The level of coherence you experience during feelings of appreciation can be measured by sensitive instruments. Coherence also can be measured using heart-rate variability (HRV) – the naturally occurring beat-to-beat changes in heart rate, which can be seen in an electrocardiogram (ECG).
Measuring coherence can accurately show heart, brain and nervous-system interactions that are sensitive to changes in emotions.
While an individual is experiencing coherence, the heart rhythm appears as a smooth wavelike pattern on an HRV graph. Contrast coherence with incoherence, created by negative emotions such as frustration and anger, which can often disrupt the synchronization of the body’s systems and create jagged or chaotic patterns on a graph.
Advanced research at the Institute of HeartMath and elsewhere has provided evidence that gratitude is not simply a nice sentiment or feeling. Sustained feelings of gratitude have real benefits, including the following four benefits:
- Biochemical changes – Favorable changes in the body’s biochemistry include improved hormonal balance and an increase in production of DHEA, the "anti-aging hormone."
- Increased positivity – Favorable changes in the body’s Daily gratitude exercises can bring about a greater level of positive feelings, according to researchers from the University of Miami and the University of California, Davis who studied this process in 157 individuals over 13 days.
- Boost to the immune system – The IgA antibody, which serves as the first line of defense against pathogens, increases in the body.
- Emotional “compound interest” – The accumulated effect of sustained appreciation and gratitude is that these feelings, and coherence, are easier to recreate with continued practice. This is because experiencing an emotion reinforces the neural pathways of that particular emotion as it excites the brain, heart and nervous system.
Thankfully, gratitude and appreciation can create their own positive psychophysiological holiday in your body – without the necessity of a feast. Sincere self-evoked feelings of gratitude and appreciation are explained in-depth by Institute of HeartMath founder Doc Childre and Director of Research Dr. Rollin McCraty in their e-book, The Appreciative Heart: the Psychophysiology of Positive Emotions and Optimal Functioning.
Lissa Rankin, M.D. is an integrative medicine physician, author, speaker, artist, and founder of the online health and wellness community OwningPink.com. Discouraged by our broken health-care system, Dr. Rankin set out to discover why some patients experience miraculous cures from seemingly incurable illnesses, while others remain sick even when they receive the best medical care.
Fueled by a passion to determine what really makes people healthy and what really predisposes them to illness, she dug into the medical literature to study how doctors might better care for patients. Her research led her to discover that patients have self-healing powers beyond our wildest imaginings, and science proves it.
She is now leading a "Pink Medicine Revolution" to help patients heal themselves, while encouraging the health-care industry to embrace and facilitate, rather than resist, such miracles.Dr. Rankin shows how thoughts, feelings, and beliefs can alter the body's physiology. She lays out the scientific data proving that loneliness, pessimism, depression, fear, and anxiety damage the body, while intimate relationships, gratitude, meditation, sex, and authentic self-expression flip on the body's self-healing processes.
Read about it in the book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself, where she introduces a radical new wellness model to help you uncover where things might be out of whack in your life-spiritually, creatively, environmentally, nutritionally, and in your professional and personal relationships. You can then create a customized treatment plan aimed at bolstering these health-promoting pieces of your life. You'll learn how to listen to your body's "whispers" before they turn to life-threatening "screams" that can be prevented with proper self-care. You'll learn how to trust your inner guidance when making decisions about your health and your life.
Personal and global ascension requires allowing and gratitude. Allowing what you do not like or want happens when you give your attention to what is desired. Gratitude is appreciation for the incredible variety in all things…personalities, clothing designs, architecture, trees, drinking vessels, and so on.
Daily allowing and gratitude bring you to an inner space of love for ALL without bringing ALL into your everyday experience. With this you discern where you want to go, whose company feels good, what foods excite your taste buds, and so on.
Changes ensue along the path of life. Perhaps the spinach you grimaced over is now a favored green in your salad. Perhaps a person you avoided for a “less than” feeling they transmitted with their presence, has transcended the emotional issue resulting in that message.
Rather than avoiding what is undesirable, focus on what is desired. You can always go to a place of inner stillness where your answers await. (One might sleep on it!)
At a recent tai chi gathering on the Intracoastal Waterway, the participants were mostly quiet for the practice. By being the example I desired for the group, speech was minimal. My meditation on balance visualized everyone in the group receiving a harmonious blend of galactic and earth energies. Group behavior demonstrated greater balance manifested as silence (focused meditation). The group tuned to living in the Now. Everyone benefited.
Another way of discussing human interaction is this: love all in the grand scheme whether or not you like their behavior. It is perfectly acceptable to love at a distance and not like upon close inspection. Just follow your emotional guidance scale. If the person does not inspire good feelings in you, place your attention elsewhere.
Whatever you are giving your attention to already has a vibration of its own, and as you give your attention to it, you include its vibration in your vibration...and then your point of attraction is affected. (Excerpted from the Abraham-Hicks workshop in Silver Spring, MD on April 19, 1997)
If man understood that "what I create has nothing to do with what anybody else is creating" then he wouldn't be so afraid of what others are doing. (Excerpted from the Abraham-Hicks workshop in El Paso, TX on November 14, 1998)
An alternate title is 'Remembering Who You Are'. The way is whatever you choose with attributes including:
- Respecting yourself,
- Loving yourself,
- Expressing gratitude,
- Releasing judgment,
- Participating in the moment, and
- Living your passion.
Your path is daily practice in mindfulness and it begins with a willingness to change. Just like losing excess weight, bettering academic grades or becoming proficient at a skill, each opportunity can bring you closer to the goal.
As you proceed along the path, you discover (remember) the interconnection of all things. Call it interrelationship, co-existence, ecology, symbiotic or any other of the many relationship labels you can think of. Interconnection is the glue at all levels of our being.
A great example of this in daily life is food. When you eat a meal that satisfies you without indigestion, you are respecting your body, mind and spirit. You love yourself when you make good food choices that satisfy! When you eat joyfully and take your time to savor, that is a form of gratititude. The dining experience excludes comment on the flatware, dishes, serving environment and server, so you release judgment. Contemplating each bite - texture, blend of flavors, heat, etc. - is participating in the moment. Choosing foods that bring back memories of favorite food experiences is living your passion.
If your dining experience is food on the run, then respect yourself enough to make small changes to bring your dining experience closer to something more enjoyable to you.
As you work on the bullet list above each day, at some point you will experience greater connection to the world around you. It will happen on physical and non-physical levels. You will find yourself more tuned in to others...what they need, think and feel. This is where the richness of life comes in.
In the words of Maya Angelou, "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
Now, you have the opportunity to be the change you wish to experience in the world.
How can one person transform the world?
Help is everywhere. Use what resonates with you. As you evolve, you change, so what resonates with you will also change. Pay attention to your gut, intuition, inner voice, or whatever you refer to as the guidance system that helps you make choices.
In the course of research for a monthly newsletter, I visited inc.com. I glanced at the Most Viewed list to find these articles:
- 12 Great Motivational Quotes for 2013
- 6 Habits of Remarkably Likable People
- 8 Things Remarkably Successful People Do
- 9 Daily Habits That Will Make You Happier
- 10 Things Extraordinary People Say Every Day.
While these topics were not part of my search, they became part of my 'find' for newsletter content. The topics speak to trends in human consciousness. The readers of these articles seek information to spur them to greater heights; that is the basis of the monthly newsletter I create for independent inventors!
You are independently re-inventing yourself, too!
