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There’s something about being with trees – a walk in the forest, the experience of planting a tree or leaning back against a tree with a book in hand. Are trees sentient beings? Can they sense how humans feel about them? Are they affected by our emotions? And, what is it about trees that has an uplifting effect on people?

Trees Are Intelligent

A new generation of scientists is showing that plants and trees are intelligent and aware; they process information, sleep, remember, and communicate with one another. They have at least 20 different types of senses, including ones that roughly correspond to our five senses. They also have additional senses that can do things such as measure humidity, detect gravity, vibrations, and sense electromagnetic fields. These scientists insist that plants and trees are intelligent because they can sense, learn, remember and even react in ways similar to humans. Their behaviors exhibit a coordinated activity and response across the whole organism that require signaling and communication systems which include long-distance electrical signals, specialized vascular tissues, and the production of chemicals used by the brain and nervous systems in humans and animals. The most well-known way they communicate is chemically. This is why some plants and trees smell so good and others awful.

Researchers have also tracked the exchange of nutrients and chemical signals between trees through an invisible underground fungal network. The oldest trees, or "mother trees," function as hubs and help nourish their offspring until they’re tall enough to reach the light. In other words, trees recognize their seedlings as kin. Trees also cooperate by trading nutrients across species. For example, when evergreen species have sugars to spare, they share them with deciduous species when they need them and vice versa. For the forest community, this cooperative and coordinated underground economy provides better overall health, more total photosynthesis, and greater resilience in the face of disturbance that allows them to thrive collectively.

Electrical Life of Trees

Although there has been an abundance of new research and insights on the way trees communicate through chemical processes, there is far less known about the electrical life of trees.

A professor at Yale University was the first person to conduct long-term measures of trees’ electrical activity which appeared to be related to the phase of the moon and solar cycles. There’s a lot more to learn about trees, especially how they may respond to human emotions and how being in the presence of their biofields can have an uplifting effect on people. The HeartMath Institute (HMI), a non-profit research and education organization, has developed a new technology that reads the electrical signals in trees and the surrounding earth and then feeds those signals to the cloud, where they are processed and displayed on a computer screen. Interestingly, trees have complex and different overall electrical patterns, almost as if each tree has its own personality.

Graph of Live Tree Data

Global Tree Monitoring Project

This Global Tree Monitoring project is part of a broader initiative to conduct interconnectivity research, ¬testing the hypothesis that all life forms are interconnected in a rich tapestry of intersecting magnetic energy fields. We aim to reveal this ancient hypothesis under the lens of modern science. HMI has created new equipment and software for simultaneously measuring the electrical potentials generated from trees located around the planet. This is an exciting citizen scientist project that encourages people from around the world to sponsor and host a sensor on their favorite tree. We will use the data from the global tree network to explore research questions such as: Are trees affected by human emotions? Do the electrical responses in multiple trees correlate to events that trigger an emotional outpouring in large numbers of people? Can trees help predict earthquakes? Do trees communicate energetically with each other over large distances, and how does the biofield of trees have an uplifting effect on people?

HMI’s Tree Research Benefits People By:

The HeartMath Institute Tree Rhythms – A Citizen-Scientist Project

Learn how you can participate or view a real-time live data graph of 46+ trees to see the electrical activity from any tree in the network.

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Love generates hope, and hope is the window of future possibilities that serve the highest good for the whole.

Often, the light in our hope dims and is obscured by chaos and our own mental and emotional blocks, such as fear, judgment, prejudice, and separation. As we practice heart qualities like love, care, compassion, kindness, and cooperation, along with becoming more responsible for our personal energy expenditures, we can become architects of a new sense of hope and live according to our deeper values and higher quality choices.

As more people connect with their own heart’s intelligent guidance and practice the qualities of the heart, we can individually and collectively experience more peace, happiness, and satisfaction in our lives. This makes a valuable contribution to the whole and creates more hope for each other and planet earth.

The world will start to look better as we begin to upgrade the patterns and habits of how we treat each other. As we become more compassionate, more forgiving, and more eager to put the past behind us, this will draw more hopeful solutions for the seemingly insurmountable challenges we are experiencing. As we learn to get along with each other, then planet earth joins in and becomes more accommodating.

Building trust in our heart’s intuitive guidance leads to uplifting possibilities and the increased capacity to manifest them, along with many other upturns we’ve long hoped for. Opening our hearts to each other creates a constant renewal of our sense of hope and optimism for the future. Hope from our genuine heart is a most powerful magnetic draw for manifestation; it’s a gift from our spirit, and it’s well worth keeping the flame rekindled.

To increase hope for a better future, we can learn to connect with our available heart’s guidance that’s within all of us. This connection, born from love and care, can unfold the higher qualities of life we are looking for, and above all – increased joy and fulfillment.

When we genuinely commit to increasing our love and kindness for each other, new hope comes with the package. Having hope is important, but it’s time to start creating forward steps along with it – not just waiting for hope to put solutions on our doorstep. A good first start is to begin expressing more care and compassion and bringing it to the street in our day-to-day interactions, then the rest will unfold. Doing this can get easier than not doing it once we break through the inertia accumulated from our old predictable patterns and reactions. We were born to love, respect and cooperate with each other, and collective humanity is starting to move in that direction, although it may not seem like it at this time.

We are experiencing a transitional period, and this won’t last forever. It obviously will go on for a while – until more of us decide to open our hearts to compassionate care and create a different world from what we’ve created thus far. Eventually, our hearts will have had enough of the old and want to pioneer these new changes. We can do this. The most important step is to add more heart energy to our interactions. We are not bad folks; we are just waking up to the good in us.

Written by Doc Childre, HeartMath Institutue’s Founder.

We would love to hear your thoughts on what hope means to you.

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Many spiritual cultures agree inner stillness creates an energetic environment for supporting our advancing consciousness that can unleash the transformational power of our love.

HeartMath tools and coherence technologies have been designed to monitor and facilitate easier access to stillness and its connection to the natural inner wisdom and guidance of our heart.

A coherent alignment between our spiritual heart, mind and emotions can lead to a new way of perceiving, thinking and relating. When practicing heart coherence, we experience a distinct quieting of the inner noise generated by the normal stream of unregulated mental and emotional activity. When you’re in a still coherent state, your nervous system is more aligned, your hormonal and immune systems are getting rebalanced, and your mind and emotions are connecting with more of your spirit’s practical guidance.

How to Achieve Inner Stillness

Achieving inner stillness requires a little practice because our mind will try to occupy any available space. Think of inner stillness as something practical and street-worthy. How many times have we told children or others to get still inside and listen up because we have something important to tell them? This is because we instinctively know that stillness plays a part in the quality and depth of most people’s hearing ability. So, why not use stillness in the way it can count the most—to quiet our mental and emotional static so that we can sense the counsel and wisdom from our heart.

When our mind finally relaxes in meditation, inner stillness is where we land. From there, we can reset and upgrade our life experience. As we learn the value of inner stillness, this reduces life’s more challenging ways of nudging us towards listening to our heart’s suggestions.

It’s a highly effective energy-saving choice to schedule times for practicing inner stillness and allow our heart, mind, and emotions to experience a relaxed time-out from competing with each other over which decides the choices and decisions we make. Stillness softens our determined mental and emotional energetics so that our heart-speak can be heard.

Exercise: Stillness

Practical Applications of Stillness

• Start your day by doing the Stillness Exercise, along with the commitment to breathe an attitude of inner stillness, when convenient, throughout the day. It’s a soft place inside that is sensitive to your intuitive nudges.
• As you proceed through the day, stillness helps to prevent the mind’s impatience and distractions from overriding your choices for the best outcomes.
• Practicing inner stillness helps you to create the straightest line toward the manifestation of your intentions.
• Practicing inner stillness to connect with our heart’s care and guidance can become a most positive step forward for humanity, not as a trend or religious motivation but as a practical street sense, heart-based way of life.

To get benefits out of these stillness practices, you don’t have to totally stop the mind – even reducing thoughts and calming yourself improves your capacity to sense your heart feelings and suggestions. In a short amount of time, the power to quieten your mind will increase. You’ll also find your stress will reduce at a surprising pace with a little practice.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2017 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

We would love to hear about your experiences with inner stillness.

Written by Sara Childre, Pres. of HeartMath Institute and Doc Childre, HeartMath Founder.

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Global stress is on the rise. Waves of emotional turbulence modulate throughout the planet, resulting from our collective emotional responses to droughts, floods, hunger, world stage instability and on. These stress waves get powerfully stirred and amplified by the media, which sustains a collective uneasiness that can dampen how we think, feel, and respond to life’s interactions – especially on the emotional level. The internal turbulence caused by these waves of stress can be offset.

We can help with this by getting into a quiet space and asking our heart daily to draw to us inspirations, tools and common-sense insights for reducing our stress. We often get inspirations and intentions to use certain techniques we already know that could help prevent and reduce our stress load. Yet it is easy to fall short of grounding them via practice.

Heart Commitment

Sometimes our intuitive inspiration suggests to us new tools or information that could help us reduce and manage energy-draining habits, such as impatience, frustration, anger, or the struggle with choices. However, our initial inspirations can soon fade unless we learn how to anchor them into our memory recall for when we need them. The trick to anchoring is to consciously practice new tools several times a day for a week so that they begin to show up automatically when needed.

Inspiration is a packet of free energetic initiative – but with a timer on it. As we act on the first nudge of inspiration, we can beat the human tendency to waste that gift of free initiative from our heart’s intuition. Sometimes it’s many moons before an important inspiration returns if we miss it on the first pass.

The internet offers many simple techniques that can help us with the obvious energy drains, such as anxiety, impatience, anger, frustration, overload, and more. But we have to put our heart into our commitment to bring our inspirations to the street.

Important Steps to Remember for Anchoring Inspirations and Insights

• Act on your inspirations and insights soon after experiencing them. Procrastination allows the free energy boost from inspiration to fade – which makes your intentions increasingly harder.

  Go beyond "I know I should" and make it happen – because you experience the energy savings, and especially the benefits from stress reduction.

• Revisit your commitment to practicing new intentions throughout the day and occasionally breathe in the feeling and memory associated with it. This will increase the strength and resilience of your intention.
• Remember: Using any new tool each day for a week (or more) anchors in your new habit, which will soon become an automatic response.
• Appreciate any positive benefits, as reinforcement lifts the spirit of your commitment.

Let’s close with a helpful tool, especially for these times of change.

A Practice for Reducing Anxiety

Practice radiating love and care to others, to nature, quietly in meetings, to pets, etc. This calms and softens your mental and emotional energy, which reduces types of anxiety and brain fog caused by pressured thinking. The increase of pressured thinking makes up a large part of our stress deficit. This tool can help with this and much more.

The post The Importance of Anchoring Your Insights appeared first on HeartMath Institute.

In her article, The Spiritual Heart, Micheline Anderson applies HeartMath science to a correlation of spiritual practices. She suggests that the heart may be the temple of the soul, and that the related emotional keys of spiritual aspiration reflect increased longevity and wellness. Given the historical association between the metaphorical qualities of the heart and the many spiritual practices throughout history, there is increasing evidence that substantiates physical well-being with identification and appeal to a transcendent being, including our personal and collective higher self.

There are numerous definitions of spiritual, it would be fair to include most of them in the realm of those beliefs or practices that are not bound by the body. These can include religious beliefs but also secular practices that are not necessarily related to a given deity. The idea that one can be atheistic or even agnostic and still highly spiritual is not incompatible with a heart-centered focus, and its benefits.

Spiritual Practices Promote Good Health

Emotions of spiritual reflection and inspiration come to us with form, but the formless attributes of a deep moral and ethical conviction also elicit qualities of compassion, appreciation, and a sense of wholeness that echoes a collective conscious – even transcendence. We experience these feelings even in environments not traditionally associated with spiritual practice, in fact – through great art, music, dance, poetry, literature – even deep connections to nature and discovery through learning and research. For many, such secular experiences become sacred, a form of spiritual renewal. Regardless of source or association, these emotional and spiritual qualities are reference points of the heart. Science now demonstrates that there is a physical correlation of spiritual practice that promotes and sustains health and resilience.

Throughout the history of major civilizations – Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome and China and the cultures of western Judeo-Christian societies, the heart is considered the master organ. We promote good health through attributes of the heart that prove substantive, including forms of spiritual practice, either religious or secular.

The Physical and Spiritual Heart

We know that the heart produces a number of hormones, including oxytocin, and plays a critical role in modulating many areas of the brain involved in self-regulation; but it also plays a vital role in emotional experience. The heart-brain connection for emotional balance extends to spiritual practices, where feelings of wonder, joy, and compassion are common. The notion of reverence to a power higher – or as an extension of one’s higher self – helps calm the mind and body, reflected through healthy heart regulation or heart rate variability (HRV).

By contrast, we are also held in awe and experience a sense of reverence when we attune our conscious minds with our intuitive selves. In moments of self-discovery and solving a problem without an external reference, the intuitive realm of the heart reveals an intelligence that is deeper than our normal state. This inner source of knowledge echoes those attributes that inform deeper, spiritual awakenings.

The Spiritual Heart Connects Us

Anderson also suggests that there is evidence that the spiritual heart connects us to each other, where groups of people strengthen all individuals through spiritual practices. The idea of the knowing heart resonates between and among people – as vibrations, the way trees or plants can be sensitive to each other. The frequencies of emotion and thought occur in wavelengths that may be imperceptible to measurement, but the effects of their power and impact are nevertheless experienced. This group dynamic is why many religions and spiritual practices advocate collective prayer or meditation – the vibration of the whole affects each individual and provides a heart-felt sense of synchronicity.

Beyond preventative cardiac and emotional self-regulation, Anderson further cites studies that spiritual practices, led by a heart-centered focus, contribute significantly to renewal and recovery. These adaptive healing attributes of the heart help align a balanced spirit-mind-body response; one that can mitigate emotional and even physical dissonance.

The Spiritual Heart Affects The Planet

Moving out an order of magnitude, the energies of the heart reverberate beyond individual and group dynamics. The practiced attitude and commitment to loving and caring for all life increases the therapeutic potential of the planet, the larger vibrations of global coherence, according to Anderson’s research.

The vibrations of the heart emit electromagnetic currents that continue to circulate within the collective conscious of humans. The unfolding of the heart in thoughts and feelings of spiritual or emotional well-being – love, compassion, gratitude, appreciation, wonderment, even humor – these vibrations benefit the body and immediate circle of our own domain, but they also aid in others who suffer or may operate in frequencies of low spiritual resonance.

This phenomenon is why many religions and even secular practices advocate praying for the poor or those in dire circumstances, globally – the heart’s emotions are empathetic and create spiritual tides that aspire to lift all boats.

Summary and a Spiritual Practice

The scientific evidence that connects our positive emotional states directly affect the autonomic nervous system that regulate our physiology and metabolism. The associative psychological effects from emotional identification of moral, ethical, and altruistic characteristics substantially connect us in ways that we can cultivate; in ways that affect those around us; and in ways that affect the global consciousness and state of humankind. Attunement with those qualities that bring us joy, that inspire us, that enrich our sense of purpose and meaning – these are the emotional alignments that give strength to the spiritual heart.

Practicing the HeartMath techniques, placing one’s focus in the area of the heart, and learning to breathe slower and in rhythm can very much augment one’s attitude and approach to any spiritual practice. Like physical workouts that build stamina, emotional and psychological workouts build spiritual stamina. Even a few minutes a day in heart focused meditation, prayer, focused attention of one’s blessings – these small spiritual deposits add up over time, strengthening us in times of doubt, fear, and hesitation.

The spiritual heart is a birthright, a dispensation that awaits our rightful claim to emotional strength, psychological balance, and physical self-regulation.

Read the full article, The Spiritual Heart, by Micheline R. Anderson, click here.

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The state of ease is a highly regenerative state that helps us flow more easily through challenges and builds our resilience capacity. It is not merely a state of relaxation. It is characterized by a balance between the mind and emotions, which allows us to access a sense of inner stillness and make intelligent choices while on the move.

During times of global uncertainty and rapid planetary changes, practicing ease can save us a lot of energy, angst and downtime. Uncertainty and change can trigger increased discomfort and confusion, which may affect our behavior patterns in unexpected ways (memory lapses, brain fog, edginess, frustration, impatience, aches in odd places, sleeplessness, and more). If these type symptoms are occurring, it’s helpful to breathe ease and take deeper pause for discerning and double-checking communications and decisions.

When we pause and go to a place of ease inside ourselves, we make conscious choices rather than reacting mechanically. In this state of "active calm" our mental and emotional energy is composed, yet ready for swift intelligent action, if needed. Inner ease creates a receptive space for intuitive suggestions and feelings that are broadcast from our heart’s intelligent guidance.

Doing the steps of the Inner-Ease™ Technique at the beginning of the day reduces mental and emotional static, which clouds clear thinking and our reasoning capacity. Practice these steps for a while to increase the awareness of when you have effectively shifted to the state of ease, which is often a little deeper than your first few attempts achieve.

The Inner-Ease™ Technique

Before responding to a vexing e-mail or reacting during a tense situation, breathe ease and settle the mind and emotions. (This can often prevent an emotional mess and the downtime it takes for damage control.) When we discern our direction and act from a place of inner ease, our mind doesn’t override the intuitive whispers of our heart.

Breathing inner ease throughout the day helps us anchor new or more desirable patterns into our cellular memory. For many of us, knowing how to access inner ease is not the problem—it’s remembering to do it, especially when it counts the most. Ease gives us a chance to act and respond from our real self rather than from our mechanical, "predictable other.".

Use Ease to Change Unwanted Patterns

Suggested Practice:

1. Make a list of two to three behaviors or patterns toward people or situations you would like to change.
2. Write them down (You can add more to your list later). Examples could include impatience, hasty reactions, frustration, irritation or any other unwanted pattern. It is important not to judge yourself as you do this.
3. Next, ease into your heart and observe and honor your desire to change.
4. Then, have a sincere and honest self-talk about how to handle the item(s) you listed. The most meaningful self-talk occurs when the heart – your true self – speaks to the mind. (If indecision or self-doubt begin to surface, know that this is only your mind talking. Simply realize that it is your old way of thinking, and reconnect with your heart and recommit to the change you truly desire.)
5. Review the steps of Inner Ease and act on your insights and intentions.

Ease is not a place where your challenges will simply dissolve or your behavior patterns will change instantly. It creates an extra time window, allowing deeper discernment for heart intelligent choices — conscious choices that can help prevent and resolve many unnecessary challenges and unwanted predicaments. It helps us attune our mental and emotional nature to the most reasonable and effective way for responding to each situation that life brings us.

“Practicing inner ease increases our conscious memory to include our heart, with our mind and emotions as they navigate through daily choices and feelings that decide the quality and direction of our life.”

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