Howard Martin on Heart Intelligence and the Science Behind HeartMath
Part of what came to me back then was a sense that my life needed to count for something beyond myself, that it had to involve helping other people. So I started working to turn that into something concrete. At 21 you can hold ideas like that as fascinating concepts, but carrying them from thought into lived reality is a different matter entirely, and it asks a lot of you.
What that effort opened up, eventually, was my own heart. I came to see this wasn't a mental exercise. Thinking my way toward that kind of life wasn't going to be enough. It called for contact with a deeper layer of my own intelligence, and the place I located that was the heart.
Doc Childre, who founded HeartMath, along with others around me, helped me begin a long process of drawing out what we now call heart intelligence. That work never really wraps up. It keeps going as long as you do. For me it was always about exploring the heart, bringing more of its qualities into how I actually lived, and also using it to widen how I perceived things. New ways of understanding would surface, and I could feed them back into the original aim: to keep growing and to be useful to others.
Erik: Could you say something about how all of you first got connected to heart rate variability and the devices you make and sell that help people train the heart?
Howard: We had these experiences ourselves, Erik, and they stretched our awareness and our intelligence. A heart-centered way of living genuinely made our lives better. When HeartMath got going, the goal was a system that could reach the mainstream and touch society at large. We understood that if we approached the heart the way it had always been approached, it would stay boxed inside spirituality and philosophy.
People have been talking about the heart for thousands of years, and that deserves respect. The trouble is the distance between what we sense inwardly, what we read about philosophically, and what we actually do with it from one day to the next. That gap is wide. We needed a bridge across it, and the bridge we picked was science.
We didn't turn to science in order to strip the heart out of the heart. The point was to give it an empirical grounding. Once something is demonstrated scientifically, belief in it grows stronger, and as belief grows, so does what people are able to do with it.