Transforming Stress: The Heart-Mind Connection

Your heart-mind connection contributes to transforming stress. Stress is a natural occurrence in your daily life. However, when chronic stress takes over by rumination, anxiety, worry, obsessive negative emotional states this creates confusion in your life.

On the physical level, science shows that in these instances, your heart beat and function change. Your digestion of food becomes more of a challenge. Your breath rate and blood pressure shift. Your Nervous System moves from the Parasympathetic or rest, digest and heal state into the Sympathetic state of preparation for danger and escape.

This escape mechanism when not interrupted or addressed can lead to a perpetual loop of worry, fear, anxiety, and need for numbing the overwhelm. You might be able to identify an experience in your life where you have experienced this chain reaction. And, even if you have tried different ways to calm the stress cycle with food, drink, running or moving away from a stressful situation, taking on a person or situation that you have no power to change, or shutting down and isolating, the loop is still there. It can attempt to serve you with anger, criticism of yourself or others, hate, jealousy, and even isolation. However, this can lead to a deep sense of hopelessness and energy depletion.

The loop still presides because there is a direct connection between your body and mind, your heart and your thinking. When negative emotions, thoughts, and beliefs have been cast into neural pathways in your mind, your beliefs, thoughts, and feelings are directly related to how your body responds to what life presents to you in any given moment even when you attempt to suppress them. They return.

If you have followed articles from this website, you know that the Fire Element in Chinese Medicine and your heart give you the opportunity to love, experience joy, warmth and connection with the ability to discern between what is energetically beneficial and what is not life-energizing. The Institute of HeartMath in San Diego has done research on the impact on the electrical field around the heart and brain in varied states. When the heart is stressed, the electromagnetic field is smaller than when the heart is focused on love, gratitude, joy, or appreciation. This created calm and coherence. This pattern turns out to correlate with the electromagnetic field of the brain. There is a synergy between the function and coherence of your heart and mind.

Transforming Stress with Your Heart

For example, if your mind is racing, it is an opportunity to ask the question is, “What is in your heart?” Stop for a moment to focus on your breath and tune into your heart. Get a reading of what you are experiencing in your heart area right now, what messages do you receive? Do you hear the stress or do you hear the connection to life-enhancing calm? Acceptance of where you are right now will support your entire body-mind system to register what is happening and influence your next steps.

,There is a healing relationship between what your survival and early emotional brain and your heart’s wisdom has to offer in addressing unconscious material stress responses. Bringing awareness and acceptance and tending to the origin of these habitual or automatic stress responses, your heart is capable of updating your long term memory. This allows you to experience more and more what you would like to experience in your life related to the values you would truly like to live today.

There is no day where you experience 100% happiness or sadness. There will be days that you experience stressful situations, and some more than others. Yet, within these days are the possibilities for noticing what is helpful, beautiful, joyful, and meaningful. The way to get more choice in your day is to allow your values to lead by accessing your heart’s reach into your mind to observe with kindness and connection what is happening. By seeing the stressful feelings, thoughts, and beliefs as the observer, you then offer an off ramp from the intensity and stress aligned with your values.

“When you stand with yourself in a self-compassionate, kind, loving way, life opens up and then you can turn toward meaning and purpose, and how you bring love, participation, beauty, and contributions into the lives of others.” ~Steven C. Hayes, founder of ACT Therapy

Transforming Stress with Your Mind

Here you can notice what is happening without being held captive. You can literally thank your mind for sharing. You can expand your flexibility of choice with each stress response by tuning into or just noticing your breath. You can detach or defuse from being tied to a negative a thought, belief or feeling to just notice or observe. A statement you might use is “I notice that I am having a thought that…,emotion of, or belief that…” This allows there to be a state of acceptance of what is happening right now. By letting it be, it is possible to give space to any underlying messages or needs, and this can calm your mind and your heart. This allows you to more coherently think, to feel, and then to act.

The pathway to unity between these healing agents creates greater wholeness. It creates room for your heart, mind, and emotions to function more optimally while restoring energy for your priorities.

This can happen with visualization, connecting to your true values for your day or longer term projects, meditation, and/or noticing what your mind believes is true through journaling. In this way, your commitment to wholeness is accessed through changing your breathing pattern, and noticing, with connection to your heart’s compassion. It allows an opportunity for calming your body-mind system and moving into greater flexibility, resilience, focused coherence, or the rest, digest and healing state.

This is an invitation to give yourself the opportunity to explore underlying material that needs your heart’s compassion, and to experience 10 natural modalities to use for creating calm for your mind and heart working together with your values for living life based on purpose.

You can take part in the Calming Your Mind and Heart Group Repatterning* on December 17, 2023 as a gift of self-care to transform the stress in your life through the alignment between your heart and mind.

Get details here: https://www.windowstotheheart.net/calming-your-mind-and-heart-repatterning *You can take part in this repatterning process from any place on the planet.

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Kimberly Rex, MS is a Master Resonance Repatterning® practitioner, Master Wellness and Well-being Life Coach, and Person-Centered Expressive Therapist. She works with people all over the world by phone, Skype, and proxy.