Brief Meditation for Stress, Inner Peace and Strength

Our Hearts Can Help
Our hearts may be strained now but our hearts can also be a source of peace and strength if we engage it consciously. We all need all the help we can get these days to be able to deal with all the stress, strain and change that the Corona Virus has triggered. We can and will get through this but we need to turn up the volume on our self care and stress management! Focusing on our inner world becomes so important when we face overwhelming challenges like our current reality.

Healthy Heart Connection
For centuries the heart has been connected with the emotions of love, gratitude and compassion. It has also been associated with courage, wisdom and spirituality. Research in the field of neurocardiology has found that not only are these feeling states experienced by the heart, but they also have a very stabilizing and beneficial effect on our total health.

Stress Creates Disordered Heart Rhythms
For many years mind-body research has focused on the effect of stress and negative emotional states upon hormonal fluctuations, immune response, heart and brain function. It has become clear that stress and negative emotion lead to disorder within the heart’s rhythms, and in the autonomic nervous system   thereby affecting the rest of the body’s function in a negative way. The good news is that the opposite is also true— positive emotion leads to increased harmony, coherence and balance within these same systems.

Positive Changes with Heart Centered Techniques
Significant positive changes have been repeatedly documented in the body’s systems when techniques are used that purposefully create feelings of appreciation, gratitude and unconditional love. The voluntary triggering of these emotional states was found to increase coherence both heart rhythms and the autonomic nervous system which regulates heart rate, breathing and other vital functions.

This results in a positive effect on all psychological and physical functions. In addition, it was found that people’s perception of stress shifted in a positive direction; they developed an inner resilience that is referred be as “stress hardiness”. People became less prone to react negatively to stress and better able to actively manage and reduce unavoidable stress. That is all great news but there is more: physical performance improves, creativity is enhanced, problem solving improves and intuitive functions are enhanced.

Turning Concept to Reality
This is all excellent information! It does however require that we DO something to create these inner shifts within ourselves. Here is a heart based meditation that can help: