The poet Rumi described passion when he said, “Passion burns down every branch of exhaustion. Passion is the supreme elixir and renews all things. Let divine passion triumph and rebirth you in yourself.” Passion arises primarily from the heart. Howard Martin is someone who has not only been incredibly successful following his own passions in his own life, but he is one of the leaders in an organization, an institution, that is one of the leading research institutions in the world on the relationship between the heart and the brain.
Howard brings more than 30 years of experience in business and personal development to his position as executive vice president of HeartMath LLC and at the Institute of HeartMath. HeartMath’s research center explores the physiological mechanisms by which the heart communicates with the brain, thereby influencing information processing, perceptions, emotions, and even health.
It’s on the basis of this research that HeartMath has created cutting-edge technological tools, which help individuals increase their heart coherence, which in turn leads to improved performance, reduced stress, and more fulfillment in their lives. What’s so exciting about this is that the technology, called emWaves, is based on over 17 years of scientific research, so it’s a very profound tool.
It is a remarkable tool for allowing anyone to be able to consciously create that state of heart coherence. Howard has been instrumental in the development and teaching of HeartMath’s programs since its inception. He speaks internationally on the HeartMath approach to advancing human performance.
Howard is co-author of The HeartMath Solution, and he developed the Nightingale-Conant tape series called The HeartMath Method. As a key spokesperson for HeartMath, Howard has conducted hundreds of interviews. His appearances include “CNN,” UPI Radio Network, “WNBC TV-New York,” ‘WGN TV-Chicago,” “The Discovery Channel,” “CBN-Canada,” Muscle and Fitness, The San Francisco Chronicle, Billboard, The Boston Globe, and others.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Howard, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be with us tonight.
HOWARD MARTIN: Thank you, Chris. I’m honored to have the opportunity to be here. I’d like to say hello to everyone who has called in to give their time tonight to listen to this little Southern boy talk about the heart.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Somehow, it just feels a little more connected to the heart with that Southern accent.
HOWARD MARTIN: There you go!
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Howard, will you begin by telling us how your own passions, the things that really matter most to you, led you to work that you do today with HeartMath?
HOWARD MARTIN: As a young man, I had a passion and interest in personal growth. I think back then it was the glamour of wanting to be aware and enlightened without really knowing what that was. I’d read about it in other books, things that I’d studied, and it sounded like a good thing to do. Certainly, I had burning desire to want to be a better person, to want to understand myself, to want to understand others, and to want to understand the world.
That passion just kept burning. Despite what I went through in life, I began to learn to live it from the heart. I began to explore the heart early on. When I was about age 21 is when I became interested in that. I guess, basically, I’d read about it in books. I’d hear people talk about the heart, and I didn’t really have a lot of interest in it. I wasn’t a soft, squishy guy, but something about it appealed to me.
I figured it was worth at least taking a deeper look at it to see if there was something really there, or if it was just a metaphor. As I began this exploration of the heart, I began to find that my perceptions changed, my values changed, my interests changed. I felt that I started to be a person who loved more and judged less. These were all qualities and things that I really wanted.
Then it became a matter of really recognizing that what I’m here for on this earth is to serve and to take care of people, to help people through the transitional era in the history of this planet. That’s the passion I have today; it’s a one-pointed, burning desire to share what I’ve learned, to share the work of HeartMath, and to share it in a meaningful way that can help others have what they want in their lives.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I know Doc Childre was the founder of the Institute for HeartMath. Would you just briefly share with us the story of how you met Doc, how you made the decision to get so deeply involved with HeartMath, and what it’s doing?
HOWARD MARTIN: First of all, you’re right. Doc Childre is the man who founded HeartMath. He’s an amazing, amazing human being. He’s a real man’s man. He’s extremely intelligent; very, very aware; very much his own self, really; and he’s a man who really cares, and cares very deeply. I was very young-about 21, as I mentioned-when I met Doc.
I met him through mutual friends. I remember that when I met him, I recognized pretty quickly that although he was only a few years older than me, he was a lot more mature and aware than I was. At first I didn’t like him because he made too much sense. The things he would say would be sort of challenging to the young, cocky, arrogant person who I was at the time.
Not long after that, though, he came to me one day. I used to sort of hide from him, because I didn’t want to hear the truth. One day he came to me and sat down, and he just looked me in the eye and he said, “Here’s what’s going on. I’m not here to be your teacher, your guru, or any of those things like that. I’m here to be your friend. I have a mission in life, and my mission in life is to bring out greatness in great people. That’s all I want to do for you.”
He said it with such heart and such care that it really hit me right in the heart. To this day I can say, now some 38 years later I guess it is, that all he’s ever done this whole time is care for me and try to bring out whatever there is in me that can be better. I think he’s held true to his statement back then without ever flinching. To me, that’s a rare human being who can do that, and someone who I sincerely appreciate beyond words, having him in my life.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Howard, having spent some time with you, I’ve noticed that you seem to have that same characteristic yourself these days, a real concern and dedication to bringing out the best and the greatness in the people around you. It seems to have rubbed off a bit.
HOWARD MARTIN: He said he wasn’t my teacher, but he was definitely a friend who could teach me something. Maybe it has rubbed off after this many years; I should have at least a little of that going on.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: You have a lot of it going on. Now we mentioned that HeartMath is a leader in research on the relationship between the heart and the brain. Many people think these two worlds are way apart; you either talk about the brain or you talk about the heart. Years ago, the whole idea of the mind-body connection began to be researched and brought out, but will you talk to us specifically about the relationship between the heart and the brain? How does one affect the other and vice versa? Maybe you can introduce us to the kind of research that HeartMath has been doing.
HOWARD MARTIN: Sure. We didn’t form HeartMath until we were 15 years into working on ourselves, Doc Childre, myself and some others. We never really had an ambition of creating an organization. We were just really dedicated to self-exploration. We had found the heart in the process. What we’d found within ourselves was that the heart was this magnificent source of intelligence.
It was an intelligence that was high-speed, it was intuitive. It was an intelligence that really looked out for the whole. It was certainly, for lack of a better term, mystical in some ways, but more importantly it was pragmatic and practical. It was that intelligence that would give you direction on making decisions big and small in life: everything from how to speak to someone, when to back out or back down a little in a conversation, or the kind of intelligence that would tell you not to eat that second piece of cake.
It had a very bottom-line, pragmatic side to it. We knew this; we’d experienced this in our own lives. When we formed HeartMath here in Northern California in 1991, we intended to introduce this notion of heart intelligence to the world. We recognized that this had been talked about before, and these types of concepts had remained for so long in just the realms of philosophy, religion or spirituality.
If this was something that was going to be acceptable in mainstream society, then you had to prove it. It had to have an empirical understanding to it. That’s why the word ‘math’ was put in context with the word ‘heart’; that’s why we call it HeartMath. ‘Math’ doesn’t represent numbers in this context. It represents a symbol for empirical understanding. One of the first things we did was we gathered scientists who were interested in Doc’s work.
These were brilliant people, and they formed a very prestigious scientific advisory board with scientists from various disciplines. We began this process of looking at the heart beyond its cardiovascular functioning capacity. What we found was this. First of all, we found research that was sort of hidden in the literature-all the way back into the ’70s-that had been exploring the heart as a communicative organ.
What we found over years of research is that the heart, in fact, did send powerful healing commands to the brain and the rest of the body, and that brain function was actually critically dependant upon signals coming from the heart.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: How does that happen? We don’t generally think of the heart as being more than an organ that is pumping blood.
HOWARD MARTIN: That’s true. That’s a perception that’s been around for a long time. Now modern science is proving that the heart is certainly a lot more than that. It sends these powerful signals throughout the body in four different ways. First of all, it has a very interesting and complex nervous system, in the heart itself, made up of ganglia, protein, neurons, and support cells.
It’s amazing, and it’s a very complex nervous system studied today through the field of what’s called neurocardiology. This nervous system sends information up into the brain through a nerve pathway that originates in the heart and then travels, in a sense, north up into the brain. That nerve pathway actually ends or terminates up in our higher perceptual centers of our brain, all the way into the neocortex where we have our thinking, reasoning and creative capacities.
This nervous system is pumping neurological information from the heart back to the brain. What’s interesting is that when researchers map out the neural traffic in the body, they clearly see that the heart sends a lot more information through the brain than it actually receives from the brain. That’s the first way. The second way is that the pumping power of the heart sends a wave of energy through the body that pushes the blood through the veins and the arteries, and it’s called a blood pressure wave.
The blood pressure wave actually mediates or modulates changes in the electrical activity in the brain. As the blood pressure wave changes, so does the electrical activity in the brain, so we have this sort of biophysical communication. That’s the second way. The third way is that in 1983, the heart was actually reclassified as part of a hormonal system, because researchers found that it produced several very, very powerful hormones.
One of those is called atrial peptide, and atrial peptide has an interesting job. Its job is to reduce or mediate the release of the stress hormone cortisol, and it’s a hormone produced in the heart. It also produced a hormone called oxytocin, which some of the listeners tonight may have read about. It’s generically called ‘the love hormone’. It’s produced in greater amounts when people are in loving states. A mother with a young child, for instance, generally produces greater amounts of oxytocin.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Howard, just as an aside, if I may, you know, but some of our listeners may not know, that my wife and I just had a baby six weeks ago, a new baby girl. All we heard about was oxytocin as we were getting ready for this. What we came to learn is that the body produces much higher levels of oxytocin to assist with the process of birth. Just as you were saying, apparently, oxytocin levels go up dramatically. It’s almost a survival thing, but it makes the mother feel these great waves of love, these huge emotions for the child, as I noticed with my wife, even before the baby was born, but particularly afterwards.
It’s been interesting to see what you’re talking about on a very practical level. Anyone who’s had children, I’m sure, also has had that experience. What’s so interesting about what you’re saying, and I hope you’ll continue, is how the heart modulates these hormones that actually affect the way we experience our surroundings and our domain. That’s what I hear you saying.
HOWARD MARTIN: That’s right. That’s a great personal story and exactly what I’m talking about. The heart actually produces oxytocin. It’s one of the major sources of oxytocin in the body, actually, produced by the heart.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: It would make sense why we feel these great waves of love, like what a mother feels for a child. Our mutual friend, John Gray, talks about cuddling and the kind of romantic love also increases oxytocin levels, from what I understand.
HOWARD MARTIN: That’s right. It really does. That’s a biochemical communication we have that the heart if performing for us. The last way is an energetic communication, which is where it really gets interesting to me. So far we’ve talked about hardwired biological functioning, but the heart is also an electrical organ. When we go to a doctor and that doctor measures our ECG-which used to be called an EKG signal-what they’re measuring is an electrical impulse being sent from the heart.
This is a strong signal. The electrical energy produced by a heart is the strongest source of bioelectricity that we have. That electrical energy permeates every single cell in our bodies, in a sense binding the cells together. The signal is so strong that it actually radiates beyond the skin out into space. I’m not talking in this context about an aura or anything like that.
I’m talking about very measurable electromagnetic energy. The heart produces an electromagnetic field that surrounds us 360 degrees, all the way around us from head to toe. That field extends out into space and can be easily measured about three-and-a-half to four feet outside the body. As we change emotional states, the quality of that electromagnetic field changes.
If we are feeling strong negative emotions-like anger, frustration and things like that-what researchers see is what’s called an incoherent spectrum in the field. It means the frequencies in the field are competing; the signature is very jagged, irregular and disordered. It’s chaos in the electromagnetic field that we produce. Conversely, the good news is that when we are experiencing emotions long associated with heart-like compassion, care, appreciation, kindness, love and, yes, passion-the electromagnetic field changes, and it begins to produce what’s called a coherent spectrum.
The field becomes ordered. It becomes more powerful. The frequencies in the field are not competing with one another; they’re cooperating with one another. This electromagnetic field changes depending upon what we are feeling. In a sense, because it radiates beyond the skin out into space, we are literally broadcasting our emotions through the heart.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Actually, if you have a group of people together, I guess what comes up to my mind is that we’ve all probably had the experience where you walk into a party or a room full of a group of people. If this is a group of friends who’ve known each other, who love each other, and who get together regularly, you walk in and you can feel it in the environment.
HOWARD MARTIN: That’s exactly right.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That must be what you’re talking about, that there’s this emanation going on that everyone’s happy and everyone’s enjoying each other. At the same time, I’m sure all of us have had the experience where you walk into a room, and maybe there’s an argument going on or there are some bad feelings between people in the room. You can feel it. You can actually, literally, feel it. It must be related to what you’re talking about. Isn’t that the case?
HOWARD MARTIN: Yes, that’s the case. There could be other reasons as well, but certainly that is a reasonable explanation for that. We’ve literally broadcast frequencies, energy, or electromagnetic energy depending upon what we were feeling. We’ve all walked in a room before where everybody’s sitting around looking normal, yet we instantly know something’s happened.
As we query what happened, sometimes we find out, “We just had a big fight.” There’s been an electromagnetic discharge in that room through the anger, frustration and resentment people were feeling that very well may linger. Why do we feel that? This is where it even gets more interesting. So far, I’ve talked about the heart being a part of our physiology that sends information.
We also believe through our research and through our own personal experience that it receives information, that you pick up information from the heart. My belief is that the heart actually puts us in touch with a field of information that’s beyond what the brain and mind normally pick up on.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Would this be related to what we call intuition?
HOWARD MARTIN: Exactly. Another way of simply explaining it is AM and FM radio. The brain and mind in normal operational mode are picking up AM. When we access information through the field of the heart, it could be like FM information. We’ve done amazing research here at HeartMath, and some of that you can see on the www.HeartMath.org site, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing. We did a study on this.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: We have to go a little bit slowly for people, Howard, when we give out a website to make sure they can write it down. It’s www.HeartMath.org.
HOWARD MARTIN: Yes, that’s the nonprofit side of our business.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Then your regular site is www.HeartMath.org.
HOWARD MARTIN: That’s right. A lot of the research information is posted on www.HeartMath.org site. There’s a big study that we did a couple of years ago, published in a peer-review journal, and that study was on looking at the intuitive response from a physiological level. Basically, to simply explain it, experiments have been done in the past with people sitting in front of a computer that was randomly selecting pictures.
Sometimes there would seem to be the ability for them to sense what picture was coming up, whether it was going to be pleasant or horrific, prior to the time the picture actually did show up. We replicated the studies, and we did very, very detailed testing looking at both brain and heart functions simultaneously. What we saw is that in many cases the person’s physiology was responding in a way that would be associated with the upcoming picture about six seconds prior to the time the picture actually came up on the computer.
As we looked closer, we saw that the first responder that took place, the first response that would be associated with the upcoming picture, actually occurred about six seconds before, and it was the heart that responded first. It was about a second-and-a-half later that the brain began to respond. The heart was preceding the brain in terms of sensing the upcoming picture.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: What conclusions do the scientists draw from those sorts of results?
HOWARD MARTIN: Our conclusion was that our physiology is constantly sensing for future events. It is a characteristic that we have that goes on unconsciously, that it happens anyway, but we are unconscious of it. Learning to develop this capacity and learning to become sensitive to this would be, in essence, a very sophisticated and smart thing to do.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: How does one do that?
HOWARD MARTIN: You do it through learning to bring your whole body, mind, emotions and spirit into a state called coherence, or heart coherence. That increases the intuitive capacity that we have.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Have you done research on that, as well? We’ll talk a little bit more about this, but of course, HeartMath, as I mentioned, has developed some tools, some specific technological tools, to assist people in developing that level of coherence. Has there been research on the results of people increasing coherence in this way?
HOWARD MARTIN: We’ve done lots and lots of research on coherence. We are the experts in the world on the subject, and we’ve done every kind of study imaginable-from large studies in multinational corporations showing huge changes in emotional culture and performance in the workplace, stress levels, health improvements, and all kinds of things, to government agencies to Fortune 500 companies, et cetera.
Those kinds of studies have been done. We’ve done studies in sports. We’ve done studies showing improvements in reaction-speed time. We’ve done studies in education showing performance in academic improvement in young people. There was a very large study that we did through the US government in school districts around the country improving test-taking scores through increasing coherence and reducing test-taking anxiety.
We have many, many studies looking at all these different angles on how coherence impacts someone’s life. We found definitively that someone increasing their level of coherence, which is done through the heart and integration of heart and brain, has a huge impact on our ability to perform in life; on our ability to feel positive emotions and regulate our emotions; and on our health.
This is everything from our blood pressure to our cardiovascular function to our hormonal balance and on. It’s a great and important state that we all need to learn to cultivate more. That’s the essence of the HeartMath training, teaching and our technology, to teach people how to do exactly that.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I want to go a little more deeply into this. Is there a difference, Howard, between what brain physiologists call brain-wave coherence and heart coherence? Are they related in any way?
HOWARD MARTIN: Yes, the brain goes into certain states of synchronization, et cetera. The heart, being the strong electromagnetic source and electrical source in the body, has a big influence over that whole process that occurs in the brain. Heart coherence drives brain coherence, in many cases. In other words, when the heart sends those coherent signals to the brain, the brain responds accordingly.
As I said earlier in our conversation, brain function is critically dependent upon signals coming from the heart, and that would be one example of that. I think it’s worth going in now and defining the term ‘coherence’, what I really mean by that.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Would you do that?
HOWARD MARTIN: Sure. Very simply-and I’ll just use simple terms for it-coherence would be a state we enter into when all of our parts are working well together. It’s a harmonious state. It’s a state where our physiological systems are synchronized, like with digestion, respiration, heart function, hormonal release, et cetera. All those systems synchronize to the strongest rhythm-maker in the body, which is the heart.
When we bring the heart into coherence, when we bring the heart rhythms into coherence, which is what we teach, then the rest of the body’s systems synchronize to that so there’s physiological coherence. That translates into psychological coherence. The coherent state is also accompanied by feelings of strong positive emotions. Some of those I mentioned earlier, like love, care, compassion, and those kinds of feelings.
You have these sustained positive emotions occurring simultaneously with a synchronization in the physical systems. That opens up the brain; it opens up the mind. We begin to then have higher mental capacity. We think more clearly. We can remember things more clearly. We have the ability to differentiate things in a new way. Our perception, even our visual field, improves when we are in the coherent state.
Taking one step further, to me it’s an integrative state where we are aligned physically, emotionally and mentally, and then that opens us up to more of the spiritual side of things. That’s when spirit begins to integrate more with our humanness. To me, that spirit integration into humanness is what lights the fire of passion within us, and gives us the ability to do more than we ever think we can: the ability to persevere, the ability to sustain our intentions. All that comes from kindling the fires of passion in our hearts. The coherent state is a state that reflects all of that.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I don’t know that you’ve researched this specifically, but it seems that one could make the hypothesis, or at least project, that when a person increases their heart coherence, as you’ve defined it, that it’s going to follow that they are going to feel more passion, be more passionate about what they’re doing, and perhaps also have greater clarity in being able to understand and identify what it is that’s really important to them.
HOWARD MARTIN: That’s exactly right. I think that’s very important. One of the things about our passion is that we need to know where to direct it. What’s really going to be best for us? What’s going to be most fulfilling? What’s going to bring us the most meaning in life? How’s that passion and how are those intentions going to affect outcomes for others?
I think getting that internal guidance system lined up with what’s really best-not just what our personality thinks we want, but really lining up with our true core values-is an essential step in the process. Then when we have that alignment going on and we turn on the power of passion behind it, that’s what gives us the power to manifest.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I know that in your research and looking through your materials that HeartMath talks a lot about the effects of stress. All of us are very familiar with the effects of stress in our lives. We live in a highly stressful place. We could say stressful, but there is just a lot of information coming at all of us. There’s a lot for us to deal with. There are a lot of different variables. How does stress affect heart coherence? How does it affect the heart and the rhythms of the heart?
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