18. Your Heart

How often we talk about our hearts! We say someone has a big heart, a light heart, a heavy heart, a hard heart, a soft heart, a black heart, a change of heart, a broken heart or no heart. And no one ever says, “I love you with all my brain!”

Something else: when we point to ourselves, we never point our finger at our head. We point to our heart.

If feelings create our life experience, some logical questions arise.

• Does the heart emit a strong energy?
• Do traditional cultures recognise heart or feeling energy?
• Is the heart more than just a pump?

Can we measure energy from the heart?

This is a question posed by a group of scientists at the Institute of HeartMath: www.heartmath.com.

HeartMath³¹ found that “the heart produces by far the body’s most powerful rhythmic electromagnetic field”. This energy field is about three metres across and encircles your chest like a huge doughnut.

This electromagnetic heart field is 5,000 TIMES STRONGER than the field surrounding your brain. This is significant! Suddenly, the idea that how you feel shapes your destiny sounds a lot more reasonable. Your heart not only knows things; it remembers them.

A Mystery

In the last 50 years we have learnt much about the brain but less about the heart. We don’t know what starts the heart beating in the womb and we don’t know why a heart can keep beating after it is disconnected from the brain.³²

If you place a group of heart cells in a dish in a laboratory – with each of them separated – they will beat to a single rhythm. How do they do it? How do they know?

More Mysteries

Psychoneuroimmunologist, Paul Pearsall PhD, spent thirty years studying people who have had heart transplants. He amassed 140 reports and audio-tapes from patients who received other people’s hearts.

In his best-seller, The Heart’s Code,³³ he tells stories of patients who developed the behaviours and passions of their hearts’ donors BEFORE THEY KNEW anything about the donors. For example:

• A thirty-five-year-old female recipient received the heart of a topless dancer. She reported that before the transplant, sex was not a big part of her life. After the operation she explained, “I want sex every night … Now I tire my husband out … I used to hate X-rated videos, now I love them … I think I got her sexual drive.”
• A fifty-two-year-old male who received the heart of a seventeen-year-old boy said, “I loved quiet classical music before my new heart. Now I put on earphones, crank up the stereo and play loud rock-and-roll music.”

In her autobiography, A Change of Heart, Claire Sylvia³⁴ tells of her own transformation. Before receiving a heart and lung transplant, she was conservative and health-conscious. After her transplant she developed a passion for beer, chicken nuggets and motorbikes. When she spoke with the donor’s family she discovered that she had been given the heart of a beer-drinking, chicken nugget-loving motorcyclist.

Dr Pearsall recounts the story of an eight-year-old girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old girl. The eight-year-old began to have nightmares – and reported that she knew the identity of the killer of her heart’s donor.

Police used descriptions and evidence provided by the eight-year-old to arrest the murderer, who was ultimately convicted. Reports Pearsall, “the time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what the little girl he killed had said to him … everything the heart transplant recipient reported was completely accurate.”³⁵

How can this be?

An emerging view is that ALL cells – not just brain cells – have memory. DNA code is contained in every cell of your body. So, too, it seems, is memory.

The Western concept is that the brain is king and the heart is a pump. But the heart has a nervous system of its own. The heart is a conscious organ. Your heart not only knows things; it remembers them.

What Traditional Cultures Know

Traditional cultures know about life force or heart energy. There are over 100 words for it. The Polynesians call it mana, the Indians and Tibetans call it prana, the Iroquois call it orendam, the Ituri pygmies call it megbe, Chinese and Japanese medicine calls it chi.

Western medicine calls it baloney.

In the West we tend to worship the brain and ignore the heart. Western medicine has no words – and no place – for “life force”, “prana” or “chi”. And it is in the West that heart disease is out of control. Is nature trying to tell us something?