#8 This week my special guest is Howard Martin.
We delve into the science of the heart, it’s energy properties, guidance and wisdom.
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About Howard: Howard Martin brings more than 30 years of experience in business and personal development to the position of Executive Vice President, Strategic Development.
He has been instrumental in assisting Doc Childre, founder of HeartMath, in the development and teaching of HeartMath’s programs since its inception.
Howard is one of the co-authors of the ground-breaking book Heart Intelligence, Connecting with the Intuitive Guidance of the Heart.
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Guy: Hi, my name is Guy Lawrence. And thanks for tuning into my podcast today. If you’re enjoying these conversations and you want to check out more of this transformational work, be sure to come back to guylawrence.com.au and join me as we go further down the rabbit hole. Enjoy the show.
Guy: Howard. Welcome to the show.
Howard: Hey Guy! Good to be with you. I’m glad you have an opportunity for us to get together and chat. I know that, uh, you saw me when I was in Brisbane a couple of years ago, and now I get to be on your show. So this is all really cool. Thank you very much for having me.
Guy: You’re welcome, Howard. And you know, you’ll be shared on something since that day come into your workshop because every time I do a podcast, you know, I’ve seen new people, different guests, all over the world. And I always do the heartmath technique before the show. So I’ll sit, I’ll sit in quiet for five minutes and it always helps me get in state. Why am I doing it? What’s the intention behind it. And, uh, and it works a treat. So I thank you for that gift as well.
Howard: Well, my pleasure, and I’m glad you took that out of the workshop. I was just speaking to a promoter who I’ll be doing the workshop within, uh, April. And I asked her what she wanted me to do and she was telling me, and I said, well, what’s most important to me is that I can provide a lot of really interesting information that expands people and they go, wow. And all that. But really what I focus on is what are they going to remember them when they’re walking to the parking lot? Yeah.
Guy: And that was one of the things that I absolutely now a question I start the show with and I ask everyone on, let’s say, you’re in Australia, mate, you come to a good Aussie barbecue. Nobody knows you. And some stranger walks up to you and says, Hey, what do you do? What would you say?
Howard: Well, I’ll tell them I’m a parrot. You know, I run a chain of nightclubs in Florida. You know what I mean? I just had to say, you know, I’m with the heartmath, I’m an organization based in America. And in California, we are a transformation company. We transform lives. We transform organizations and we do it through a system. We developed this space on the intelligence of the heart and it incorporates tools, techniques, and technology, all under Pam with scientific research. And so I guess the simple way of saying is, I’m just one little guy that’s trying to do what I can to help people through these interesting and sometimes challenging times that we all live in.
Guy: And I have no doubt that would spark off multiple questions that could go off in many different directions.
Howard: Exactly. Right.
Guy: But one, one thing I wanted to ask you, I think for a lot of the listeners that might not be familiar with Heartmath. And I interviewed you say, I’ve heard Greg Braden talk about this as well. Cause you know, he loves your work and promotes it. Um, about initially we always thought the heart was a pump and it kind of just pumps the blood round and does, and does that. And I do question how many people beyond that even to this day, you know, and haven’t put the relationship so well, where did it all sort of start falling into place for you when you started looking at the heart, looking at the properties that are coming beyond?
Howard: Yeah, sure. Let me first say, I think you’re right. I mean, most people think of the heart on a physical level as a blood pump, but there’s also these other references to heart that many people refer to as well about following your heart or listening to your heart or letting your heart be your guide. You know, these kinds of statements that we make. And when you look at heart in a larger sense, historically, you can see that going back thousands and thousands of years ago, people were writing about the heart as being something intelligent and intelligence that we had. The earliest writings I’ve ever seen, Guy. Were 4,500 years ago from ancient Chinese medicine. Speaking about the hearts, vital intelligent role, sending its intelligent messages through the blood vessels. You know, it was that kind of an approach that they had 4,500 years ago, along the way through understanding the physical heart and its cardiovascular functioning.
Howard: Somehow, you know, an intelligent horse sorta got lost in the process of, you know, medical reductionism, you know, but yet people still intuitively referred to heart in these interesting ways that being intelligent. So early on in my life, as I was beginning of my self discovery processes at age 21, many of the things that are read whatever particular discipline it came from, whatever philosophy or religion or spiritual path, there were often these references to heart that were the most respectful references you could have about what heart was and about how bringing heart forward into life was so important. So I wondered about that and I wondered if this just metaphor, is this just a, you know, an aspect of the brain or mind that people are talking about or is there something more to this? And so working with friends and doc children in particular, who’s the founder of HeartMath, who’s been my friend now for over 40 years, we began to take a look at heart and say, okay, let’s just take it.
Howard: We were just, we were on a self discovery process, right? So we were looking at many different things. And as we focused on harden on manifesting more of the qualities associated with heart in how we lived our lives, we began to discover that there was a really magnificent and unique intelligence that was residing in what we call it heart, that it was the intelligence that often lifted us beyond our problems, even in the midst of chaos and confusion, we found that it was an intelligence that was more intuitive in nature. In other words, it worked very high speed. It gave us sort of a direct knowingness. It bypassed a lot of the back and forth that sometimes we go through to reach understanding it also was giving me the ability to do more than I ever thought I could. And it was taking me out of a sort of moan mediocrity and helping me, you know, see that I was a bit more into law and what I was perceiving it to.
Howard: And then I could do more in life than ever thought. I would, all these characteristics and more were coming about through the period of many years of taking a look at heart. Now the interesting sort of chronological part of this story is that doc Chaudri myself and some others were doing this sort of exploration and obscurity. We lived in a rural area and the state of North Carolina, which is in the South of the United States is not a very progressive area at that time in terms of new thought or consciousness or anything like that, you know, and that’s where we were. And so we were kind of out of what I would call the parade. We weren’t being overly influenced by many of the things that were going on. We were in a sense cut off from it. Now that presented some disadvantages, but it provided a unique advantage in that we had to build our own way.
Howard: We had to create our own road into this. And we did that in obscurity for about 15 years before there ever was a heart math, wow. Heart math was an outgrowth of our personal experiences. And we got to a point after a very long time that we felt that maybe we should make an attempt to share what we’d learned. So it wasn’t just this ambition driven process. Well, we know something now let’s go share it because, you know, we got the answer. It wasn’t that at all. It was very mature, sort of ripe and unfold live how we arrived at even deciding to form an organization. When we started heart math, we knew we wanted to position a heart centric approach and a society that could have mainstream impact. We didn’t want it to be just hard, sort of like it had been perceived before, uh, respected, but sort of held up in the confines of spirituality and philosophy that we wanted it to have the ability for people to use it in daily life.
Howard: And it had to be mainstreamed. And that’s where our science came in. That was sort of what I was leading up to here is to say that we recognize that we needed to give heart a more empirical understanding. And we needed to build a bridge between the philosophical understandings of heart and a day to day understanding and application of it. We chose science to be that bridge because in our modern society and the 20th and now 21st century, since we’ve been involved with heart math, science carries all a lot of weight. When science proves something, it makes it truth in a regimented disciplined, empirical process. The power of belief increases dramatically. And so we needed to have belief in the heart increased dramatically. And to do that, we engaged in scientific research. And today I would say that’s probably what we’re most well known for.
Howard: There’s a lot more to hard math than just research, but certainly the research part of what we’ve done has been what’s brought attention to us. And it’s what has contributed to the work of others. You mentioned Gregg Braden, uh, using their work. He’s a longtime friend of me and of HeartMath over 20 years now, Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, we’re all friends. And they have all incorporated aspects of our work into their work. And I was asked in an interview one time, a while back, um, a question I didn’t have a ready answer for the interviewer and excuse me, one second. I’m cutting off email. Uh, the interviewer asked me, um, what heart mass greatest contribution to the world have been thus far. And I didn’t, I said to him, I said, we have validated other people’s belief systems.
Guy: I can still believe it. Like, cause the thing I’ve found is that the science has been a language for me to bridge, to get past the belief system, but then to have faith in the work, because I truly think that’s a big part of it sort of believing in it enough to start stepping into that unknown and the topics that I want to sort of get into today. But if it wasn’t for that science language, I don’t know what I’d be doing with it.
Howard: Well that’s right, exactly. You know, the heart approach, which there’s plenty of good ones and they probably have wonderful, uh, you know, material, but they don’t have the same ability to reach as many people. Um, and the, one of the things about heart math that maybe people know, maybe a lot of your listeners don’t know is that a lot of our work is in very mainstream sectors of society where they heart-based system. Right. Well, who knew, right? Uh, we work in the military, uh, right now there’s a training just completed for example, on a Navy us Navy destroyer, a $4 billion ship is training the sailors on that ship and HeartMath techniques in order for them to be able to maintain operational efficiency in the middle of all the stress that they’re under. We train in police forces, we train in major healthcare systems, large hospital systems training all of their nurses to bring heart math into their work environment. So there’s a lot of mainstream applications that heart math has been able to, to provide without the science, none of that would’ve ever happened.
Guy: Yeah. Wow. That’s incredible. If, um, questions has popped in there, if you are, because the heart’s not just the pump. If you had to do a quick elevator pitch about the heart and like this is this resume, this is what it can do. How could you summarize it?
Howard: Well, first of all, it’s an information processing center in the body and it’s sending information to the brain and throughout the entire system, it actually does it in four ways through a nervous system and the heart through the blood pressure wave and the changes that are occurring in that blood pressure wave that influence things like brain function, the heart produces hormones. Most people don’t know that, but it produces a number of very important hormones. And lastly it communicates energetically through an electromagnetic field that is created by the heart that extends beyond or scan out into space. So you have a physical heart pumping blood, but what people don’t know in the elevator speech pitches that it’s an information processing center in the body. Got it,
Guy: Got it. And it’s that information I’m really curious about. Um, and you know, somebody, a friend of mine is studying HeartMath at the moment and they sent him, they knew I was catching up with you today and they sent me a study and I haven’t had a proper chance to break it down and have a look at it yet
Howard: Intuition
Guy: And the cognitive pre-cognitive approach with when
Howard: Do you mind? That’s right. I thought that could be a good conversation. Yeah, that’s a really cool one. Um, you know, the, what I just described in the elevator pitches have the hardest sending information, uh, other research we’ve done also implies that the heart is receiving information. Yeah. Information processing center would mean a lot of things, both sending and receiving the study you’re talking about is a study called the electrophysiology of intuition study. It was published in a major journal journal of alternative and complimentary medicine. Um, it was a very large and expensive study to do. And what the researchers were looking at is they were trying to see if that they’re, they could physiologically decode what people refer to as a pre-cognitive response, meaning that we are sensing something before it happens. You know, was there a way to begin to see if that was, it was anything physically could be measured in that regard?
Howard: So the research protocol was set up this way. Uh, they carefully selected a large set of pictures, photographs. Some of those photographs were intentionally horrific, you know, a car accident, someone being stabbed, things like that. The other images were very beautiful and evocative and they knew how to sequence them in terms of the number of each con, um, to have the right mix, they were placed into a computer and the computer was set into a random selection mode, meaning it was not programmed to show this picture, then this picture, then this picture, it was on random selection, right? So test subjects were brought in and they were, um, they were hooked up to a variety of measurement devices. They were getting brain data and brainwave data. They were getting heart data, uh, lots of different kinds of data around what was going on in the heart and other data to like the skin temperature change data.
Howard: So a lot of physiological information was being sent back from this test subject. And the way it worked was they’d sit in front of a computer. Um, a message would come up on the computer saying, please press this button. And they would press a button. The screen would stay blank for six seconds after six seconds. One of those pictures, one of those kinds of pictures would show up on the screen, randomly selected by the computer. It would stay on the screen for three seconds and then the screen would go blank again. And after 10 seconds here comes the same message, push the button, right? So they push the button again and the sequence is repeated over and over and over again with each test subject. So that data collected. And then they began to analyze the data, to see what they could determine from it.
Howard: And this is where it got really fascinating. They found that in many to most cases, the body was responding to the upcoming picture six seconds before the picture was on the screen. In other words, the body was, was acting like the picture was there, but it wasn’t there. Wow. And it was six seconds before the picture actually manifested on the screen that the body was doing what it was going to do if it had been there, right. That was one blow away, the discovery and all of this. The second part of the analysis produced some even more dynamic results. What they found was when they began to look at a map out the process, the information traffic that was occurring in the body while this was going on, they could see very clearly that it was the heart that was responding. First. The heart was responding to the upcoming picture six seconds before it was there about a second and a half later.
Howard: In most cases, the respond to the upcoming picture. And then about a second to a second and a half before the picture shows up on the screen, they coupled together what’s called a frequency match. They synchronized at a frequency level and then the picture appears. So it was heart and brain, heart brain combining picture. And the body was, was actually showing that it was, uh, responding to something in the future. Um, so the other thing that was the last part of that analysis, that was pretty cool is that they had some of the test subjects that they trained in the heart lock-in technique, which you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation where you practiced that before shows, right. They were trained to do that. So they do a hard lock-in, which is a heart meditation type process for a few minutes before they went into the lab to do their, their, their experiment.
Howard: In those cases, the people that got into their heart got what we call coherent before they went in there and a much higher incidents of pre, uh, picture responses. Now at the end of the study and the conclusion of the study and the summary, basically what they say, I’ll paraphrase now, nonsense scientifically. But the most of their saying is, is that it appears as if our body is constantly scanning for future events, that it is a intelligence that we have that we’re not aware of, that is always going on. We’re just not aware of it. And then it goes on to imply that we, as we develop that and we develop a very useful new skill in anticipation. And so in our training programs and things like that, and we talk about things like practical intuition, we ground that out. You know what I mean?
Howard: We take it down to what does that mean in your daily life? You know, uh, it means that maybe you determine that it’s not time to speak to that person yet about a particular subject, or if you are going to speak to them, maybe it begins to inform you about the type of words to use. You know, it can inform you about a person to hire, for example, in a business setting and whether this person is better than that other person, they have the same level of resume. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways that intuition plays out. The cool thing though, is it shows that it certainly lends itself to the possibility that the heart is actually pulling in information from another field of, uh, of information, the quantum field, which is beyond time and space and the intuitive field, which would be a direct knowingness, a type of knowingness that is different than logical linear intelligence. And that the heart is playing a key role in bringing that intelligence into our system.
Guy: Got it. And you’ve opened up about four loops in my brain now, quantum field. But, um, so from that, would you say it would be fair enough to say then that it’s a skill that anyone can learn and then can use it as a tool daily. If we practice it,
Howard: Lauren, it becomes a matter of learning to listen, to and follow the promptings of the heart. And that requires several things. And that’s what our techniques help people do that we teach. I mean, you have to begin to slow down the roar of the mind and, you know, you have to slow down the vibratory rate of the mind and the emotions in order to, for that to happen. Um, you have to learn to better, uh, I’ll use the term regulate the wonderful gift of the emotion. And the term is very intentional in that I’m not suggesting any sort of repression, but you learn to make better, more efficient, emotional choices rather than the mechanical, emotional choices of like judging someone who you don’t like because of the way they look rather than being more neutral about that. Or maybe even having compassion because you don’t know what their life is like.
Howard: You know, it’s like, there’s all kinds of ways. We make emotional choices at, at high speed moment to moment, day to day, as we learned to find that flow with emotional choices and really began to sort of merge the mind with more of the feelings of the heart. What that does is that begins to open us up to intuition and then intuition sort of becomes natural intuition. As I said, can be very practical. It isn’t just a great discovery. That’s intuition it. Isn’t just the big aha moment where we get this insight that reshapes our life forever. It is those moment to moment, day to day choices and intuition, I think is always, there is weird tagging into it and not into it, we’re in and out of access, but the field itself is there all the time. And as we learn to slow things down and become more sensitive and we practice that over time, it’s not an overnight thing, but as you practice that over time, you become more naturally intuitive.
Howard: And then things begin to synchronize a bit more. That’s when we have these synchronous events in our life, that kind of our funny desk where we sort of chuckle and laugh that this happened, it is when we have the ability to, um, to better discriminate the needs of others and the needs of the whole, rather than our own self centric needs. To me, that’s a form of intuition, a sensing, a sensitivity that comes through intuition in the form of extra care or compassion or love that allows us to sort of play in life in a different way. One practical example of intuition that I will offer an offer with a gesture of respect and honor it’s parenting. I’m not a parent, but I’m observe it. And when I watch how a parent mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, whatever is working with a child, who’s not fully able to communicate everything yet. And they are having to slow down their mind and emotions and tune in to that child to determine what this child is trying to say or what it needs. And to give that moment to moment direction all the time in a parenting process, every waking moment that they’re with that child, they’re playing that game. Nobody sees that as intuitional I do is so sensitive, it is so intuitive. And yet it’s such a natural part of life or other parts of life can have the same characteristics.
Guy: It’s interesting. You mentioned as well about slowing down enough to then be in tune. It’s like, I think about the life I was living that was very full of stress. Very, you know, go, go, go, go, go. And I think of so many people living like that, but the moment you can kind of break that cycle, if you like, there’s a sense of I’ve found there’s a sense of flow to it all. And things just seem to get easier with decision
Howard: It simplifies, you know, complexity is wonderful for entertaining and keeping us stimulated, but often simplicity is the answer is simplicity is sort of like complexity that got crunched into something we can use and it does require slowing down. And there’s a lot of talk about being in the now and all of that. And I think that’s a in mindfulness, uh, those are kinds of things trying to sort of slower stand and put us more into the moment. And all of that. I think that, you know, the now is not absolute. I don’t believe there’s a place we get to all the time where there is no feature. There is no past, but there’s a presence that we can have about what’s going on in the moment. Um, I don’t think it was the trip that we’re, you saw me in Australia, but the trip before that I was on the plane, I was flying down to Sydney, you know, salmon, some thoughts.
Howard: And I was thinking about some of these things that people say about me and how they introduced me on shows and things. And they call me all this wild stuff. You know, evolutionary leader is that, and the other visionary, all this stuff that was going, look, I don’t know if I really want to be that or not, you know? And then, and then the dialogue and sat goes, or what do you want to be? And I said, you know, I want to be in, I think what I really am is an aspiring now list. I’m trying to be more present in the moment with whoever I’m with and whatever I’m doing. So today, right now in this moment for everybody listening, uh, my day has been very busy guys morning for you. You’re starting your day. I’m late afternoon. I’ve been through a series of long complex meetings back to back meetings and phone calls in the middle of that.
Howard: And there’s emails that are coming in and stacking up as we speak. So I have to like make that shift quickly so that when I’m doing this, that stuff doesn’t matter anymore. What happened then is not important to me. Whatever’s in the email box. It’s not important to me right now. What’s important is me connecting with you and with the people that are watching our conversation. That’s what I’m talking about by being more present in the moment is being able to filter it out, all that other stuff so that I can make the most of whatever experience I’m having at any given time.
Guy: I love it. You did it triggered another thought right there, mate, it’s that letting go? Like, do you find from doing this work and obviously you’ve been doing it a long time, that it’s much easier to have non attachment to things that can happen because we can hold it on for weeks and people hold on for years sometimes for this thing, right?
Howard: Well, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s another learned skill. It’s, it’s some things that are work on all the time that I’ll work on my whole life. Really, uh, the term we have forwarded heart math is learning to take the significance out. You know, there are events and then there’s the emotional investment we have in that, you know, and how much emotional investment we put into it, determines how significant it is. And when we can learn to have a more balanced approach to him, how significant we’re going to make something. That’s when we begin to get the ability to sort of merge urge from me at the, at the speed at which I have to live to perform the duties that I have is part of my mission in life and what I do here at HeartMath in that mission, I cannot make everything significant. I’ve had to learn that if for no other reason than to survive, to be able to maintain a certain level of inner peace in the midst of that.
Howard: Because if I made everything a big deal, yeah, I couldn’t handle it. And so I know now that you mentioned a humorous thought the other night as well, you know, there was this book called don’t sweat, the small stuff, right. You know, very popular series. And I was thinking about after the day I’d been through with all the different things that would come up, I was about it. I’m almost ready to write a book called don’t sweat the big stuff, because take the significance out of anything. Right. You know, this didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and this is bad. This is not going to work out. And, you know, and through our process at all night, like you said, you know, or, and then we do have longterm emotional imprints though, the events that have happened in her life. And that’s normal, it’s a part of being human. So they’re going to be there and you work them out over time, but I don’t have to add to that.
Guy: Yeah. No, that’s, that’s great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Um, I just said, just think of things that I’m finding as I do the work continuously, that’s been hard.
Howard: Yeah.
Guy: Significant change is that my, my interpretation of the problems that arise is not so much,
Howard: Uh, an emotional drama
Guy: That is connected to it. If you like, it’s diffused it’s
Howard: And you’ve shared that this was a new, sorry. Okay. We went live, speak. You’ve moved up for an new pod,
Guy: Correct? Yeah. I’ll just stop my video Howard. One sec. See if that helps the internet. There we go.
Howard: Can you hear me? Okay. Now, can you hear me? Yep. You’re there now.
Guy: Okay, beautiful. Sorry. Could you repeat the last part?
Howard: Yeah. I was going to say, you know, you talk about taking significance out. I mean, you’re you share with me before we went live, that you are in a transitional phase that you’ve sold a company you were involved in, you’ve taken on some new ventures. You’re, you’re starting a New York podcast, a different direction in your life. You’re following your own intuitive art. Right. You know, making changes. Yeah. And sometimes those things can get hard. They can be real significant, but you’re finding a way through that. Uh, and creating something really new and exciting for your life and for the lives of others. So it’s cool.
Guy: Yeah. Thanks man. Yeah, totally. I, um, another question that popped in there was, and you touched on it earlier, but the magnetic field that the heart can put out as well. And if I’m not mistaken, is it a hundred times more powerful,
Howard: 40 to 60 times, more powerful than electromagnetically speaking. Yeah. Yeah.
Guy: What influence does that have on each other? Is that a, is there any studies around that?
Howard: Uh, yeah, it’s the direction our research has gone in. I mean, over these years for anybody interested in research, by way, that’s watching us go to heartmath.org. We have two sites, a for profit company, which I’m executive vice president of and a nonprofit, the nonprofit does the scientific research and other things as well, underserved working with children, et cetera. But if you go to heartmath.org site, and if you click on the research tab, you’ll see, you’ll stay busy for a long time. You know, with research, we understand a lot about individual, heart, brain, body communication, synchronization, the effects of heart math techniques and organizational settings and all that stuff. Now we move into social coherence, collective coherence. How does all this play out as we interface with one another and with the earth itself? So yes, we are all energetically connected, all living things on this planet and beyond are all connected through a vast web of energetic connections, the strongest energetic, so to speak that we have as our hearts, it’s the strongest source of bio electricity in our body.
Howard: It produces an electromagnetic field extends around us and 360 degrees and extends outside of the body about, I use us measurement three to four feet outside of the body. And that field is constantly changing the image. The information in the field, the frequencies in the field is constantly changing all the time. And what changes that information is our emotional state. As we shift the emotional state, the field information changes, we go from frustration to feeling peaceful, big change. You go from anger to feeling joyful, huge change. You know, we’re broadcasting this information. So yeah, we are influencing one another. Um, we are doing lots of studies now on social coherence, the only influence that we are having on one another, we are also doing research on the energetic connections between things like us in the earth. Uh, we’re doing a major study of sounds kind of squishing.
Howard: Woo. But it really isn’t when you dig in, we’re doing a study on understanding trees and the energetic components of trees and their changes, electromagnetically and electrically, and how we are being influenced by and influencing them. And so that’s the type of research that’s going on right now. So we’re putting together a new whole body of research on what we call social coherence or group coherence. There’ll be new training programs, new HeartMath technology, all based around this research, as it continues to unfold. The next step is understanding in a sense we’re all in this together that we are all part of a big process. That’s unfolding a big shift in consciousness and that we are not alone, that we are influencing one another. We are supporting in one in one way or another one another. And that there is this connection. So people believe that many of your listeners probably say, yeah, I, I understand that I’ve known it, none of that for years.
Howard: That’s great. But how do we then take that to the street? We bring science and you know, how do we ground that out and show that yes, guess what all the things we feel and believe are really real. And we are definitely doing that. So my heart is affecting that. My belief is, is that we are right now, everybody listening to this, whether you’re listening to it lab, or whether you are listening to it at a later time as part of a shared experience, there’s an energetic field that’s being created through this conversation and the participation of each and every one of you, those listening. And this was a field that, again, it’s an energetic connection that we can’t see it’s unseen, but yet I believe it exists. And in this case, it’s being created through this shared experience of us being together electronically in one way through the mediums that we have, but also energetically connected in other ways that are beyond even the medium that we’re involved in. I think of it like the internet. Yeah, we are crazy. But we are
Guy: Why things like group meditation can seem more powerful, profound.
Howard: Exactly. Why
Guy: Did, and the electromagnetic fields are connected. Yeah,
Howard: There’s a collective field. And when, when people go into more of a meditative practice of one kind or another, the generally they’re putting out more of this coherent type emotions that’s changing. The field is changing the physiology. Uh, people trying to be peaceful, they’re trying to put out love or compassion to the world or whatever. When you take that together and you and people are doing that collectively, it amplifies everything. It’s the shared field begins to lift it all. And that’s why we like to do it. Um, I do interviews all the time and, and reach a lot of people through doing interviews like I am today, but also do live events. How come you know, well, I enjoy them, but also there’s nothing like being in the same physical location with people and having that shared field closer and more personal. So we still long for this and long for these connections. And so stay tuned. Everybody, heart math has been around 28 years, but we’re still like little kids. We’re still unfolding this thing, you know, and we’re still having a lot of fun. And, uh, there’s new information coming from us in the future. Look forward to,
Guy: Will you be making more trips to Australia as well?
Howard: I’d like to need to talk to Chris super. And my friend down there she’s been my promoter for years. I don’t know that she wants to have me back anytime, but, uh, but she’s a lovely lighter, like give a shout out to Chris, anybody watching. She does great, um, programs down there in Australia. And she’s a dear friend, a bed, many, uh, a number of really good tours with Chris and somewhere in the future, I do look forward to coming back. Um, always had nothing but good times in Australia, really. So it really, to be honest, it’s true. And I’ve had wonderful audiences there and it’s got a special place in my heart. Australia does look forward to someday to coming back. I’ll make sure I give Chris a nudge, give her a nudge. Give him a lot,
Guy: Have one more question for you before we change gears into a little bit of topic.
Howard: Why do you, it is
Guy: That we can struggle to follow our own heart.
Howard: Good question. Um, first of all, I have to say that the so-called value I call it, the voice of the heart is often quieter than the roar of the mind. That’s one reason. The second reason would be that what our heart’s telling us is not always where our personality wants to hear. Did you get that part now? Okay. So what I was saying, the second reason would be that what our hearts prompting us to do or not do is often not what our personality wants to hear. So it’s, we sort of write it off, you know, because it’s going, yes, what we, you think we want, you know, the heart’s got wisdom in there that ends up being the best for us, but our personalities don’t always want to accept that. Um, and then lastly, there’s just a lot of speed going on in life right now.
Howard: And it’s hard to find our footing. Uh, the speed of change is accelerating so dramatically and it’s not going to get any slower anytime soon. And there’s just so much going on so much to do not enough time to do it in so much information, coming at us from all different angles all the time. And it just gets hard to find a time when you can really feel like you can step back a little bit and have a talk with your heart. And that’s why it’s hard, but not only that the world itself, I mean, in general, I’ll say the world itself is not supporting a heart based approach. Now that’s changing and it’s changing pretty quickly actually. And there is actually a, my opinion in a movement of, of adding heart and taking place in the world. People all over the world in different ways are manifesting more of the qualities of the heart and putting them into their beliefs, their actions, their collective actions, a lot of ways of which an add heart and movement is unfolding.
Howard: A lot of the rural can ride hard off, but it’s getting stronger and stronger and more people are choosing a way associated in general with heart of how they’re going to live their lives, what they value, what changes they want to see in themselves, what changes they want to see in the world and society. A lot of it is being driven by, uh, emergence of heart in a new way. And that’s my part of the mission right now. My biggest part, everybody in heart math, really, but I’m not a scientist scientist role McCrady and just a magnificent team that does that. Put myself out into the world to try to create a movement of adding heart, to inspire people, to recognize they have this magnificent part of themselves. And if they make contact with it, life’s going to get better for them. And then they’ve got a lot more to give to others.
Guy: Well, what one tip would you give to our listeners? If let’s say they might feel it off track, they might be in the wrong, like they there’s this feeling coming up that I want change that could be depressed or there could be all sorts of things going wrong with everything. You know,
Howard: What tips could you give them? I think the tip out offered today is when you found yourself in places like that, the starting point for getting out would be to have compassion for yourself. In other words, you know, we can say I’m depressed, I’m sad, I’m upset. And then that can lead to self judgment. Uh, it can lead to a sense of hopelessness that things are never going to get better. That you’re not good enough for you don’t get it, or you’ve tried and you continue to not continue to fail and all that. And all that is simply making the process worse. At some point, you need to turn that around and get the energy going back the other direction. One of the best ways to do that is to say, look, wait a minute. I’m okay. I have a talk with a little dude here, a little dude, you know, you’re all right, you’re doing the very best you can.
Howard: You know, you’re having a tough day recognize you’re a good person. You’re doing okay. You’re doing the best you can in a challenging world and have kindling that feeling of compassion for yourself. The trick of the mind will be to say, you can’t do that because you don’t deserve it. Well, that’s, that’s the old way of looking at it. The new way of looking at it, as you gotta start with that, you know, honor yourself for who you are as a human being for being alive on this planet and functioning like you do, and have that self compassion that can begin to turnaround a process. I’ll take it now to humor. A little bit of what I just said. I’ll put it in some Southern terms. You know, it was a man once told me one time, son, if you ever find yourself in a hole you want to get out. And the first thing you gotta do to stop digging,
Guy: Yeah.
Howard: That dig has got to stop at some point, or you’ll never going to pop back out the other side. So start out with, with that self compassion piece. Um, if that’s too hard to do, I’ll offer a secondary tip. It’s like, look for something in your life or something in general to appreciate appreciation can be easier than compassionate sometimes. And no matter how tough our life is, there’s always some things we can’t appreciate a story. I just remembered, uh, from a school teacher who uses heart math in her classes who, uh, lives in a very impoverished area in Brooklyn, New York had a child and she was trying to get him to appreciate, and he came from a terrible home life and there was nothing about his home life or his life in general that he could appreciate. And so she was walking down a street with him on a early spring day when winter was just subsiding.
Howard: And he noticed, he looked over and he noticed a Rose starting to come out on a wild Rose Bush by fence. And he looked at that Rose and she focused him on that Rose. She said, look at that Rose look at beautiful. That is, you know, can you appreciate that Rose? And a little boy, he could appreciate that Rose. And he began to smile and she took that and she began to work with him in that way to get him to see that there were things around him that he could appreciate. And that’s an extreme example, but for most of us, even when times are tough, we can find something to appreciate in life. And that’s a turnaround. I miss turning things around again, that’s helping to shift and move on is to say whatever about the problem. I’m going to appreciate the fact that I’m alive. I’m going to appreciate the fact that, you know, I’ve got something to eat tonight and I’m looking forward to you. I’m going to appreciate, you know, my dog, you know, I’m going to appreciate so many things that we can appreciate even in the times when life seems to be doing this the wrong way.
Guy: Yeah. Love it. They’re always starts with the self doesn’t it? It’s a it’s. Yeah. I’m aware of the time. And uh, I’m going to change gears a little bit. I’ve got a few questions. I ask everyone on the show. That’s kind of related to the whole it’s very related to today, actually, anyways, but, um, what does being one of your low points in life you’ve had later in life pretending turned into be a blessing
Howard: Early in my life. My whole entire passion was music and I was a drummer and I started playing drums when I was very young, like nine years old. And by the time I enrich my early twenties, I had fortuitously found my way into the mainstream music business and was playing with people that had records out. And I did that for 12 years. All my identity was tied up in that, right? It’s all really new. And it’s all I really thought I was supposed to be doing. But along the way, as my own spiritual enfoldment was beginning to take place, it stopped making as much sense. And I’ll reach the point where my heart promptings were strong enough. They were telling me I needed to really stop this. I needed to let go of this little league rockstar stuff and get on with life. But I did not want to listen to my heart about that.
Howard: It finally got to a point where something was happening in, in my world, in the music business that was forcing me to make that choice. And I had to make a choice between moving forward in a, with a band and a record deal situation that I knew was wrong or taking a, um, um, a moral stand and possibly having to leave the choice came for me to leave and to leave the music business. And the day that I did that and the drama that went on around it, I went and I sat down on a flight of stairs at dock shoulder’s house. And I started crying my eyes out because I had no idea what I was gonna do. No idea what life could be for me. And I just walked away from everything that I thought I worked and I was devastated. And it was hard when I look back at it today, it was the very best single decision I ever made.
Guy: There you go. And we can all relate to that story at some, some point in our life, Howard,
Howard: Every best that’s decision you and I would not be doing this today. You know, I wouldn’t be somewhere else and probably not very happy. And, uh, I can’t be thankful enough that I made that decision and I had helped to make it through. I had friends. I had people working to help me see the, what I should do there, but nobody would tell me what to do. And that was the beauty of it. It was my choice to make, and I had to make it or not. And I did. And today it’s the best choice I ever made.
Guy: Would that be safe to say, then that’s the first time you followed your heart?
Howard: Not necessarily the first time, but I’ll tell you the feeling that I had afterwards was a feeling of empowerment, a feeling of something lifting in me. Like maybe for the first time, I’d really become a man. Then I’d stepped up and I’m really done something that was the right thing to do the courageous thing to do the thing that was going to make the most sense, to be honest, life didn’t reward me quickly for that decision. There was a process of going through some tough times for a long time after that. So it wasn’t that I got instantaneous reward because I was such a good boy. Um, but there was a feeling inside a deeper feeling in me that what I had done was the right thing to do. Yeah. That was empowering. That felt empowering.
Guy: Love it. Yeah. Um, next question. If you could have dinner with anyone tonight, they don’t lie. Who would it be and why?
Howard: If I could have dinner with anyone tonight who would have babies out, you asked me,
Howard: Well, I’m having to think about that. You know, there’s so many great people in the world and so many magnificent people and some of the ones that I’ve really admired are no longer with us. You know, I would have loved to sat now with Nelson Mandela and a dinner with him. You know what I mean? Just to see what that dude was all about, you know? Uh, he’s certainly a great man. And, um, you know, it, isn’t, when I think about answering a question like that, it isn’t so much about whether the person is same or not. It’s about the essence of who they are. And there’s so many people in the world today that nobody will ever know about. There’s some beautiful, beautiful souls people that I’m sure I would love and be honored to have dinner with. And they may have ordinary jobs on the outside, but they’re extraordinary on the inside.
Howard: So I can’t really just answer that question in the moment when I’m sorry, but there’s so many different angles and ways to go with that. I’ve had the good fortune of meeting many, many famous people. And in some cases I would have to say that, you know, the meeting with the famous person, uh, was a disappointment and then I’ve had other times when it expectation, you know, um, I spent a part of a summer, I think it was 2004 working on a project about the life of the boxer, George Foreman. Wow. And he was just wonderful, man. He had this big smile on his big heart. And at the time he was, um, one of the most respected brands in America. You know, everybody believed in, loved in George and all that. And he, and he was extremely wealthy by then. And he’d been through a lot of ups and downs in his life and a member of the first meeting that I had with him.
Howard: He had me come to his house and he treated me so graciously and sitting in his kitchen with him for a number of hours. And he was such a kind man, and everything that you booze being, he would project like, you know, when he was doing a commercial on TV that bothered George Foreman grill, you know what I mean? All that. It’s like, it was that whole essence that you were resonating with when he did, that was 10 times stronger in person. And yet he was very humble. He didn’t have a lot of education and things like that. He was just a really good man that cared and respected other human beings. And I remember standing at the airport after that going, you know, that was a time when I met somebody who’s famous. That was, it was way better than I thought it is funny about those things sometimes. So it isn’t about fame and fortune. It’s really bad essence.
Guy: Totally. Couldn’t agree. More. Couldn’t agree. More. And our last question is there with everything we’ve covered today, is there anything you’d like to leave our listeners to ponder on?
Howard: Yeah, I think so. I think that, you know, um, I’d like to see people recognize more of who they really are and the power that they have inside to first of all, change their own life, uh, and to have a better, more fulfilling life. Um, and then also to make a contribution to help to usher in this new world that’s happening in any way. But to assure Dan and a kinder, gentler process to me that does have a lot to do with heart and with manifesting the qualities of the heart are what we call our heart math, the intelligence of the heart. There are ways you can do that, that have nothing to do with heart math. Um, there are ways to do that, that have something to do with us. Uh, I have a program, for example, not just trying to pitch a program, but just if people are inspired and become an add heart facilitator, it’s not expensive, you get some training and some technology and ways in which you can share that and you join with others, who’ve done the same and you become a contributing member in a sense to this movement in the world of adding heart.
Howard: You know, so I think that, you know, recognizing first of all, that there’s something that each and every one of us has inside that, uh, that we can tap into that will help us navigate these changing times and Ken latest to more fulfillment. And that part of that fulfillment for me, at least. And I think for many people is not just having it for sales, but sharing it with others. And so I think that’s what I like to say is recognize that you’re who you are more access more of your own heart’s intelligence, which is your own best friend and to take it forward into the world, share it.
Guy: Thanks for that, Howard. That’s a great note to end on mate. If everyone that’s listening to this today wants to learn more about your work and HeartMath where can I say?
Howard: Yeah, go to heartmath.com and there’s a world of heartmath there. And of course there’s all kinds of things people can do. They can read her books and that sort of thing, but go to heartmath.com and check it out. There’s a, again, a lot of things there are free. You go to heartmath.com.org is a nonprofit site. There’s information, free things. There are resources, there training programs. There’s our technology that helps us to integrate heart and brain and all that. It’s just a lot we could talk about, but, leave it to people to follow their own hearts, see what’s right for them. And then explore that a little bit and see something that we have resonates with what you might want and one in your own life or the lives of others. So heartmath.com, heartmath.org. Of course, the usual standard line everybody has now, which just follow us on Facebook. We have been made Facebook followers and they also, somebody listened yeah. Between the two organizations over me and now follow us on Facebook and go to our sites and join the, join the movement, you know,
Guy: Beautiful. Well, I’ll be sure to link to everything Howard, and I just want to acknowledge everything that you do with heart math. And, um, it’s been a big influence on my own life personally as well. And I certainly fly the flag and love promoting your work. And, um, it’s been an honor having you on the show today. Just to share some wisdom.
Howard: Well, thank you Guy! Very much for having me stay in touch. We’ll do more as this unfolds. I wish you all the best and I wish everybody is listening all the best for giving us your time and your attention to listen to our conversation. And I hope your life unfolds for you in some really fulfilling ways.
Guy: Totally. Thank you, Howard.