| Heart Matters by Thelma Rodgers 23 January 2006 The music filetype is midi playable by Windows Media Player Quicktime and various other players.  Click here to listen to this music1 - it comes from the heart! Literally - it's composed from a real recording of a real heart, of a real person, maintaining the rhythm of the heartbeat as it follows the person's thoughts, feelings and experiences. In listening to this there's a sense of immersion in the stream of that person, their ebbs and flows, highs and lows, their responses.And listen to this! Again, this is directly composed from a heart recording. So different with the definite beats! Such a different person, such different feelings. In comparison with the first composition it marches along.Which of the two is the healthy heart? These two pieces of music illustrate a heart statistic known as HRV - Heart Rate Variation - and the more responsive the heart rate the higher the HRV and the healthier - emotionally and/or physically - the person. The second composition is of a physically unhealthy person, but a similar pattern occurs in a healthy person when they become angry or upset - the adrenalin produced forces the heartbeat to become regular - there's no leeway for responsiveness as the system mobilises for defence! The year of 2005 was very full for me - 3 months' teaching on the architecture of buddhadharma at Auckland University; involvement in the Wangapeka website and archives; other volunteer work at the local school; family and friends; but by far the strongest thread of development and interest was an exploration of "matters of the heart". It started with a casual - and I thought somewhat frivolous - encounter with Journey to the Wild Divine2, a biofeedback/meditation computer game that promised a diversion - a meditation "training" with a large sugar-coated pill of entertainment. To my surprise it became a springboard into a major exploration, occupying my spare time for a good half-year, and eventually encompassing Western technology, biology, philosophy and scientific research; the beliefs and writings of Buddhism; and opening to new understandings of traditional Buddhism, meditation and myself. The interconnections are myriad, and it soon became obvious when I tried to set things down that one article just couldn't do it justice - the music of the heart was only one of the amazing things that emerged. So this is a first instalment, and each thread will eventually have their own article! This is also a personal journey, a story, an interpretation, a "what if ...?", some questions, and a process. This article is an attempt to outline the process, so at the end are some links to information and discussions on the web that contributed to my journey, for you to explore and develop your own understandings and experiences. It started with the Wild Divine game - and exploded! The game itself? - wonderful, beautiful, absorbing, a pleasure to be playful about meditation. There are definite benefits, but I also have reservations! A separate article is definitely needed to do it justice. But the path on for me was not so much the game itself. It was my first encounter with biofeedback, and I found it fascinating. The Wild Divine game uses a "lightstone" to measure data - skin resistance (rather like a lie detector), and the heart. It combines them in various ways for different meditation events. Some events are purely calming, while others raise the energy - these use the skin resistance data. Others focus on the heart. Most of the "heart" events use a "heart breath" practice - unlike our practice of following the breath it's very prescriptive - you breathe in for 5 seconds and out for 5 seconds, focussing on the heart. In the game it's directly linked with compassion. All this raised a number of questions - why that particular breathing pattern and how was the feeling of compassion connected with it; how are heart and breath connected; what was this thing called HRV and why was it important; and why monitor the heart rather than brainwaves in determining meditative states? At first I found the paths diverging, but eventually they re-united again. The following is a summary; each thread a potential article. My first stop was the Heartmath Institute3 - they developed the heart breath, and investigated the connection to compassion. They also provided the basic biological information on the physical role of the heart in monitoring the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and mediating with the limbic part of the brain. Their research ranges from entrainment and coherence to HRV to health to practical techniques - one exercise is very like the Tibetan practice of tonglen. They present a "scientific", rather than philosophical or meditative, frame to their work - in fact their name for it is freeze-framing. It's all quite complex! So on to researching papers on meditation and health, especially those using heart measurements - found some, but examining different meditations to the ones we practise. So I started to do my own measurements - after all I now had my own heart monitor! Free "open source" programs4 have been written using the "lightstone" as a monitor to record and analyse heart readings. A short personal experiment looking at the HRV - the heart "responsiveness" - before and after a meditation course led to an involvement in testing out some improvements for the programmer - he was in Texas! I'm taking it all to the School of Living Dharma this year and hope to do some longitudinal testing and analysis of a small group of meditators, before and after each retreat section of the School. The project won't be very scientific as the lightstone isn't very accurate, but the results should be interesting. I'll report back later. The third thread was why heart rather than brain data to measure meditation states. Up til now most of the current scientific studies I had seen, eg those by the Mind and Life Institute, have been concerned with the effects on the brain. The shift also seemed relevant to a longstanding conundrum for me - that the Tibetans locate the mind in the heart! It all started to make sense - as did other Buddhist writings such as the 7 factors of enlightenment - from the viewpoint of Western heart theories - an integration of East meditation and Western science. In another article I hope to tease out these connections and their implications. Last but not least, the whole exploration has affected me profoundly both in body and in understanding. The tools of the Wild Divine game and lightstone, together with reflections based on the research, have transformed the whole of experience, not just meditation; a shift in focus from head to heart. Writing these articles is the sharing of the merit - a kind of letting go of that process, as the focus now opens to the new. metta Thelma Rodgers Please note: Products on the following websites are not endorsed by the Wangapeka Retreat Centre, and any comments here or in the body of the text are my personal opinion only - T. Rodgers. References and Links Future articles will expand on this list 1Music of the Heart 2Journey to Wild Divine - Demo 3Heartmath Institute 4Lightstone Zone Click here for the printfriendly version of this page About Us / Program / Teachers / Treasury / Buddings / Images / Links / Books / Stay / Contact Us / Members
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