by Eva van Loon

“A change of heart changes everything,” claim the Heartmath people.

The who?

About 1991, in the coastal hills of Santa Barbara, California, Doc Childre and friends put together years of research on heart/brain communication and the power of coherence, a highly efficient psychological state where all the systems of the body work together in harmony, to create a program that can empower anyone to take control of stress, emotions, and the cardiac system. They developed the Heartmath technique to help people not only control their stress and manage the health of their hearts, but also cure ADHD, lose weight, and, well, find happiness.

If you’ve ever had or seen a cardiogram, your’ll remember the jagged peaks and valleys the heart scrawls across the paper. There is, however, another kind of heartbeat pattern, where those lines swirl across the paper in smooth, even peaks and valleys like sine waves—that’s heart coherence.

When your heart is coherent, you are alert, calm, at your most competent, and close to bliss. Incidentally, your brain basks in a climate ideal for learning.

Skeptics dismiss Heartmath as just another New-Age program with little substance. They couldn’t be more wrong. True, Heartmath is essentially just one simple technique—but its effects are spectacular and it is solidly based on science.

To achieve heart coherence, any human can use a certain kind of breathing and certain kinds of thoughts, while centering consciousness in the heart, to convince the body to shut down the production of adrenaline and cortisol (which make you high but lead to heart conditions) in favor or producing acetylcholine and serotonin, the body’s very own happy pill. If you haven’t thought of your being as a skin bag of chemical reactions before, now’s the time to start. The Heartmath difference is this: that container of chemicals bubbling on the lab table before you is your body, yes, but you are the chemist.

Becoming a Heartmath provider costs several thousands of US dollars. Once through it, I had a reaction quite like what I felt on learning to read at age six: Is that all there is to it? Heartmath, like reading, is a simple but vital skill. For example, one fellow-provider claims Heartmath saved his life in a congested-heart-failure incident (CHF). Nor was this the only miraculous story. In my life, Heartmath has helped depressed and suicidal students and those in crisis because of learning difficulties, vindicating the claims by Heartmath of great success with ADHD.

If you watch golf, keep your eye on the champs, many of whom have learned Heartmath and can be seen doing it just before the swing.

Heartmath provides software to let your computer show you when you’re in coherence (magic just before that exam!) Recently, the software upgraded and downsized into a palm-held gizmo called the PSR emWave, allowing you to check and manage your cardiac status anytime. Now that’s empowerment, and it’s a lot healthier and more fun than a cellphone! Last month emWave won the Last Gadget Standing award as the best of the year’s new electronic tools.

The emWave costs only a couple of hundred dollars US. Contact your local provider (me), learn the Heartmath technique, use your hand-held emWave, and I guarantee your change of heart will change your life.