The Power of Collective Intention

Speaker 0 00:00:00 Welcome to the Adhar podcast. The podcast that inspires heart first living. This is where you'll get practical tools to reduce stress, inspire creative action and energize your personal growth momentum along with ways to apply these tools. And now here's your host, Deborah Rosman. Speaker 1 00:00:20 Hello, everyone. I'm Deborah Rosman and a warm welcome to our listeners today. Our ad heart podcast topic is the power of collective intention. And I think you're going to enjoy hearing from my guest Lin MC tagger, an expert on topic. The Adhar podcasts are all about inspiring forward movement and heart powered intention. And the power of the heart is so important to be able to lift the power of collective intention. And we're gonna be talking about that today. Lynn is a dear friend is also the author of the power of eight, where she shares in this book, remarkable findings from 10 years of experiments about how group intention can heal and uplift our lives and change the world for the better, similar to heart math Institute's research findings on group and team coherence. Lynn's research found that when individuals in a group focused their intention together on a single target, a powerful collective dynamic emerges, and the world needs us to come together these days and help lift that with a powerful dynamic of integrity and higher intention. And that is how love can heal longstanding conditions, men fractured relationships, lower violence, and even rekindle life purpose, as Lynn says. So welcome Lynn. It's wonderful to have you here. Speaker 2 00:01:53 Oh, Debbie, it's so great to be with you. Speaker 1 00:01:57 You know, these days, Lynn, you're probably hearing this from people you talk to, but it's so important to understand the power and opportunity what the collective can do. Cuz so many of us, I think, feel helpless looking at the world's situation, looking at it, getting crazier and crazier so much polarization between groups and different biases and different collective intentions based on people's beliefs fueled by their fears or social groups, conspiracy theories. I mean it's all over the place. How do you see this and the opportunity? Speaker 2 00:02:33 Well, I see it as an opportunity because it, it is an opportunity in several ways. Number one, to rewrite our story. And by that, I mean to go back to the science and realize that we're operating and everything about our lives is operating according to a story that is out of date, you know, our scientific story essentially defines us as competitive individuals. That's based on the work of Isaac Newton who described a very well behaved universe out there of separate objects operating according to fixed laws and time and space. And that was augmented by the work of Charles Darwin, who was convinced there wasn't enough to go about, uh, around. So life must proceed through struggle. So from those two things, those two scientists, we came up with this light motif of our lives of competitive individualism. And essentially that is the problem. That is the problem behind every possible crisis. Speaker 2 00:03:41 We now face is the idea of I win. You lose somebody has to win at somebody else's expense. And so what I've been looking at now since 2007, and actually earlier, when I was started to get interested in the power of thoughts is the whole idea that we are not these separate and discrete objects, but a packet of vibrating energy trading energy with other, uh, sub atomic particles, other people, and out there, this giant quantum field. And so we're all connected and lots of people say we're all connected, but, and you know, that is a kind of mantra now, but what does that really mean? And what that really means is that we can connect with other people via our thoughts because our thoughts are one other kind of energy. But also what I've discovered is those thoughts magnify in a group and they also create a relationship and a rebound effect, uh, with the participants. When you do an intention in a group, it not only has an effect on the target. It has an effect on the senders too. Speaker 1 00:05:02 That's right. You know, I totally concur with that and research concur with that. And then we go, how do we convey that to the massive humanity? I mean, I know that to shift a system into a higher order, a more coherent mode, as we say, there has to be increasing positive attitudes, emotions, people have to recognize we're connected and know we're responsible energetically, or it is gonna feed back on us like the mirror effect. So we can teach people in training programs or speak about it like in podcasts, but that only speaks to a small number of people at this time in history. It seems like we need to have a way to talk about the power and the possibility of this interconnectivity, this collective intention to achieve more harmonious and effective outcomes for groups for the world, for our life to get, help us get along with each other, because things aren't gonna shift until we actually know how to get along with each other. What are you seeing in this area? Speaker 2 00:06:15 Well, I, I look at this optimistically because I love the whole, uh, the whole idea ESPED by Margaret meed, that every major social change starts from a small group. Every single one has, you know, everything from Gandhi, you know, um, proposing that these little communities in India ought to use a spinning wheel. Yeah. Um, as the central central sort of industry and creating self sufficiency through that, but also his, you know, his path of non-violence Martin Luther king started as a small group. And so even though we are speaking to the choir right now, that choir is growing bigger and bigger and bigger because also people see that the world around us, you know, is going down. You know, that things are to a point of such corrupt, uh, corruption, particularly in the United States, but all over the world really right. Um, that politics is, has reached such a level of corruption. Speaker 2 00:07:30 Um, medicine has reached such a level of corruption. So many areas have reached such a level of corruption and ineffectiveness that we have to come up with a new way. And of course, business, the business model now has created a bunch of real winners and losers. So we have to change things and more and more people recognize that as we see that our current societal structures are not sustaining us. And we've always operated from the idea that we have to go from top down, you know, that we need the right leaders. And I don't look to that anymore because I think that the whole political structure right now is so corrupt that it has to come from somewhere else. It has to come from ground up. So I really welcome this kind of change. And I don't worry about the small numbers cause I can see that with success, those numbers grow. Speaker 2 00:08:30 And when people see that things work, I mean, I certainly see it with my intention work where I see, uh, small groups of eight or so healing each other, whether it's their health or their relationships or their career or life purpose or whatever that power of a tiny little group can change the world, change their communities, each other and the world. So I think what we have to do is just keep hammering out our message in getting smaller groups to continue to meet. And I certainly know with heart math, the message, which was a revolutionary message that you all had so many years ago that the real intelligence is not the brain. It's the heart. And the real information is emanating from the heart and the heart can create this kind of collective field. That's such a powerful and important message and it's so easy to do too. Speaker 2 00:09:38 That's another important part of your work. And I find with my intention work, it's so easy to do, but here's what I think intention works definitely is individually, but it really gets supersized in a small group and I've tested it. I've done 40 intention experiments. Now 36 of which have shown positive, measurable, mostly significant effects. And those have been done with a, a vast array of scientists from prestigious universities, university of, of, uh, Arizona, Penn state university, Princeton, university of California, et cetera, cetera. And we've done everything from trying to make seeds grow faster, to, uh, purifying water, to lowering violence and war torn areas. Um, and my most recent work having targets, but bringing together polarized people. So I have deliberately brought together Jews and Arabs, Republicans and Democrats, um, African Americans and the police, um, uh, um, people who are Democrats and jihads, people who are, you know, really at odds and watched those differences melt when they do a collective intention. Speaker 2 00:11:06 So for me, the real path forward is small groups and understanding the power that we have. We already hold ourselves to heal. You know, we, we were born with this gift. You know, our thoughts are, I always like to say we're leaky buckets, Deborah, and that we are, you know, we, our thoughts aren't locked inside our heads, but they leak out affecting other people in things. But what we, we have been born with is disparaged by our authority figures, as we're growing up, you know, little kids understand this, my, my new grandchild, who's about four months old and that my little granddaughter, you know, you can see the magic in her already. There is an understanding and a unity with life that will get separated over time by teachers and other authority figures. And so that's what happens to us. So for, for, for me, what I think is so important is reclaiming and understanding how to use this gift that we're given this gift and ability to heal and with your work, this gift and the power that the heart holds and getting that into a coherent state is extraordinarily powerful. So we're talking in both cases about energetic systems and energetic exercises that are essentially a huge path forward to creating much more coherent society. Speaker 1 00:12:55 Yeah, I totally agree, Lynn, and you know what we've discovered and you prob you bring these people together. These polarized groups for a power of collective intention thought by itself is not as powerful as the heart care. There has to be underlying motivation of desire. Let's do this, that put the heart into it. And that heart energy infusing thoughts is what creates the power. You know, the heart is informing the brain. If there was no heart, the brain would be dead. So looking towards how we have an increase, this heart to heart connection has been our research basically because we know that when people come together in the heart healing is what happens because that's love. It's really about the power of love. It's really about, you know, we say the words, the mantra love runs the universe. Well, really it is when you see your granddaughter and the magic in her eyes. Speaker 1 00:13:56 And we feel that connection because the energetic field of the earth is mirroring back more. So what we feel in our hearts than what we just think in our minds, and you put the two together in a coherent mode and that's where real empowerment can happen. And I agree with you, I think just even a small percentage of people on this planet, caring and practicing collective hard intention, cuz that's both the visualization, the mind align with the heart's care can work wonders. And when I looked at what Gandhi was doing in the films I've seen, or Martin Luther king, it was the heart that spoke to people. It was the care and that passion and that was, uh, contagious and electrifying. And so, oh, Speaker 2 00:14:47 Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's I watched this with, um, with our big collective intention experiments. So recently not long ago, I did an intention experiment for Jerusalem, which was experiencing a lot of violence and I was lucky enough to use, uh, um, a studio make use of a studio that had the capacity to put cameras in 10 different locations. So we put a camera in eight different, uh, conference rooms in eight different Arab cities. So, um, in, you know, in, um, Kuwait and Jordan, uh, and Saudi Arabia, et cetera, et cetera. And the ninth camera was in an audience, an auditorium filled with Israeli Jews now to set up this experiment, I had to be the go between because the Jews weren't talking to the Arabs, the Arabs weren't talking to the Jews and everybody was suspicious of everybody else. So we did this and then I, with this technology could speak to all of them. Speaker 2 00:16:01 They could see me and they could see each other so I could call on them and they could talk and talk to each other and talk to, to everyone. So we did our intention experiment for this one area of Jerusalem that was suffering from a lot of violence. And then I called on the different groups to say, well, how was that for you now? Remember they were hardly speaking to each other. Yeah. And as one Arab said to me, I've never actually seen a Jew before we are taught that they have horns growing out of their heads and you know, vice versa. So after this and we have it on film too, I'm asking each of them. So how was that? They're starting to say to each other, your God is my God. We love you sisters. We love you brothers. You know, everybody was crying. Speaker 2 00:16:55 Everybody was sending love to each other and it was this altruistic act. Something we haven't really talked about a really important piece. At least of the work I do is altruism. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> the idea of coming together for no self-interest doing something for someone else. In this case, it is a peace intention experiment. The heart cracks open. That is what goes on. Essentially you are doing something for purely altruistic reason. And when you look at the science of altruism and I have done it's in my book, the power of eight, um, you see, it's like a Bulletproof vest, um, people who do things for other people with no expectation of reward live longer, happier, healthier lives, right? If they're ill with something and they do something to help someone else with the same illness, they're more likely to get better and you know, on and on it goes, I mean, there was a wonderful study, uh, by a psychologist who was also a priest looking at whether you could use prayer to, uh, help depression. Speaker 2 00:18:11 So we gathered together 400 people with clinical depression, divided them into two groups. One group was given prayer, uh, to heal their intention. The other group were the ones doing the praying and afterward he used a whole bunch of psychological parameters to, to see how they were. And he found that the people who had got the prayer really improved, but nowhere near as improved as the people who had been doing the praying for someone else. Right. So it's, you're exactly right. It's the heart thing that gets tapped into. And in my work, it is that that power of altruism. And so I see that as a big piece here too, when you talk about, well, how do we bring people together? So these Arabs in Israelis, I mean, it was fascinating, but more recently I did an intention experiment, um, for the inauguration, right after that January 6th invasion into the capital building in order to lower violence and to have a peaceful inauguration. Speaker 2 00:19:22 So we did it the Sunday, I think before, uh, the inauguration. And we did, you know, to have a peaceful inauguration and no more violence, et cetera. And that's the one where I brought together Republicans and Democrats, and it was another love Fest by the end. So I think this focusing on an altruistic act, you know, we all have varied somewhere within us, a better humanity than we are allowed to show in this doggy dog eye. When you lose world, we all have a heart. We all have some sort of shock of recognition. When we do something altruistic for someone else, it brings out the real person in us, the real humanity in us. And so I really think that that piece of coming together to do something and in our case, it's just intending for something. But it's more than that too. It is creating this collective field. Speaker 2 00:20:29 It is, I mean, with our intention experiments, we sometimes feel fine. You know, remember we're all connecting individually via our computer screens, much like we're doing today, but there are thousands and tens of thousands of us doing it. And sometimes the energy is so powerful. I'll have to stand away from my computer. And I'm thinking to myself, why is this? This is just, you know, individuals all focusing on some collective target. And oftentimes I have it on a website now I'm, I'm, you know, on broadcasting live when I do them. And yet we create this kind of field of intention and field, as you say of the heart, which is in my, in our case, it is what the target really compels us to do is to get off of ourselves. And that's another thing that I spend a lot of my time in my courses saying to people get off of yourself <laugh> and do attention for someone else. And invariably, invariably, what they want for themselves comes true. Not because they are doing it selfishly, but because they have got off of themselves. And that is one of the big healers, Speaker 1 00:21:50 Beautifully said, wonderful work. You're doing Lynn. I just so honor it. And you know, we've been studying the physiology. What happens when people do that because that's another way to contribute, to motivate more people, to get off themselves and care in love and open their hearts, you know, which is what it's all about. However we get there and you're doing wonderful work with that. And when we do that, it's activating the higher centers of our brain, the, where we experience in the frontal lobes, the higher potentials, the empathy, the compassion, more and more people are going, are being prompted from within to say, we need to be kinder to each other. You know, the altruistic impulse is actually vibrating. I feel through the Earth's fields, like you're talking about more and more people are saying common sense. We have to feel that. And then that does impact. I believe the vibratory rate of the whole field. And so things can happen a lot quicker in a non-linear energetic way than what it seems when you look at the linear politics of it all. And so absolutely, you know, it, it, it, it is that contagious feeling of what you have when it feels so good to give, to serve to care. Speaker 2 00:23:07 Absolutely. And it's not, you know, in my book, the bond I looked at, um, this whole idea was Darwin Wright and overwhelmingly concluded. He was not, he was later in his life. He talked about cooperation as being really the, the central driving force of, of animals and people. And yeah, that's certainly what I discovered Aren that we need to belong. You know, we need, we need fairness, which is one of the other issues that we face now. Things are so incredibly unfair and people know in their bones that this isn't really right. But I also found a huge need to give that people really do need to give. And I think that comes back to what you do, which is all about getting into that hard space of connecting with what it really means to be a human being. And that is why people feel so good after your work, after my work, they suddenly really connect with their true humanity instead of, you know, I have to make more money. Speaker 2 00:24:21 I have to do better than that person. I have to compete with this person and, and I have to get, and spend people are now realizing the meaninglessness of that. And when faced with all of the, uh, existential crises we have now, they get, well actually, you know, having that really expensive car in the driveway is gonna mean nothing. If it's too expensive to drive, or if, you know, there's no oil and gas left or whatever, whatever. And so people are now reaching for something else. And I think that's why they're drawn to this. So drawn to this work, Speaker 1 00:25:05 Lynn for our listeners, Cheryl, what are your next steps? What are you working on now? Speaker 2 00:25:11 I am researching, starting to research for another book. Um, something that I've been really interested in. I do a lot of courses in person and online. I'm doing a retreat, uh, with my husband, Brian Hubbard. Who's worked a lot on healing the past, and we are working. We're putting our work together and using intention as well to heal the past. So we have an upcoming retreat, uh, in you'll love this in, uh, a stately home with 3000 acres. That was the runner up for the location for Downton Abbey. So this is very British. This is a very British, uh, retreat. That's where I live by the way guys, I live in, I live in the UK in London. So we're doing that. I do a lot of online courses, teaching intention on various levels, everything from beginners to, uh, facilitator courses for people who wanna do that too, to my yearlong course, the intention master class, which is I put, I teach people over successive weeks and then I put them in groups and I keep working with them and keep making sure they meet and making sure that they practice a batch of things. Speaker 2 00:26:30 And what I have found Deborah is when people consistently meet week after week after week, extraordinary miracles happen. It's the people who are dedicated to being part of a group and working with intention. That's where I find love grows. Um, because they meet they're meeting. You know, we are putting people together because of, um, uh, their location. So they're in the same time zone, but they've never met these people before. We discourage people from creating a power of a group in a course with their friends. We want them to take total strangers to demonstrate you use these kind of techniques and you can get along with anybody. And so we find the people who consistently meet it's a huge percentage, close to a hundred percent will have some major transformation in their lives. And I think it comes down to that love and feeling love from total strangers. We don't get to do that too often. Speaker 1 00:27:38 That's exactly well, that's wonderful. And we're finding that we started, um, with the heart meth Institute, researching team coherence, what does it take for teams to be coherent? And it is that connection and some tools and techniques, otherwise they can fall apart. Um, but until they actually have that safety, that feeling of psychological safety with each other, but we teach a technique, our activating the heart of teams program. It's a heart meditation on collective intention, but it's called shift and lift. And our trainers have found this team building technique, energetically a really good start for releasing separation, building heart energy, and coherence between people from diverse backgrounds, because what we wanna do and what you're obviously doing too, is supporting the dignity, the respect, the deep listening that builds that harmony and coherence, where you wanna be part of that group. You wanna feel that con nurturance and contribute to it. And that raises the vibration and the field and the field effect is so important. So let's close our wonderful podcast today with doing this shift and lift technique together. So it's based upon our research on heart brain synchronization, and then radiating that into the field. So let's, uh, let's start by focusing our tension in the area of the heart and doing what we call heart focused breathing. Speaker 1 00:29:10 Can you just imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Just find an easy rhythm that's comfortable and starts to balance and synchronize. The autonomic nervous system is we do heart focused breathing. Now let's activate feelings, genuine attitudes or feelings of kindness, appreciation, genuine connection, and an attitude of deep listening to our own heart. Cuz these are not just heart qualities, their energies that synchronize our brain, a nervous system and bring us into a heart coherent state. As you do heart focused breathing, you just breathe. These heart qualities, kindness, appreciation, genuine connection, and an attitude of deep deeply. And in a group we're listening to each other and each other's hearts. Now let's radiate or send these heart qualities out from our hearts through the hearts electromagnetic field, which stretches way beyond the body to each other, to all the people, listening to this podcasts. And as we radiate these hard energies, hard qualities, it raises our own vibration as well as help lifts others in the energy field of the environment that surrounds us. Speaker 1 00:32:24 Now, when we're in this heart connected state, I always like to add let's hold in our hearts with compassion. All the people who are experiencing separation stress, anxiety struggle during these times and see the collective heart energy, helping to lift the collective vibration, to draw in more understanding and harmonious outcomes. We always close our ad heart podcast, heart meditations with the intention collective intention of co-creating a reservoir of this coherent heart energy that each of us can build on and access as needed over the next month to help us connect with our hearts, intuitive guidance for our own lives or me more effective choices and solutions. Let's do this for a minute build and that reservoir of heart energy that we can draw on as we personally need it or contribute to it as we do our heart meditation. Thank you so much for helping us create this collective heart field environment. Lynn, before we wrap this up, is there anything you'd like to say and leave our listeners with? Speaker 2 00:34:56 Yeah. I think that one thing that somebody said to me once that was really powerful to put all of this in perspective, she said to me, she wrote in and said, you're doing more than research. You are breaking open people's hearts. And I was really taken aback by that. And I started realizing the power of collective intention to break open hearts. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I think for people to understand and put what's going on in perspective, we're all so frightened now. But what we have to realize is we should welcome what's going on now? Yes, it's a bit of a bumpy ride, but we've been living according to a full sense of who we really are. We've been filled with dissatisfaction, oftentimes despair. Um, often we're not living according to our real authentic selves. This is our opportunity. And I guess my message to everyone is grab this opportunity with both hands and you don't need a new person in charge. You don't need a new parliament in the case we have over here, what you need is a small group and a common intention, and you have the power within yourselves to change the world. Speaker 1 00:36:31 Beautifully said thank you Lynn so much. And thank you to all our listeners for joining us. And I hope you've been inspired by this episode and found something you can apply and take forward in your life. Even if it's a group of a family, work, friends, social media, friends, that heart connection group with a collective intention, I do believe can change the world. It's a noble I ping. You said small islands of coherence can make a huge difference to the world. So I wanna take this moment to remind you that the third Tuesday of every month, we publish a new episode. So be sure to subscribe. So you don't miss out on our next guest and topic. And thank you again, Lynn so much. Take care. Speaker 2 00:37:21 Thank you. Speaker 0 00:37:23 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 heart math Institute, both organizations are committed to helping activate the heart of humanity.