Brain/Heart Coherence – BionicOldGuy

I have been doing well in meditation lately, achieving an important first step of “calming the default mode network” (which I discussed here). But something seemed missing. I would sometimes feel calm and quiet but a bit dull or empty. I had seen meditation teachers talking about linking the mind and the heart, and thought that might be what’s missing, but had not make much progress on it. I got some tips on it from the book “The Heart of Centering Prayer” by Cynthia Borgeault. I’ll discuss that book a bit more later. But the breakthrough for me was when Cynthia discussed neuroscience ramifications of the mind/heart connection. I had often thought “heart” was meant metaphorically in this connection, but she insisted that is was physical. The book was written in 2016 so neuroscience research on this was sparse but still compelling. It has since exploded, and there is now a whole field of “neurocardiology”. The brain and the heart communicate strongly through the vagus nerve, and it it conducive to mental and physical health when they “sync up”.

To understand this more I asked Google Gemini to do deep research on it, and the resulting report is here. There is a lot out there now about things like “vagal tone”, which I thought just means doing things to get the brain to slow down the heart. But it turns out that 80% of the traffic along the vagus nerve is from the heart to the brain, while only 20% is brain to heart. The bottom line is that if the heart and brain can operate in coherence with each other it is a healthy and relaxing state. The details are summarized in the infographic:

I was already doing one of the suggested techniques for this, which is breathing about 10 breaths per minute during meditation. That was accidental, it’s just naturally the breathing rate I settle down to. It is also suggested to do things to “open the heart”. In my case thinking of my loved ones works fine for that. Adding that to my meditation was a night and day difference. No more feeling quiet but empty. Now when the mental chatter dies down, it is quiet but full, where the fullness is a pleasant feeling in the heart region.

“The Heart of Centering Prayer” is highly recommended for those interested in meditation techniques and theory. Centering prayer is a technique that originated in the Christian tradition but is universally useful. It is sort of a combination of open awareness and mantra meditation. Instead of repeating a mantra continuously you only use the word occasionally as a reminder to “recenter” yourself when your attention wanders. That summary does not do it justice, to understand the nuances you have to read the book.