In 2019, I did a course with the Institute of Intuitive Intelligence. Because I wanted to be more intuitive, and I had read Ricci-Jane Adams’ book Spiritually Fierce, and I felt it was a type of spirituality that I could embrace.
Part of the concept that Ricci-Jane teaches is that the centre of intuition is the heart. Hence, heart coherence is important for developing intuition.
I’m going to quote a large chunk of Ricci-Jane’s first lecture, because I love that she is so scientific:
“So HeartMath Institute are world leaders in helping us understand this science. What they have proven is that within your anatomical heart, there are a cluster of 40,000 neurons that are exactly the same substances your brain, your cranial brain. Now these neural cells are clustered together so that they’re very focused. And that in that anatomical heart, this little brain as it’s called, is actually the beginning point for all of the activity that happens in all of the systems of your body. In other words, the heartbrain communicates more with the cranial brain than the other way around.
“This is really quite mind blowing. So literally the heart, which has now also been proven not just to be a pump that pumps blood around the body. In fact, the cells have a vortex like movement and they motivate themselves. About 90% of their movement is within the blood itself rather than the pumping motion of the heart. That’s simply not true. That does about 10% of that pumping motion. The true location of your intelligence is your heart. From an electromagnetic perspective, which is what we are, we’re biologically electromagnetic, your heart has a magnetic field that’s about 5,000 times bigger than the brain or any other part of the body. So that field that surrounds your heart is much bigger. And as we’ll go on to learn about the forms of intuition that HeartMath talk about, this is vital for understanding the origin of our intuition in our physical body.
“So that cluster of 40,000 neurons in the heart is the part of us that instigates all the other reactions throughout our system and HeartMath Institute were able to demonstrate this through an experiment they conducted. They prepared the subjects of this experiment with heart coherence, which is the practice we’re going to learn at this module. That simply means that they brought them into a state where they were in a meditative state, if you’d like. They had come into a state of calm, the functioning of their body was in a state of calm, and they were holding a high vibration. All of this we’ll unpack as we go along.
“The subjects were wired up so that all of their physiological responses could be measured, and they were sat in front of a computer screen. And this screen was going to randomly select images of an emotional nature, so either extreme, extreme positive or negative emotional states. These would be selected at random by the computer and flashed up on the screen. And the recipient would have their physiological signs measured.
“What this experiment was able to show is that the heartbrain was able to receive or was pre-cognitive of the image that was flashed up on the screen. Six seconds prior to that image appearing the heart then send information to the cranial brain. So the cranial brain receives the information about how to respond to that image three seconds prior to the image appearing, and then the brain sends out the chemical instructions that allowed the rest of the systems in the body to have a response. Either a positive response, the release of oxytocin, or a stress response, the release of cortisol and adrenaline based on that pre-cognitive data that was received by the heart. “
So the practice of heart coherence is crucial for intuition, and it’s a practice that I’m trying to remember to introduce into my day a number times, and not just an infrequent practice. It isn’t meditation, it isn’t relaxation. It is a profoundly disciplined tool that you will need to practice to get really really good at.
You are aligning your body with your heart by doing this. I’ve heard Tony Robbins talk people through a similar process, and he did so on aTim Ferriss podcast once, so it’s not so unusual. And I highly recommend learning and adopting it into your life.