricity between them,” or “It felt like a current running through me,” or “You could cut the tension in that room with a knife,” or “I could just feel his vibes.”

Additional scientific findings like this, which reveal the extraordinary mysteries of the heart, are summarized in IHM’s “Mysteries of the Heart” video that can be viewed on their YouTube page at http://youtu.be/Kyfm5_LLxow. What are you Broadcasting Today?According to IHM Research Director Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., “A handshake, a hug, a pat on the back to a teammate – these interactions help us communicate and perhaps say more than what meets the eye.” So we need to ask ourselves, “What are we broadcasting?”

To cultivate love, it’s important to take pause and consider what emotions we are broadcasting to other people and into our environment. Or as we often say at HeartMath, “What are you feeding the field right now or today?”

The nature of true love is care, kindness and other heart-felt emotions that create resonance. By focusing on and broadcasting these heart feelings, we create a deeper connection with others.

So for Valentine’s Day and February Heart Month, let’s celebrate this heart research and take our love gestures a step further than just flowers or candy. Let’s focus on what our heart is broadcasting to our loved ones and into the field environment. Perhaps we can ask ourselves each day, “What am I feeding the field?”      

To share these important and but not often known understandings of the heart, the Institute of HeartMath is conducting a research campaign this month and giving away one of its best-selling electronic books, The Energetic Heart. The book explains the transfer of energy between people and how we can enhance our resonance with each other. To celebrate HeartMath’s understandings of the heart during Heart Month and to download the free book, go to http://on.fb.me/explore-IHM. 
                          

                                               ******

The NapkinwriterI likes the image of tending her heart as a garden and she looks forward to putting a small garden in the backyard of her new home, once spring comes.

So even though February is a short month, I see it as a good time to start “checking over the soil” of my heart and having it be just-right ready to live in this world as a presence of peace and an extender of love to my neighbor and where ever I am called to share it.

 

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The Real Energy Crisis May Be Within

Merridee LaMantia Art

During her final show, Oprah Winfrey spotlighted a clip of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, famed neuroanatomist who successfully recovered from a stroke, and went on to educate us all about our brain tissue and value of life.

Winfrey went on to thank Bolte Taylor for a simple but powerful lesson, which was given to her on a sign by this courageous woman. The sign read: 

Please take responsibility
for the energy you bring
into this space.
                     Jill Bolte Taylor

Winfrey said she had the sign on a wall in her office and home and that it is a great reminder that all life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment. “We are all beaming little signals like radio frequencies and the world is responding in kind,” is a quote from Dr. Taylor’s book, “My Stroke of Insight.”

This sign is available from artist Merridee LaMantia, the artist at her website, www.merrideelamantia.com/bolte

Not a bad idea to spread this vibration out into the world, and so I share it here with you and put in on my wish list to purchase when I am able.

Looking around Merridee’s website describing her art, her philosophy, and her interests in life was a bright experience for me and the energy vibrations of good and peace rippled right across the internet into my room.

She values and drew early in her life upon imagination as a communication medium with the world.  She played with dimensional aspects of defining space for floor plans in her elementary school years and architectural drawing by the time she was in college.

She met and married a fellow artist and together, she counts their creation of three daughters as a most creative endeavor.  “As the years pass, I’ve expanded my inspirational focus and now grow natural materials to incorporate in my work,” she explains on her website.

Peace Like A River - LaMantia

Peace Like a River is a 7’0w x 4’6″h x 4″ deep artistic creation of curly willow branches, Lotus pods, bamboo, cloth, raffia.

As an artist, she has made a commitment to be a participant, rather than an observer, in the world’s life-changing events. She strives to transform ideas into positive visual communication, instead of pointing out the troublesome, self-serving political injustices occuring daily in the world.

Her feeling is that creative thoughts, emphasized, can become positive actions. While the artistic expression takes mental discipline and persistence, it first of all requires an openess to simple intuitive truths.

That’s the power and wisdom I find in her artistic creation of a quote from Bolte Taylor.   We need to be aware of the power of our energy of pure Presence.  It is even more fundamental than the axiom “Be sure brain is in gear before mouth opens.”

Our energy is our building block — our internal furnace — that which stokes us  — our integrity  — OR  it is our “hidden agenda”, what can be felt by others regardless of how we appear or what we say. Our energy is the truth of us.

I would not mind being reminded of it when I walk into a space that contained this message on the wall: Take Responsibility for the Energy you bring.  I would agree to keep on target with that.

One of the energies Meridee LaMantia shares with the world is that of Illuminating Peace – A Global Perspecitve. It is a traveling exhibit as a “dimensional vocabulary for peace”, a strategic counterforce to current violent conflicts taking place on our planet.

Using imagery of other world cultures and symbolism regarding “peace”, she interprets the essence of these discoveries into eight artistic fabric panels.  Her written vision is, “May peace prevail on Earth” (in 50 languages) as a way of honoring the hope connecting our one world family.

Illuminating Peace - Merridee LaMantia

This Indiana artist uses her love of light, texture, space, color and fabric to communicate this universal message that peace is powerfully alive in human hearts around the world.

I can’t always tell this by watching the 6:00 pm news. But I know it to be true because I share the same initiative and do in my small ways what I can do to share the presence of Peace. I know of many women and some men who share this same message through their gifts of writing, art, photography, music, drama, blogs and program presentations

 — none of them seem to shine the light on themself, but instead through their work and their works, they encourage others to stand right up and …….Take Responsibility for their Energy.………….and if that energy calls for them to take their writing, their photography, their healing out of a small space and share it with the “world-space”,  they have made the best creation of all. 

The creation that keeps on creating.

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Cells are Conscious – Pass it on!

From my friend in Australia:

 Christine Whitelaw’s blog:    www.dadirridreaming.wordpress.com

Continuing to learn about brain health, Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s book “My Stroke of Insight” is an excellent resource. Her web site for feedback from readers is rich in inspiring stories of their experiences as they put Jill’s suggestions into practice.

When the left side of Jill’s brain was damaged she appeared a wreck outwardly, unable to speak, or understand speech, unable to walk, unable even to roll her body over. Inwardly she either suffered tremendous pain and confusion, or escaped into another reality, a right brain experience. She writes “The now off-line intellectual mind of my left hemisphere no longer inhibited my innate awareness that I was the miraculous power of life. I knew I was different now – but never once did my right mind indicate that I was “less than” what I had been before. I was simply a being of light radiating light out into the world.  …. in the absence of my left hemisphere’s negative judgement  I perceived myself as perfect, whole, and beautiful just the way I was.”

Jill remembered everything she was experiencing while she was so ill, because she was not unconscious. Her right brain and all the cells of her body remained conscious and aware, processing information. However because of the damage to her left hemisphere she had to relearn how to read and write and walk, and how to make sense of the physical world. It was an effort for her to chose the chaos of recovery over the temptation to slip into the peaceful tranquility of divine bliss brought about by the silence of her judgmental left brain.

Her resolution was to recover and teach others that “peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind”

As her left hemisphere began healing Jill was faced with the dilemma of wanting the skills she had lost, but not welcoming the old feelings such as anger, frustration or fear that made her body uncomfortable. She learned to talk directly to her brain saying that she did not want to hook into those neural loops. She says “Suddenly I had much more to say about how I felt and for how long, and I was adamantly opposed to reactivating old painful emotional circuits“.  We can follow her example, refusing to run those painful old circuits, choosing instead to take a right brained view of love, peace, joy and compassion.

Jill made use of cellular consciousness in her recovery. She says she counted her blessings and thanked her brain a thousand times a day for responding so well. She found that her right mind understood that every cell in her body (except for the red blood cells) contained the exact same molecular genius as the original zygote that was created at conception, and that she was the life force power of these 50 trillion molecular geniuses! Jill says she is having a big love fest with her 50 trillion cells, she thanks them out loud every day “Thank you girls. Thanks for another great day!” A feeling of intense gratitude in her heart makes sure the cells understand. Then she implores them “Please heal me“, and visualises her immune cells responding.

Jill says “I unconditionally love my cells with an open heart and a grateful mind”. During the day she cheers them on with each achievement and challenge. It is a two way conversation, with Jill listening to her body and responding appropriately. Here is cheerful song to encourage your cells!

watch?v=qMU-Rtb1FW8

More tomorrow, with suggestions about switching on your right mind.

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