Arthur Fowler eat your heart out!!

Arthur Fowler eat you heart out (google if you've no idea who he is, and I robbed no-one) I had my first ever stall on Strandhills Peoples Market on Monday!  I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, from the craic and camaraderie setting up stalls, to enjoying the sunshine & having good old chats with anyone who came within earhole distance.  I'll be running some 'Mind Calm' workshops Strandhill in the next few weeks so I thought it would be good to get the word out and meet as many people as possible seeing as I'm new in the area.

Now I was one of the only stalls, if not the only, that wasn't selling anything - just myself.  Apart from having the craic there was a couple of things I really wanted to do:

• one was to show people the effect their thinking has on their overall well being moment by moment
• secondly I wanted to share how through practice and insight we can create a better relationship with how we think and feel, thus changing our relationship with life (Mind Calm)

So no small order there :-)

I set up a little competition using an Inner Balance Sensor connected to my iPhone which was connected to my mac.  Clip it onto their ear and it would give real time reading of Heart Rate Variance.  Heart rate variance (HRV) is the hearts beat to beat variation (the time between each beat). Although the gap should never be the same between beats the smoother the overall HRV the more in flow you are with other areas such as your autotonic neuro system.   

Fig 1 Taken from 'Science of The Heart' Heart Math Institute

Fig 2 A reading from one of the participants

As the heart is the strongest biological oscillator in the body what happens is that the rest of the bodies systems are brought into sink with the hearts rhythms (this is called entrainment which is a form of coherence).  As you can see from the above diagram (Fig 1) when the exercise called freeze frame was applied how in unison HRV, Pulse & Respiration became.  You can find out more information regarding Freeze Frame in the book 'The Heartmath Solution' by Doc Childre.  I used a part of the Freeze Frame process on the stall which I explain below.

People who dropped by and took part clipped on the monitor and it showed in real time their HRV as well as their Coherence score (which showed phychological/physiological sync). The Session report document here (Fig 2) shows you the overall score of one of the guys who took part.  The more time spent in coherence the higher the overall score.  More importantly the more time spent in coherence the greater the feeling of well being, resilience, peace etc.  Due to the method I was using with the guys at the stall, because we were using compassionate thought, its also shown to lower blood pressure and aid physical recovery!

It was amazing to show people the real time effect their thinking in the moment could have on all of these aspects.  My favourite was watching one of the ladies who who scoring really high suddenly see her coherence plummet when she realised she hadn't had a sale yet! (she didn't say at first but I asked her when I noticed the severe change in score).  She then started laugh and the score started to rise, yay :-)

Being aware of HRV can have such a powerful effect on how we live our lives.  Whether its our general well being, to how we function in our work to the scores we get on the golf course it effects everything!  Im looking forward to getting back on my pitch in the next few weeks and hope to see some of you there.

Oh yeah before I forget, to help coherence all I asked the guys to do was the following for two minutes - Focus on having steady breathing while thinking of something really positive and focusing on your heart.  (yes its that easy)

Do it now & let me know down below how it makes you feel in the comments below.

Take it & make it easy

John :-) x