How You Can Harness Brain Heart Coherence in Your Daily Meditation Practice with Dr. Joe Dispenza

Dr. Joe is known for his tremendous research in the field of neuroscience and is a Doctor of Chiropractic with a Bachelor of Science degree. He started his career running a chiropractic practice, but that all changed when he was tragically struck by an SUV while participating in a triathlon. 

Although medical professionals told him he needed a complicated surgery that would disable him from walking, Dr. Joe took a different route. According to Dr. Joe, he used the power of his mind to heal his body by visualizing his healing. From there, he became highly interested in neuroscience and the power of the human brain. Although you shouldn’t disregard medical advice, Dr. Joe’s story is inspiring and illustrates how our bodies are capable of surprising feats.

Dr. Joe encourages others to use a valuable tool called brain and heart coherence. Everyone is capable of using this incredible connection between the heart and brain, enabling us to improve practically every aspect of our lives. 

In this article, you’ll learn all about brain and heart coherence and how you can use meditation to strengthen your brain and heart connection. 

Understanding Your Heart’s Intelligence

Your heart is so much more than just an organ to pump blood throughout your body — it also shapes your emotions and impacts your ability to make decisions.

When you tap into your heart’s intelligence, you can uncover critical intuition and guidance that you can’t access exclusively with your mind. 

Our heart’s intelligence can also help us with emotional guidance. The heart serves as a source for feelings of wholeness while also allowing us to experience positive emotions, such as joy, love, and gratitude. We can experience an overall feeling of connectedness when we access our heart’s intelligence, and accessing it also has immediate, tangible benefits.

We Usually Respond to Stress with Basic Survival Instincts

Throughout our lives, we experience different events that can trigger our bodies’ fight-or-flight mechanisms. Some common examples include if you’ve experienced something traumatic or any pain or loss that stimulates this survival instinct within your brain. 

The survival part of the brain that experiences stimulation after a traumatic or stressful event is called the amygdala. The amygdala is located in the cerebral hemisphere and helps detect potential threats, making it a critical part of our anatomy for self-preservation. The effects of the amygdala are reactionary and instinctual, meaning that you have unconscious stress responses to your external environment that humans developed evolutionarily to keep you alive. 

Although the amygdala is a critical part of our biology, it can become a controlling, stressful force that keeps us from experiencing wholeness and satisfaction in our lives. 

When you think about traumatic or stressful experiences, you reactivate your amygdala as if the event is happening all over again. As you activate this part of the brain more and more, you create a baseline response for yourself rooted in fear and survival rather than love and happiness, ultimately leading to prolonged stress and discomfort. 

Your Heart’s Intelligence Can Calm Your Survival Instincts

Fortunately, you can overcome the amygdala’s negative effects by tapping into your heart’s intelligence. Here’s how it works!

Your body has afferent nerve fibers that connect your heart and amygdala. When you tap into your heart’s intelligence, you can overcome the stress and survival mode associated with the amygdala in order to experience more happiness. 

The problem is that people struggle to tap into their hearts’ intellect. We often rely on external experiences to feel the elevated feelings of the heart, such as love and connectedness. 

For example, have you ever felt more positivity and wholeness when starting a romantic relationship? It’s easy to feel love and connectedness with both yourself and your significant other, but that feeling may wane over time. Additionally, you may feel devastated if the relationship ends unexpectedly, and you may even start to reactivate your brain’s amygdala. 

We all want to bring more positivity and connectedness into our lives, so the question becomes: “How can I elevate my heart and experience wholeness and love outside of external circumstances?”

What Is Brain Heart Coherence?

Brain and heart coherence means creating harmony between our brain’s intelligence and our heart’s intelligence. The energy of your brain and heart start working together to bring about more of a flow state while also promoting unity in your body, mind, and even your spirit when that coherence is strong. 

Your breathing and heart rate directly impact the speed of your brain waves, and when you slow your breathing and heart rate, you then slow your brain waves to access a more optimal mental and emotional state.  

You can access the harmony between your brain and heart by engaging in calming activities, such as yoga, visualization, deep breathing, and, of course, meditation. 

When you create unity between the energy of your brain and heart, you can obtain more clarity while calming your amygdala and stress levels, creating a more harmonious state for your emotions and thoughts. 

Obtaining brain and heart coherence also has other tremendous benefits, such as increasing our heart rate variability (HRV).

What Is HRV?

Heart rate variability is the amount of variation between your heartbeats. For example, if your heart beats at 60 beats per minute (BPM), your heart rate variation describes the variance between beats. Perhaps there was a one-second duration in between two beats while the next duration was 1.20 seconds for example. 

Scientific research shows that HRV could be a good indicator of one’s health, and a greater HRV often indicates a healthier lifestyle. Pro athletes typically have a much greater HRV than others.

That being said, HRV fluctuates heavily day-to-day and is also a highly individualized metric, so a low or high HRV doesn’t necessarily guarantee whether someone is healthy or unhealthy. 

Other Benefits of Brain Heart Coherence

In addition to improving your HRV, creating harmony between your brain intelligence and heart intelligence has numerous health and mood benefits that you can tap into today. 

Brain and heart coherence enables us to access our heart’s intelligence without relying on external circumstances. This gets us out of survival mode so we can experience more satisfaction while creating a more suitable atmosphere for better health. 

It’s no secret that prolonged stress is bad for your long-term health. Stepping out of survival mode and reducing stress levels can lower your blood pressure, enhance your nervous system, promote hormonal balance, and improve your overall brain function. 

This, of course, is just the half of it — brain and heart coherence also enhances your overall emotional state. When you tap into an elevated emotional state that exists separately from external circumstances — such as a new relationship, friendship, promotion, or anything else external that would bring excitement or delight — you can grow in your understanding of yourself and other people. 

You can also create a more optimal state of mind for intuitive and creative thinking. Brain and heart coherence allow your heart to become more relaxed, and through the coherence, your elevated heart state sends signals to your brain that you’re not operating in survival mode. You move beyond the limitations of your survival instincts to access your creative center and grow in your emotional intelligence and mental clarity. 

How the Heart and Mind Connection Can Help You Accomplish Your Goals

The benefits of heart and brain coherence cannot be overstated. In addition to improving your mental and emotional well-being, the harmonious state can greatly assist you in achieving your goals and unlocking your full potential. 

Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches that you need clear intentions and an elevated emotional state to move toward the future that you want. Your coherent brain shapes your intentions, while your coherent heart elevates your emotional state.  

Think of it this way. Your brain’s intelligence serves as the electrical charge necessary for change, while your heart’s intelligence creates a magnetic charge. With these two critical components, you change your energy, and by changing your energy, you change your life. The heart and brain working together enables you to overcome your past so that you can begin living in the future. 

Take Hold of Your Future by Coupling the Power of Your Brain and Heart

In order to change your life, you need to see yourself as the creator of your destiny. Rather than allow your past or external circumstances to shape your future, you decide that you will be the author of your future life. 

You can leverage your heart intelligence and brain intelligence to shape your future, and this starts by rewiring your brain to become the person you want to be. You can start this process right now by mentally rehearsing what you want to become. You basically create circuits by picturing who you want to be, and you rewire your brain to begin thinking the way you want to think, enabling you to actualize your goals. 

For example, if you want to get in better physical shape, the process starts with believing in your ability to do it, and you can develop these beliefs by mentally rehearsing what you want to accomplish. Maybe you picture yourself being in better physical shape. You’ll then rewire your brain to begin thinking like someone who is in better physical shape, and you’ll make different lifestyle decisions that reflect that shift in thinking. 

As you mentally rehearse and picture who you want to be more and more, the response becomes more automatic. You’ll likely have an easier time ingraining certain healthier habits, such as exercising more and eating healthier, making the rehearsal become a reality.

So what does this have to do with heart and brain coherence?

The second step involves teaching your heart intelligence to follow suit with what your brain intelligence is doing. It’s more than just rehearsing how you’ll think differently when you accomplish your goals — it’s also about feeling what it’ll be like to achieve your desired results. You feel a sense of gratitude toward what you’ve accomplished before actually doing it.

Let’s go back to the fitness example. You need to think of yourself as being more physically fit on a mental level and emotional level. You can feel gratitude toward yourself for investing time in your own health, and you can also feel a sense of pride in what you’ve accomplished. You feel positive emotions before achieving what you want, and this will enable you to make it a reality. 

How Does Meditation Strengthen Our Heart and Brain Coherence?

We’ve discussed the numerous benefits of why you should create harmony between your brain and heart, but how exactly does this work, and how does meditation help us enter this elevated, coherent state? 

First, let’s discuss how meditation supports heart and brain coherence. Meditation slows your breathing and, as a result, slows your heart rate and brain waves. When meditating, you access a state of mind between conscious and subconscious, and your brain’s chemistry shifts in a way that usually only works when falling asleep.

When you shut your eyes, less sensory information can distract you, and with less potential stimulation, your brain then releases melatonin that calms your brain waves. This is how you clear your mind when meditating. 

You enter a relaxed, transcendental state that creates coherence between your heart and brain. When calming your body, clearing your mind, and engaging in deep breaths, your heart will begin producing a low frequency. You then focus your attention on your heart, therefore focusing energy on your heart and your elevated emotional state. Your heart will receive more energy and become more open, and you’ll achieve heart and brain coherence in the process.

Your brain and heart’s coherence creates sympathetic arousal, thus creating a balanced energy that slows your brainwaves. 

Although your brainwaves slow, you create a more positive, conscious energy rooted in intuition and creativity rather than survival. The more relaxed you become, the greater your brain and heart’s coherence will be, enabling you to reach a more optimal state for your heart’s intelligence and your brain’s intelligence.  

Learn More About Optimizing Your Heart and Brain Coherence

You can use your brain and heart connection to accomplish incredible things and obtain more clarity and joy in your life, and the most exciting part is that you can start doing this at any time. You can use meditation to strengthen your brain and heart coherence, and there are plenty of tools online to help you get started, including meditation practices on Dr. Joe Dispenza’s site.

We encourage you to also check out some of Dr. Joe’s invaluable resources for optimizing your health, including his blog and books Becoming Supernatural, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and You Are the Placebo.      

Your brain and heart are capable of accomplishing tremendous feats. Cheers to you for harnessing your body’s power to improve your life and impact the world around you!