Brain/Heart Coherence – BionicOldGuy

I’ve been doing well with meditation lately, having achieved an important first step in « quieting the default grid » (which I discussed here ). But something seemed to be missing. Sometimes I felt calm and quiet, but a little dull or empty. I had seen meditation teachers talk about connecting the mind and heart, and I thought that might be missing, but I hadn’t made much progress on it. I got some advice on this from the book The Heart of Centering Prayer by Cynthia Borjo. I will discuss this book a little later. But the breakthrough for me was when Cynthia discussed the neuroscientific ramifications of the mind/heart connection. I often thought « heart » was meant metaphorically in this connection, but she insisted it was physical. The book was written in 2016, so the neuroscientific research on the matter is scarce, but still compelling. Since then it has exploded and now there is an entire field of « neurocardiology ». The brain and heart communicate strongly through the vagus nerve, and this promotes mental and physical health when they are « in sync. »

To understand this better, I asked Google Gemini to do an in-depth study on the matter and the resulting report is as follows here. Now there’s a lot of stuff about things like « vagal tone, » which I think just means doing things to get the brain to slow down the heart. But it turns out that 80% of the traffic on the vagus nerve is from the heart to the brain, while only 20% is from the brain to the heart. The bottom line is that if the heart and brain can work in harmony with each other, this 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. This was by accident, this is the natural breathing rate I settle into. It is also recommended to do things to « open the heart ». In my case, thinking about my loved ones works well for this. Adding this to my meditation was a night and day difference. There is no more feeling of silence, but emptiness. Now, when the mental chatter subsides, it is quiet but full, where fullness is a pleasant sensation in the region of the heart.

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’s sort of a combination of open awareness and mantra meditation. Instead of repeating the mantra constantly, you use the word only occasionally as a reminder to « re-center » when your attention wanders. This summary doesn’t do it justice, to understand the nuances you have to read the book.