Howard Martin on the Origins of HeartMath

This conversation comes from Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman that gathers people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine. The guest is Howard Martin, Executive Vice-President of HeartMath and co-author of The HeartMath Solution, a book built around research into the connection between the heart and the brain, heart rate variability, and biofeedback training. Martin also sits on Jack Canfield's Transformative Leadership Council, a group of people working on personal, organizational, and social change, and he belongs to Evolutionary Leaders, a circle of visionaries assembled by Deepak Chopra.

Erik opened by thanking everyone tuning in from around the world, and Martin returned the greeting, saying he hoped the two of them could put together an exchange that would mean something to the people listening. Then Erik asked the obvious first question: what is HeartMath, and where did it come from?

Martin's answer stretched back a long way. By the time of the interview the organization had been going for nearly 25 years. It was started by Doc Childre, a man Martin had known as a friend for close to four decades. The beginning was modest. Childre, Martin, and a handful of others spent years living in eastern North Carolina, working through a long process of self-exploration, and in the middle of that they noticed something about themselves that struck them as important. It had to do with a kind of intelligence they saw surfacing. Not a brand-new thing, Martin said, since it had been present for a long time, but something that seemed to be moving into a new stage.

None of them set out to build a company. There was no plan to become authors or speakers or to do any of the things the group eventually did. They were simply trying to put the basics first, widen their own awareness, and make some sense of being alive. The ambition came later, almost by accident, once they reached a point where it was clear they had hold of something other people could use.

What pushed them toward sharing it was the state of the world around them. They felt people were living through a stretch of change unlike anything before, and that the old ways of coping were no longer enough. The aim, as Martin framed it, was to give people tools for meeting that change and getting the most out of it, so they could do more than just hang on and get by.