Can you think of a time when you experienced a strong feeling of intuition? Maybe that intuition felt like it came out of nowhere and wasn’t something you ever would have thought of with your rational, planning mind.
I’ll give you an example from my own life. When I was a student at St. John’s University, I traveled to Rome with a student group. During my time there, while we were standing in front of the Trevi Fountain, I turned to Father Mark—a Benedictine monk and one of my first teachers in contemplative prayer—and said that I wished I could stay in Rome for the whole semester, instead of just the one month I had originally planned on.
Father Mark said to me: You know what? Call St. John’s, tell them to “F off,” and say that you’re staying in Rome for the semester!
Later, I found out that Father Mark was kidding! But in the moment, I took him seriously, because it triggered this intuition in me—this feeling that staying in Rome for the rest of the semester was important for me to do.
So I ended up staying. I took classes in theology and art, lived with Benedictine monks, and learned a lot about prayer, meditation, and how to integrate it into life. After getting married and having kids, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, because it has come to form a lot of this work that I now do.
Now, return to the example from your own life. If you acted on that intuition, are you glad that you did? If you didn’t act on it, do you have any regrets about missed opportunities or risks not taken?
HeartMath® research is proving that intuition is real.
We tend to think of intuition as “woo-woo” or unreliable, but HeartMath research has been proving that it’s real. Through our hearts, we can tune into intuition that is valuable, real, and actionable.
Let me give you an example of a HeartMath study that still boggles my mind. In this study, the researchers hooked participants up to both an EEG (to measure brain activity) and an EKG (to measure heart activity), and sat them at a computer monitor, where they were shown a series of images.
Some were neutral images of people going about their day. Others, however, were shocking or grotesque in some way—images you’d naturally recoil from. The images were completely randomized: no one, not the scientists or even the computer itself, knew which images would be shown next.
The researchers found that 4-5 seconds before the images were displayed, both the heart and the brain registered states of arousal, as if they were picking up on something. And these arousal states were different before the neutral images than they were before the more emotionally charged images.
In other words: before the participants knew what was coming next, before the computer programmers or even the computer itself had run the algorithm to know what was next, people were picking up on some kind of information as an intuition.
The details of the study are even more fascinating.
Researchers found that the heart was responding an average of 1.5 seconds before the brain.
What this tells us is that the heart received intuitive information first, responded to it physiologically, and then sent that information up to the brain. All of this happened before the conscious, rational awareness could even register a response…and well before the images appeared on the screen.
The official report says: “This suggests the heart is directly coupled to a source of information that interacts with the multiplicity of energetic fields in which the body is embedded.”
In other words, scientists are now saying what yogis and mystics have known for generations.
We are immersed in a sea of wisdom, sent from God or a Spirit beyond us, about where to go with our lives. And part of the contemplative path is learning how to let go of the internal obstacles that block us from receiving that intuitive wisdom. This is not coming from a guru sitting on a mountain. This is hard science and data!
And it’s possible to strengthen your intuition.
The HeartMath study included two groups of people: a control group, who weren’t given any particular direction before viewing the images, and a second group who learned heart coherence techniques (the same techniques that you’ll learn in my Centering for Wisdom Program).
Without telling them why, the researchers asked this second group to go into heart coherence right before sitting down at their computer screens.
You can probably guess what happened: EEG and EKG monitors showed that the group that practiced HeartMath® techniques responded earlier, and with a greater intensity, than the control group.
Now I want you to think of a time where you got stuck, where you didn’t know what to do next.
If you’re working in leadership roles, this probably happens a lot. You might not even think about all those little places where you get stuck, or about how much energy and time can be lost to them.
Some common examples from myself and my clients include:
A due date on a project. The deadline is approaching, you’re getting anxious, but you don’t know where to go with it—or even where to start.
A new idea. You want to create a new product or service but aren’t sure how to move from concept to reality.
An overwhelming to-do list. This one is so common that we hardly even think of it as an example of getting stuck! But if you’re like a lot of people in leadership roles, you have more on your to-do list than any one person could accomplish—not just in a day or a week, but even in a whole career. When your to-do list is impossibly long, but you don’t have a sense of where to focus your energy, or what to do next, that can cause you to get stuck.
Psychologists call this a sense of time scarcity. When you don’t feel like you have enough time, energy, or resources to do everything you need to do, you end up living in a constant state of panic that you’ll never get it all done. And this anxiety makes it even harder to work effectively or efficiently!
When you get stuck, what can you do?
When you’re not sure what to do next, we can take the science of intuition, combined with a deep centering practice, to help you get unstuck.
The technique goes a little deeper than this, as I’ll teach in the program, but here are the basics:
- Lay out the issue. It could be something small, or it could be a major problem in your life.
- Note any thoughts or feelings about it before doing the exercise.
- Get yourself into a coherent state using all the techniques you’ll have learned. (One of the major benefits of the Inner Balance™ sensor, which is included in the program, is that you’ll know for sure that you’re in a state of coherence.)
- Ask—you can ask God, or your own heart—what would be a more efficient or effective attitude, feeling, or action?
- Then all you do is listen. Listen for your first intuition and write that down. Sometimes that intuition comes right away, and sometimes it takes a while. Maybe it doesn’t come to you until later in the day. Whenever it does come, you write down that first intuition, and make a plan to act on it.
This is a scientifically validated source of knowledge and wisdom that is guided by and aligned with your heart: both your physical heart, and your emotional, spiritual heart.
It’s also a skill that you can refine, practice, and enhance. Over time, as you spend more and more time in that state of high coherence, you’ll start to see your baseline shift. The more you do it, the better you get!
I want to leave you here with a question about WHY? Why learn these techniques?
Some of it should be self-evident: who wouldn’t want to lower stress, solve problems effectively, and avoid getting stuck in that never-ending to-do list?
But there’s also a bigger picture that motivates me to keep doing this work. And that is that we desperately need wise leaders guiding organizations, from small businesses to billion-dollar international corporations. We need loving members of our families and communities who are tuning into this higher intuition that comes from God, from something beyond ourselves.
And when you learn these techniques, you’re learning tools for acting on behalf of a greater good, something bigger than yourself. You’re learning to innovate in ways that serve the common good.
We all want to get out of that cycle of overwhelm and burnout, and there’s value in that healing alone. But the real magic starts to happen once you’ve gotten free from that chronic stress and are able to start making decisions that are aligned with your higher purpose. You’ll begin to see the ways this can spread to impact our families, or organizations, our whole communities.
That is my Root WHY: it’s the reason I do this work.
If you want to learn more, I have a couple of invitations for you to go deeper.
The easiest thing to do is visit the website for the Centering for Wisdom and HeartMath program that I’ve created. You can learn more about the program and read more about how all these pieces fit together. That might be enough for you to sign up right away!
If you still have questions, or need some more guidance on whether the program is right for you, you can book a call with me. We’ll talk about where you are now in your spiritual practice, career, or relationships, and about where you’d like to be. I’ll help you get clear on your current challenges and come up with a plan to move you forward. If I can help, then we’ll discuss that. And if I can’t, that’s fine too, and I’ll be straightforward about that.
I hope you’re finding peace amid these latter days of the pandemic, and deepening your contemplative practice to lead with greater insight, wisdom, and intuition.
Or, if developing a practice is something you’ve been thinking about for a long time, I really encourage you to take some kind of action, like checking out my site, that will allow you to learn, to deepen your new practice, and integrate it into your daily life.
This isn’t only about your own healing and health: it’s about tapping into the unique gifts that the Divine Wisdom wants to express through you, and getting in touch with the reason you’ve been put on this earth.
If your heart is calling you to take action right now, listen to it! See how you can live in tune with Divine Wisdom…and along the way improve your health, make successful decisions, and give more back to the world.