Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to a special encore presentation of one of our most popular ad heart podcasts. I'm Deborah Rosman, CEO of HeartMath and your host. I'm joined in this episode by Dr. Mimi Garneri, a world renowned cardiologist and author of the Heart Speaks. She's also president of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine.
We're reissuing this important episode because its insights are especially timely with so many people experiencing higher levels of stress and anxiety. Dr. Garneria and I explore how traditional medicine often overlooks the impact of accumulated stress on our nervous system and importantly, how the heart's natural healing potential can be accessed. This to help us release built up stress and restore balance and well being. There's a wealth of insight in this conversation for anyone looking to support their own health or the well being of loved ones. I hope you find inspiration and practical tools you can use in this encore episode of the Add Heart podcast with Dr. Mimi Garneri.
Hi everyone, I'm Deborah Rosman and a warm welcome to our listeners.
This month I'm talking with the world renowned cardiologist, Dr. Mimi Garneri, founded the Scripps center for Integrative Medicine and served as medical director for 15 years.
Welcome, Mimi.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: So great to be here. Thank you. This is such a great podcast. I'm thrilled to be on.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Well, we're so glad you're here. You know, in your book the Heart Speaks, you share groundbreaking research that the heart is a complex organ possessing intelligence, memory, decision making abilities independent from the mind, which is what HeartMath Research discovered too. And that healing the heart can have more to do with healing the mind and soul, you say, than we ever knew.
Of course, HeartMath has developed methods to access this intelligence of the heart, but I'd like to know what inspired you to write this book.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Well, thank you for that question.
The book was actually my journal. The Heart Speaks was never intended to be a book for those who aren't familiar with it. It's really a book of stories that talks about things that affect the human heart way beyond cholesterol and blood pressure. Not that those aren't important, because they are.
But really looking at some of the deeper issues, grief, motion, stress, loneliness and so on, which unfortunately get marginalized in cardiology.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: You know, you and I talked about, based on this research and our own personal hearts intelligence, yours to the book and your own discoveries of mine, that the world really needs a revolution of love.
Tell us how you came to this from a cardiologist's point of view.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: It's been an interesting journey because I'm very conventionally trained. And in 1994, I moved from New York City to San Diego to B.F. scripps clinic, really to work as an interventional cardiologist. So that meant I was placing, you know, over 700 stents a year in people's hearts. Very mechanical fix.
But then I had a great opportunity. I was asked by Dean Ornish to conduct some research with those patients that were not stentable, quite frankly, you know, the days when the stents were new, technology was new, and there were a lot of people that actually told, you know, sort of, go home and get your affairs in order, which is often leave.
And so we began teaching yoga and meditation, vegetarian diet, group support exercise to these really sick heart patients. And I was just amazed as a card carrying conventional cardiologist how people's lives were transformed. And not only were their lives transformed, but the lives of their family. Because when you have a sick family member, right, everyone is affected by that.
So one of the things that it was all new to me, right. But really looking at the mind, body connection, hearing people talk about loss, people talking about grief, talking about stress, I remember one man saying, I was, you know, my cancer was in remission, and then I was so stressed out that I started getting chest pain and my lymphoma came back. You know, and as I started to perk up and say, let me look at the literature around all of this, which is profound, by the way.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: You know, why do not more cardiologists care about all this? Or it's obvious that stress affects the cardiovascular system.
Do they know that?
[00:05:19] Speaker B: You know, I think they know it. Right, right. Well, you have to say, when you have a 10 minute or a 15 minute, if you're lucky, 20 minute appointment, what are the easiest things to do? You say, take this blood pressure pill, take this cholesterol pill, take this diabetes pill, I'll see you in three months or whatever. But when you start to talk to people about their lives, both the richness of their lives and challenge of their lives and what's actually going on in their life, and you open up what physicians for years have called Pandora's box.
And when you open Pandora's box, you can't do it in a 15 minute appointment.
Right. And we're really trained to think about ill to the pill.
So, you know, we went through a phase in cardiology where we said, oh, give everybody Xanax. It's a very different breed of physician who can take the time and say, okay, let's get you trained in heart math. Let's get you trained in meditation. This is what it can do to transform your stress response. And not only that, what I love about HeartMath personally is it transforms how you see the world.
Right. It's not just a technique to, you know, to stabilize the autonomic nervous system. It really changes the lens, which you see.
And that, to me, is fundamentally important.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, I've given so many talks to doctors as well as, you know, business people who need to understand how the heart rhythm responds to stress and emotions. And that when we let rage and frustration and overwhelm and patients just lead us throughout the day, which many do, they go one overwhelm to the next. It just increases disorder in the autonomic nervous system, the heart's rhythm. Whereas if we can pause and use a technique like a heart math technique or anything else that helps us neutralize that, come back to inner balance, and then pause and have a moment of emotions like gratitude or appreciation or love, that heart rhythm moves right away into this smooth, coherent waveform which signals the brain, which creates harmony between the heart and brain.
And that rhythm set by the heart is capable of entraining the other organs to oscillate in synchronicity, like the pendulum of clock. So how do we reach more, you know, this. How do we reach more cardiologists and other doctors? Because it's so important that they understand.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: I think. You know, I've spent a good 20 years of my life trying to convince my colleagues to think differently.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Hmm.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: There are some that are ready to come along. They see it, they know it. And then there are some that say, yeah, we know stress is bad for the heart, so we'll give a beta blocker and we'll block the adrenaline. Right. I think we as human beings need to take responsibility for our health.
Right. And let's keep people out of the healthcare system, quite frankly. And I think if we take these techniques and we put them in the hands of our community, then people will start to get well without necessarily the need to get the approval of a physician, quite frankly, to be doing this, it's like you don't need a physician to give you permission to eat organic blueberries or to go take a meditation class. But we need to empower people to look at their lives differently, to choose, take that pause and say, hey, what's working for me? What's not working for me? And how can I change something? You know, it's easy to say, okay, I'm not exercising. I'm going to walk every day. Okay, great. Or I'm not eating right. I'm going to. I'm going to start to make changes in my diet. Really important.
But I can tell you if you can get your nervous system under control, everything else falls into place.
That to me is really the first step.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: So I've heard that from psychiatrists, from a lot of the healthcare professionals who come to Heart Mass say the key right now, and people have tried everything else is to understand they have a dysregulated nervous system from the accumulation of stress and it's not just cortisol. And they take an anti cortisol pill. I heard that.
That they really need to read, reboot their nervous system. How do you teach that? How do you apply that in your practice?
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Because I'm a cardiologist. People know my background and those that come to see me, if I tell them, you know, I really want you to get a heart map, download the app, get, get the device, start to practice. They hear that because it's coming from a cardiologist.
Right. People are very smart and most people know that stress is making them sick.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: People know that their anger is not good for their health. And so the benefit of getting control of the autonomic nervous system and also changing the way one thinks. Right. So how do you evoke those feelings of love, feelings of compassion, feelings that bring joy as opposed to the negativity. Right, right. Like I love some of the heart math. You know, I'm a heart math instructor. I don't know if you remember that.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I do.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: But you know, like just teaching people to recognize where they are in their emotions.
Take a pause, take a step to get you in the other direction if you're angry. Take that. Pause, pause, breathe. You know, I think we should. I think we really do need to activate the heart of humanity. You know, I really believe that we all have a heart.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: I believe people are all inherently good.
I believe we live in a culture that's extremely stressful right now.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Right.
And I really think that if we all do our bit to practice, to be kinder, to be more gentle, to be more accepting, it's going to be a better world. And I.
What I love about HeartMath is heart math has the research to support everything I'm saying. So there's no cardiologist out there who could say, oh, that cardiologist is crazy. Right. She's, you know, we know stress kills people. We know stress raises blood pressure, causes congestive heart failure causes arrhythmia, causes diabetes, causes osteoporosis, causes cognitive decline. We know all this. Headaches, muscle spasm, we know this.
So if we know this right, how do we say, okay, I'm going to put the brakes on this, right? I'm going to take that pause. If nothing else, I'm going to take that deep breath and then I'm going to look at my life and say, what can I do?
And the beauty of the heartmath techniques is there's a while and you know this, you may not need a device anymore. You can do it without a device. You know you can. You really learn to do this by self regulation of your own body. And every human being is capable of this.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. That's one reason we developed the new heartmath app where they could see their heart rhythm with the camera, using the camera on their smartphone as a sensor.
And that's just opened the eyes of so many people who aren't ready to spend money on a device. But everybody's got a smartphone and just about throughout the planet, there's billions of them. And I think that's how we will help activate the heart of humanity. When people really see that as they change the frustration through a simple technique, takes less than a minute of heart focused breathing and finding something in their life to feel grateful for and seeing what that does to their heart rhythm, that's the wow moment like I did that I really can control that. It's possible. It's not just foo foo or imagination.
That's what my heart's passion is, to help people have that discovery so that they're then motivated to do that more.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Exactly. And you and I both know from heartmath research that if I'm doing it and you're doing it and we're in the room with someone who maybe doesn't even know what this is, all of a sudden they're going to feel a different, a different way as well. Because we're going to bring that, that coherence to them that it's fascinating. So I think we should think about doing a like 10 million strong. Let's just throw out a number of people committed to practicing, right, the heart math technique. Give it a little bit of time every day and watch and see what happens around us because we know that it transforms the room, we know that it trans people fight less. We know that people feel less anxious, less frustrated, less likely to say something they're going to regret. So your relationships get better at home with Your family at work and so on.
And imagine what it would do for the world.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. You know, most people don't realize it's not something psychic, that the heart with every heartbeat is producing electromagnetic field. It's a power generator.
And that field is like a radio transmitter, transmitting how we feel. Kids call it my vibes. You got good vibes or bad vibes, but we pick that up from each other. It's a real transmission, just like cell phones, just like a radio. And that's how we can affect others. And we know when we're really stressed out, we're affecting our children, we're affecting our relationships. When we learn how to get in this state of heart rhythm, harmony, coherence we call it, that affects our environment too, which is what you're talking about. And you know, Mimi, people kind of know it's about love.
All the poetry and the songs about love and everybody wants it. Not the squishy or sentimental love, but the real. That real power of love, deepening connection of that makes us feel we're alive and who we really are. Everyone wants there.
And there's an intelligence to love that we need people to understand so love can go viral, not just give it lip service.
So you talked about, let's do a revolution of love. Give us your vision. How do you see that happening?
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Well, you know what I would love to see is that we all just pick a time or just do it throughout the day, where we learn the heart math technique and we just lock in for a few minutes a couple of times a day. And when we're in our, what I like to call our sacred space, we just transmit love, compassion to the world.
We're talking right now about a planet which is deeply suffering, right? We have everything from wildfires to floods to tornadoes. I mean, the list goes on and on and more and more people being displaced to the point where I think we're going to have climate refugees. I really believe that it's already happening.
And now the talk at the Vatican of Pope Francis with Dr. Ramanatham, who's one of the leading scientists on climate change, with some of the work happening at ucsd, everyone is talking about resiliency. How do we improve human resiliency so that we as a species, quite frankly, can survive?
And we're not going to have resiliency if we're fragmented, if we're frustrated, if we're anxious, if we're in pain. We have to improve the resiliency of our communities.
And this heartmath is a beautiful Technique for taking us. It increases our emotional intelligence. Right. You know, when crisis hits, you can say, I'm going to go and steal the TV from Walmart, or I'm going to go with, you know, see how I can help my neighbors. Right? What's the response? How do we want to be, how do we want to be as human beings on this planet? And I really believe that if we can get enough people, we can transform the consciousness level, raise the consciousness level to one of love, to one of compassion, to one of tolerance.
All the things that are so desperately needed right now.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: I couldn't agree with you more. So many people like National Geographic just brought a whole article special thing on stress in this issue and how today's stress is different because we connected. I mean, we're all hearing everybody's stress story constantly and the media amps that up and people are like adapted to it. That's the survival mode. It's just the way it is. And when that happens, then your own sense of conscience and inner dignity starts to get numb and you end up like you said, so many people are doing things like, you know, silly, robbing stores. I mean, there's always been. But when you lose connection, you lose conscience, you lose your humanity.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: And so you lose, you, you have. Then it's all fear based.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: So what? Right? So it's fear based, all that behavior.
So if you can transform fear into love, then we're going to change everything. And because the reality is we have enough on our planet for everyone.
We can take care of everything, but we have to make that choice to do it. Now each and every one of us has an opportunity to be something different, to do something different. And again, I think we just need a path to get us there.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: Right?
[00:20:14] Speaker B: And the beauty of heart math is it gives us a path. It might not be everybody's path. I wish it was right.
But as long as you have a path to inner peace, and in that inner peace, you, you find yourself a better human, right? A someone who feels good about who they are, what they do.
And we all have our moments, but let's hope the good moments.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: That's right. You know, if what we've discovered of even a small percentage of us, like you were saying, commitment to putting love into action in our own lives, which is a practice of going back to the heart. When we get triggered, we get out of the heart, we get back in when we feel stressed and then interweave qualities of the heart like compassionate understanding or deep listening or gratitude or kindness or just calmness into our next interactions, we start to change our baseline heart rhythm.
You know, that's the science that Heartmath Institute is researching. What's involved in changing your personal and global social baseline, because that's where the rubber meets the road.
So if we realize that warmth of kindness, deep listening, compassionate care, forgiveness is what creates heart rhythm coherence and can shift our baseline, raise our vibration above it all, then we can make more heart intelligent choices and help activate ourselves and the humanity in a higher place. Whereas love is the missing piece. Everybody says it, but we individually have to practice it and collectively step into it.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Well, I think anyone who is listening to this podcast has been in an experience where they walked into a room and they said, oh, there's something bad happened. Yeah, we always say, oh boy, bad energy, bad vibes, whatever. Right? That's what you were talking about earlier.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: We also have all been in the experience of saying something we regret, right? We get upset, somebody pushes our button, we say it, it's out of our mouths and we think, oh my God, I can't believe I said that. How do we get control? Right? And how. And what people have to realize is that there is the connections between the heart and the brain.
Right? The heart is feeding the brain information. As cardiologists for years we've known that people with panic attacks, you better check them for heart arrhythmia.
It's the heart arrhythmia, the heart sensing something's not right, telling the brain, hey, pay attention, something's going on.
Right? We have that data in cardiology. We also have, of course, as you know, better than most through the heart math data that we can transform that information that we send up to the brain to either take us from the fight, flight, run, fear, to that compassion, love, other response.
And that to me is the beauty of this. And imagine if we can get a world that hears this and recognizes this. People know it on some level. They know when the room doesn't feel right, they know when the room feels good. They know they say things they regret, they never think about, how can I transform that in a second? And how can I do it through a practice? Because we're not raised with learning that, Right?
[00:24:02] Speaker A: That's right. And the wonderful thing we're seeing is after even a week of practice, five minutes a day, I mean, it gets easier, we start to form a habit, which gives us choice. There's like a bird on my grandmother called the little birdie on your shoulder. But we're starting to access through that heart, brain synchronization, higher intelligence, part of ourselves that can prompt us and say, do you really want to press send on that email until you take a pause and read it again?
You know, I can't tell you how many times that's bailed me out. You know, just pause and take a break, get some water and go back and read it again. And I go, oh, no, I'm so glad I didn't send that.
So, but again, after a week of practicing just some simple tools like hard, focused breathing, you put, you're really putting love into action. That's an act of love, an act of care for yourself and others.
So I'm so inspired by you being so inspired.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: You know, it's a beautiful thing because you just said it's an act of care for yourself. So on your side, you're going to improve what's called your heart rate variability.
Slow heart rate variability, low heart rate variability, we know in cardiology, is linked to sudden death. It's linked to poor cardiac out. So if you can improve your heart rate variability, you can improve your longevity, that's for sure.
So now. So you're giving that gift to yourself and you're also giving yourself the opportunity to transform how your nervous system is responding. Right. The nervous system was designed to save our life. Right. Everybody knows this fight flight. Yeah. Get away from the tiger or you're bleeding and you have to produce stress hormones to support your blood pressure and all of that. But we're living like that 24 7.
So if we can pull that off of our bodies, literally, if we can dial down the adrenaline, the cortisol, the norepinephrine, the aldosterone. Right. We need these, but we don't need them 24 7. The way we have a foot on the gas pedal all the time, we need to balance this.
That's a beautiful gift. We're giving our own heart. And then if we can, if we can take that gift and bring it out to the world through, you know, this when we do a lock in, we transmit love, we send love, we send peace, we send, you know, we, we're connecting with the world in a different way.
And it's incredibly healing to those around us as well as to ourselves.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, let's do it together. Let's have a heart meditation on putting love into action. Because it's up to each one of us.
So.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: And let's plan on activating the heart of humanity. Let's activate one heart at a time. Let's make it like It's a, you know, a match that goes from flame to flame to flame.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: I love that they light up the world, not wildfire. Okay, let's all center in the heart together. Let's do some heart focused breathing.
Just shift from your mind and emotions to the core center of your heart.
And as you do this, breathe in love and appreciation for yourself and someone you love and appreciate.
This warms our heart and actually increases heart rhythm coherence.
Just breathe easily and imagine with each breath that your mind, emotions and body are becoming still inside.
This helps with focused intention.
Next, let's visualize more of humanity connecting with their heart's kindness, love, compassion and respect and their interactions to help reduce separation and draw in new solutions that serve the greater whole.
Know that as the collective heart awakens, this can eventually transform all this civil unrest from separation that's going on and clear the way for people to get along with each other.
A first step toward creating a better and more harmonious world.
Now let's send out our love, our inclusive love and compassion to all who are suffering throughout the planet from wars, famine, climate change and many other hardships.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: It.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Let'S close by radiating and co creating a reservoir of compassionate heart energy that each of us can tap into as needed over the next month. When we feel stressed or want more clarity or support from our heart's intelligence, we can create this reservoir that we can access each one of us together.
Thank you so much for sharing that that heart meditation with me.
Mimi, is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?
[00:32:23] Speaker B: Oh, I just am so glad that everyone listening I hope is participating in that last meditation. Lock in.
There's no way you can't feel better after doing that.
Really love and appreciate your heart and all the beautiful hearts around you.
Thank you so much for leading us in that. And there's so much great heart math research that I just have to really send a big thank you to Roland, Doc and the team because it gives us the data we need to talk to our colleagues, talk to people that don't understand this world, and also helps us to heal everyone around us. So thank you.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Thank you, Mimi and I want to provide a free gift to our listeners. You can watch the interactive HeartMath experience, an online video course that gives some of the basic research and some of the techniques you can use anytime during your day.
Or check out the amazing new HeartMath app at your app store that has the camera sensor and you can download the HeartMath experience for free from theheartmath.com or you can go get the Heartbreath app at your app store and get it from there.
And I also want to remind you that the third Tuesday of every month we publish a new Ad Heart Podcast episode. So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next guest and topic.
Take care everyone.
Lots of love.
Thank you for listening to the Ad Heart Podcast.
Be sure to subscribe so you can catch the latest episodes. If you're wanting even more heart inspired content, find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Look for HeartMath and also the HeartMath Institute. Both organizations are committed to helping activate the heart of humanity.
