Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: As I started to observe, to practice meditation and to observe my heart and my mind, what I noticed was a lot of inner turmoil and conflict, you know, fear and confusion and frustration. And then through the practice, I started to notice the emergence of other potent qualities, you know, that, you know, wow, I actually have this real, a strong reserve of determination I can be with the discomfort in my mind and my heart and my body, or moments of calm or peace and recognizing, like, oh, yeah, I used to feel this way as a little kid sometimes, right? I had these moments of, say, feeling really content or really connected or really at ease that I had lost touch with. And so rediscovering these very natural, innate capacities through meditation and then recognizing not only are these present and available, but as you all do such beautiful work teaching people that we can cultivate them, that they don't need to be random, that we can actually strengthen these neural pathways, we can strengthen our access to these states as they talk about in the research, so that they become traced, so that they actually become underlying foundations for how we live and meet the world.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Deborah Rosman, and a warm welcome to our listeners each month for the Adheart podcast, I have the privilege of interviewing individuals who are contributing to the creation of a more heart based world.
My guest this month is Oren J. Sofer, author of a new book, your heart was made for this contemplative practices, for meeting a world in crisis with courage, integrity, and love.
Now, of course, this title intrigued me as at heartmath, we're always saying that the heart is what gets us through challenging times, personally or collectively. And I was also intrigued because Orn has spent decades exploring nonviolent communication and the qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the very real challenges of overwhelm, oppression, injustice, burnout. These are all huge issues, personally and collectively. So welcome, Oren.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Deborah. It's a real privilege to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Well, our topic is the heart's qualities and heart mass. Research on the heart's qualities such as patience, kindness, ease, respect, courage, integrity, compassion, and more. What you write about is that our research has shown they're actual energies or different frequencies. They're not just do good qualities that you learn about in church or spiritual or philosophical writings. And in fact, we actually have called these heart qualities since the early 1990s heart power tools, because as you intentionally practice shifting to those heart feelings, they can transform your perceptions and your personal and collective life. So I want to know, how did you discover the power, the effectiveness in these heart qualities.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. I love that power. Heart powers, heart power tools, they are very real, tangible resources that we can experience. It's so beautiful that you guys are doing this work.
And I do think there's a lot of resonance and alignment between my book and the work I've been doing and your mission.
I first discovered these qualities is as distinct resources, powers, tools in human consciousness through buddhist meditation.
One of my first meditation teachers have this very pragmatic, down to earth way of introducing meditation.
And he said, if you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.
And as you and I both know, in asian philosophy and eastern religions, the word for mind is not the same as the way we use the word mind in the west. It's a heart mind. It's this understanding that our conscious awareness, the seat of conscious awareness, is actually in the heart. And so the one he's using, the word mind, he doesn't just mean your thoughts. He means this whole experience we have of being conscious beings, of feeling, of sensing, of experiencing all of these different powerful emotions and senses that we have. So, as I started to observe, to practice meditation and to observe my heart and my mind, what I noticed was a lot of inner turmoil and conflict, fear and confusion and frustration. And then through the practice, I started to notice the emergence of other potent qualities that, wow, I actually have this really strong reserve of determination I can be with the discomfort in my mind, in my heart, in my body, or moments of calm or peace and recognizing, like, oh, yeah, I used to feel this way as a little kid sometimes, right? I had these moments of, say, feeling really content or really connected or really at ease that I had lost touch with, and so rediscovering these very natural, innate capacities through meditation and then recognizing not only are these present and available, but as you all do such beautiful work teaching people that we can cultivate them, that they don't need to be random, that we can actually strengthen these neural pathways, we can strengthen our access to these states as they talk about in the research, so that they become traits, so that they actually become underlying foundations for how we live and meet the world.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: That's beautifully said. Heart qualities are actually talked about in almost every religion, culture, philosophy, but they are so often just paid lip service to and not really practiced or integrated into a way of life.
And we always admire the few people that we see who are leaders, who've really integrated them, because it uplifts, you know, why did you decide to write a book about this now at this time, because your title is really intriguing.
The heart's made for this.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank know, Deborah. The question that has been driving me since I first started meditating, really, that drove me to contemplative practice. That inspired me and sparked my curiosity about nonviolent communication, which my first book was about, say what you mean.
And then in many ways, inspired me to write this book, is the question, how.
How do we integrate our values? How do we live our values? How do we make real? How do we realize our vision of what we want our life to be, of what we want our world to be, of what we want our friendships and our relationships to be? And one of the things that I find so moving and poignant about all of the people I meet and teach and work with is that when I ask people to get quiet inside and to connect with what do you want? What do you really want in your life? What do you value? What do you long for?
Without fail, there are these beautiful, universal qualities people name, peace, connection, love, belonging, joy, happiness, contribution, meaning, community. We know what we want. We have a sense of what our north star is if we slow down and really listen.
But the poignancy of it is, for many reasons, we don't know how to get there.
And so that is what I found so powerful about the practice that spoke to me in Buddhism, which is this very pragmatic approach to actually cultivating the qualities. So why did I write this book?
I started writing it in 2020, when we had that terribly earth shifting year of so many different things, starting with, but not ending with, the pandemic where the world was turned upside down, the cultural and spiritual upheaval of George Floyd's murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, many rapid changes and climate change that happened that year, the wildfires out west.
And I saw my community, my friends, the people I work with, and just so many people really struggling to find ground with the changes we were all living through. And as a meditation teacher and a practitioner, I knew, I said, well, here's one way I can help, which is to give people some inspiration and practical guidance on how to develop these inner resources so that we can find our way without drowning through all of these changes.
And then that inspiration to provide practical guidance in really challenging, rapidly changing times.
That deepened when my wife and I got pregnant, which I talk about in the book. And I started looking ahead to the life of our child and the next generation and really wanting to grapple in a deeper way with this question of how can what? I've devoted so much of my life to contemplative practice be a resource and a contribution to building a better world for the future generations.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
At heart math, we said, what's the science behind this? Because we kind of had this realization that the heart can't really go viral, so to speak, without to have a lot of the scientific validation. Otherwise, it gets pigeonholed as this religion or that religion, whereas really, we're talking about the human operating system, and we've been saying it's heart time on the planet, because everything else has really been tried. And look where we're at. With the mind separate from the heart, more people are on edge. Yet when we know, like you said, what people really want in their deepest connection is who they are, their heart. And when we're in the heart together, it automatically puts our interactions into more of a resonant flow. So our research showed that when we practice, these heart qualities genuinely shift to a feeling of patience. When we feel impatient or any of these heart centered activations that we can do like you offer practices, our heart rhythms come into more coherence. Our brains release powerful neural chemicals that influence our moods and perceptions.
And simply by practicing heart qualities, even for a few minutes a day, intentionally, it activates the frontal lobes in the brain for self regulation, foresight, seeing a bigger picture, inclusiveness, intuitive discernment, all the stuff that's not happening in society, they're all aspects of love. To me. It's like, this is how you love, actually. When you feel impatient, you practice the feeling, the energetic of patience, until your nervous system gets more in sync. So it's time for the heart and love to go viral. But how do you see this? Because you're contributing to it in your book.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. And I'm so grateful to you and your colleagues for digging into the science and the research and bringing that forward. It's a huge.
See, what I see, Deborah, is a few things.
One, I see how it changes people's lives, both the people practicing heart qualities and the people around them, that it has a tangible effect. People feel more empowered, more hopeful, and happier in an enduring way, not in a like, yeah, I got what I want, happiness way, this sort of consumerist happiness, but an actual deep, abiding sense of meaning and satisfaction. And I'll just tell a little story about a good friend of mine who is also a meditator and practices heart qualities and these beautiful capacities, inner resources we have. And she moved to a little community, like a housing co op community, where there's an hoa and I don't know, 30 or 50 little units. And she noticed when she moved there that people really kept to themselves. There wasn't a sense of community. Everyone's kind of doing their own thing. And she decided to practice generosity and look for ways to contribute to the community. And she started this practice of leaving mystery gifts on people's doorsteps. And the first thing she noticed was how this practice changed her own mind and her own days when she was out, instead of ruminating on her worries or troubles or feeling anxious about something, she would be on the lookout for a fun little gift to give somebody in the community, and what would be the next thing? And it shifted her whole mood and her whole orientation. It changed her perceptions, as you noted.
And then the process of actually giving the gifts took on this very sort of mischievous, delightful tone of surreptitiously leaving it at their doorstep.
The next thing she noticed is over a few weeks, she noticed people in the community starting to change. People were smiling, looking around, because people were noticing that this was happening and trying to find out what's going on and who's doing it. And then this very interesting thing happened. Deborah. Other people started doing it.
She found somebody left, like, a fresh loaf of bread on her doorstep. So it was contagious. So this transformed not only her own experience of her days, but it started to transform the community and other people. This power of generosity and the infectiousness of it.
So it's empowering. It changes us. The other thing I notice, there are two other things I notice both in practicing and in teaching these skills.
One is how they work together in a very kind of potent and flexible way. So you mentioned practicing patience, and that's been a huge one for me, having an infant, the need for patience and how low resourced I can be at times, operating on not enough sleep and so forth, and seeing how sometimes when we're feeling, say, really impatient, frustrated, maybe angry, maybe even helpless.
To practice patience, we also need compassion for ourself. We also need a certain level of what I call aspiration, some sense of orientation towards our values, and a sense of hope that it's possible. We need determination and resolve. So the qualities support each other when the one we're reaching for isn't present, there are other ones that can come in to fill that gap and support us as we work towards them. That's one of the things that I see as I teach and practice.
The other thing that I see that I've found really essential and really helpful is a certain quality of humility. And respect for the tenacity of the unhealthy habits in our mind, that it really takes work, it's not easy to do, and it takes patience and time and dedication, and that we can see changes very quickly, right away, but that most of us are working with decades of conditioning in other ways and strengthening other qualities that are not helpful. And so there's a kind of humility that I think is healthy as we really start to explore this inner terrain and recognize, wow, here are these really potent transformative qualities that I can strengthen, that I can bring into my life. And you know what, it's not going to happen like that. I actually need support and community and encouragement, both inwardly and outwardly. And I think that's always really important for me to share when I talk about these things, because so much of our culture is focused on instant gratification and individualism and do it alone. And I think we need support to do this in a way that's sustainable, because it's not easy.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: That's very well said.
The leg up that practicing heart qualities gives us, and I certainly experience it, is that it harmonizes our inner mind, emotions, body, and that gives us a chance. And especially if we can get in sync, get in coherence, heart coherence, as we say, for real, then we can get some inner guidance and direction that we then have to build our confidence in as we step into it. And so much of that requires, like you said, supporting each other through the clearing of the old cellular imprints of doubt and fear.
But it's the lack of getting in sync within ourselves that creates so much of our personal stress and then our ability to not get along with others. I mean, this world needs us to learn how to get along with each other. And I know that's what nonviolent communication is about, but we're all having to navigate these tumultuous transitional times internally, personally, where we don't see a certain future. It can be very insecure financially and always. And then old structures and the social systems are breaking down and new possibilities and structures haven't yet emerged. And that sometimes there's this heart awakening going on. I don't know if you see it, but we hear about it. People all over the world are realizing it's got to be something about the heart, more compassion, random acts of kindness. Just the example, that wonderful story you just said about how just doing little caring acts can create an infectious viral effect. And that's what we need in the world. But people have to start by going within themselves. And I know you talk about your subtitle, meeting a world in crisis with courage, integrity, and love. And someone I spoke to the other day, who's working on an arab israeli peacekeeping initiatives, calls this heart activism.
That's what's needed. And the people, the arab people and the israeli people that are trying to make a difference there, call it that, because they somehow know that this crisis, that no solution is going to come unless we get in the heart with each other.
I'm really interested what examples you see in the nonviolent communication work of heart activism. Do you see an increase in that happening these days?
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you.
I don't know. I'm not tracking enough to say do I see an increase or not? But I do see a lot of what we might call heart activism and its manifestation, really beautiful ways of people coming together and infusing their work for social change with heartfulness, with compassion, with love, with a vision of shared humanity. Right? Which is, I think, what we're talking about here. We're talking about being able to move in the world from a place of awareness and connection to our shared humanity, so that as we are working for change, we are embodying at least some of the vision of what we're working towards. And this is really what I think, contemplative practice, whether it's the methods I outline in my book, whether it's heart math, whether it's other tools people bring to bear, what contemplative practice has to offer to the world of social activism and social change, is a way of transforming the fundamental, underlying basis from which we are working, so that our means is more aligned with the end that we are working towards. And I do see this. I do see it. I see it in the movement of sort of principled nonviolence around the world in ways both great and small. And I think it's important to shift and expand our definition of activism so we can see it in things like some of the climate activists in South America working for, claiming one of the victories that happened as a river was actually given indigenous, was given rights, personhood rights, in the same way that a corporation has rights as a person working for ecosystems and living beings, non human beings, to be recognized at having rights and doing that in ways that are very heart based.
Or some of the work that's being done around the climate, not just like the school climate strikes, but different schools where students are leading movements to do climate audits and move away from fossil fuels, and doing it in ways that are very collaborative, that are very forward thinking, that are very based in their values and in a sense of dignity and compassion.
But I also think we need to recognize that activism doesn't need to look like organizing for policy change or protesting in the street. And a new friend and colleague of mine, Anya Kimenetz, who has some wonderful work on how to talk to children about climate change.
She writes about going to the local PTA meeting where she lives in Brooklyn and organizing there just within the community, talking to other parents, talking to the school board, the way we raise our children and speak to our children is a form of activism, in my view, because we are transforming the roots of the future of society when we can bring an awareness of collaborative models and mutual respect, rather than domination based ways of relating and parenting. So I do see it happening, and I think that there are many ways that we can embody these qualities and engage them in our life and in our world that will move us towards a different future. And I think the more that we can expand our definition and our sense of possibility for what that looks like, the more hope I have for the future.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Beautifully said. Well, it all starts with the heart.
Heart activation starts with activating our own heart care connection, heart alignment, and then listening to what our own intuitive guidance, or larger self is telling us. So let's do a heart meditation together.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Lovely.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: So we'll start off and the collective heart energy can help amplify our own heart connection.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Sounds good. Let's do it.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: All right, so let's do some heart focus breathing. Focus our attention in the area of the heart and just envision your breath flowing in and out of the heart or chest area. Breathing a little slower, a little deeper than normal, as our research shows. That starts to bring your heart rhythms into a more synchronized, coherent state as you continue just doing this heart focus breathing activate a genuine heart quality of love or care, gratitude, compassion, kindness, whatever one comes to you that's easiest to feel or just a genuine feeling of calm, know this is helping create heart brain coherence.
Now, as you continue this heart activation, envision yourself having more compassionate understanding of all people, realizing everyone's having to deal with the stress of these days. Personal, social, global. Given their awareness or beliefs, they do the best they know. So let's expand our compassionate understanding.
Don't have to agree with everybody, but we can feel that heart activation of care and compassion.
Now, in this heart coherent state, ask for your heart's intuitive promptings, guidance on which heart qualities you want to embody more in your life.
Patience, courage, respect, equanimity compassionate care. There are so many. Just listen to your own heart's prompting.
It may be the heart quality for the day. Sometimes I get different ones for different days and then it's important to step into it and practice it.
Now let's envision a heart momentum unfolding on the planet of more people practicing heart qualities to replace blame and fear and activate a bigger picture, perceptions and thinking so we can create a new world together that works for all. Let's envision a heart activation momentum. Together let's radiate our collective heart energy to all people who are suffering from the wars going on and other global stressors, knowing that together our heart energy can make a difference.
And let's close by co creating a reservoir of heart energy that each of us can tap into as needed over the next month to help reconnect with our heart feelings and intuitive direction. Create this collective reservoir of heart energy we can each access and tap into when we need to the support for each other.
Thank you so much for sharing that with me, Owen. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners or thanks.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: For that lovely practice, Deborah sure. Maybe I'll just end on one fundamental note or reminder, which is that we're always practicing something right and what these tools, these skills, both the heart math skills that you teach and the contemplative tools that I offer in my new book, your heart was made for this do is they give us a way of shaping our life, shaping our inner life, and having more conscious choice over what we're practicing, what we're strengthening, so that we can live the kind of life we want and build the kind of world we want. So thanks so much for having me. The book's available everywhere books are sold and if folks want to find out more about me or my work, I'm on social media at orangejsofer and my website is orangejsofer.com.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Thank you so much. And as a gift to all of our listeners, I want to remind you that you can get free access to an amazing online video course, the heartment experience, which teaches five helpful techniques to activate your heart qualities and support you in practicing them to have more heart based living. Or you can check out the new Heart Math app on your App Store or Google Play Store programs for heart based living.
And on the third Tuesday of every month, we publish a new Adheart podcast episode, so be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next guests and topics. Thank you again and take care.
[00:33:38] Speaker C: Thank you for listening to the AdHeart 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.
