The HeartSpheres™ approach transforms stress, anxiety, anger, hyperactivity, fatigue and depression into positive feelings that enhance professional performance, creativity and personal development.
The HeartSpheres™ Technique provides scientifically validated emotional management tools that achieve this transformation. These techniques are effective and easy to master. By applying the HeartSpheres™ approach we transform negative emotions into positive feelings that can stimulate physical, emotional and mental health and sustain it through regular inner activity.
The technique focuses on developing three basic skills that we can practice in everyday life:
1. Equanimity:
This is all about developing inner calm, peace and composure to help us distance ourselves from traumatic life events, thus reducing their impact on our health. By doing so we develop objectivity and a healthy degree of detachment from the stressful event and the trauma associated with it. This allows us deeper insight into ourselves and others. This inner clarity and calmness can help us cope better with difficult life experiences and stressful life events.
2. Appreciation:
Learning to appreciate ourselves and others can help us overcome detachment and embrace life positively and creatively. Positive thinking can stimulate strong feelings of appreciation, care, love and compassion. These in turn can be deepened and sustained with mental exercises and can be applied to every day life.
3. Open-mindedness:
Open-mindedness rests on inner calm and appreciation. By learning to give up our thoughts, feelings, judgements and intentions we allow the other person or nature object to reveal themselves within our consciousness. This brings about intuitive insight into people and situations. Open-mindedness rejuvenates body, mind and spirit. It keeps us physically and emotionally young and adaptable. It helps us embrace life without allowing fear to alienate us.
The following techniques are part of the HeartSpheres Approach:
• Visualisation (imagination) and memory techniques: Visualisation and memory techniques focus the mind and engage the creative will. They stimulate feelings of calmness and appreciation. Research on guided imagery proves its effectiveness in managing stress related conditions. Imagination is a powerful mental function that helps us review the past and imagine possible futures. It involves thoughts with sensory qualities, such as those associated with vision, hearing and smell.
Imagery is the language of the arts. Drama, poetry and music are living prove of the close relationship between images and emotions. The imagination is an excellent source of creativity, problem-solving and planning.
Studies indicate that focusing the imagination in specific ways can be calming, encouraging, mood modulating, pain relieving, and may even speed up physical as well as emotional healing.
• Sustaining positive feelings:
Stress research proves that emotions impact directly on our entire being. Not only are breathing and heart rhythm affected, but also the autonomic nervous system, endocrine system and immune system as well. By developing and sustaining positive feelings we can manage extreme emotions associated with stress by transforming them into feelings of calmness and appreciation. These in turn have a strong health promoting effect. by balancing circulation, heart rhythm and autonomous nervous system activity, whilst stimulating the immune system.
• Breathing technique:
Practicing focussed, slow and regular breathing combined with memory or visualisation techniques and positive feelings, deepens the health generating effect of these exercises and shapes our physiology in a positive way. By enhancing the physiological effect of generating and sustaining positive emotions through slow and regular breathing, the physiological patterns of positive feelings will be “learned” on a deeper level and gradually transformed into deeper personality traits and skills, which can be sustained.
• Positive affirmation:
Affirmations are strong positive statements relating to ourselves and others. If they become rooted in our subconscious then teh act as powerful regulators of our beliefs and behaviours. When we enter this relaxed, but fully alert and focussed state, we can gain access to the subconscious part of our self, our human will. At this point we can suggest behaviour changing ideas to our subconscious mind. Used in this way affirmations transform negative views about ourselves, our motives, values and attitudes into positive ones. By harnessing the power of the subconscious to influence our conscious mind and vice versa we achieve a sustainable change in our attitude and behaviour towards life.
Practicing the HeartSpheres™ approach has many benefits:
1. We develop internal awareness, self-regulation, and emotional management skills. We learn how to prevent the damaging effects of stress by becoming aware of the moment when our negative stress response starts and how to prevent it from influencing body and mind.
2. Stress in everyday life is unavoidable. Accepting this fact and appreciating the impact of transforming stress and negative emotions into positive feelings such as equanimity, love and open-mindedness, brings physical, emotional and mental well being into our lifes and our relationships.
3. We learn to relieve symptoms of physical conditions associated with stress, such as high blood pressure, cardio-vascular disease, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, chronic pain, sleep disorders any many others.
4. Apart from providing powerful stress management tools for stress related conditions, the HeartSpheres™ technique supports personal development and helps reshape negative emotions into positive qualities, such as courage, appreciation, care and compassion.
5. The techniques also help to reduce emotional upset associated with traumatic life events. Past traumatic experiences often lead to stressful situations, that we live over and over again. Such experiences sometimes originate in childhood and reflect the experience of social relationships having gone wrong. The neglect or abuse of basic human needs such as intimacy, trust, protection and care are often responsible. Genetic and physical factors are sometimes implicated as well. Regardless of the cause the effect on these individuals can be devastating in terms of their emotional development. This can lead to poor self-esteem, lack of trust, lack of respect for oneself and others, anxiety, chronic irritability and ultimately unhappiness.
The HeartSpheres™ technique can transform past traumatic experiences by changing the negative emotions attached to them into equanimity, understanding, appreciation and compassion for oneself and all others. The positive feelings generated become deliberately attached to the person or situation through a process of calm detachment, recollection of representative events, and using them to understand how appreciative thinking and compassion can help us cope better with anything life throws at us.
This leads to a process of forgiveness for oneself and others and eventually to emotional freedom. We learn how to prevent ourselves from attracting similar traumatic events over and over again, as well as we learn to create different patterns of inner response to outer situations. By systematically reviewing important life events and acknowledging misperceptions about us or others, we learn how to become open-minded, intuitive and capable to adapt better at all life events, good or bad, without harm. We open ourselves to experiencing not only new life- events, but also to seeing our life in a new light.
The inner calm, appreciation and open-mindedness exercises are inspired by work done previously by Rudolf Steiner and other scientists devoted to develeping aids to emotional, physical, social and spiritual well-being. (Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, author, educationalist, scientist and founder of Anthroposophy and the “School for Spiritual Science” in Dornach, Switzerland)
The breathing technique mentioned in the exercises has been developed and researched by Doc Childre and his team. (Doc Childre is a stress researcher, author and founder of the HeartMath Solution and the Institute for HeartMath)
The HeartSpheres™ technique helps to enhance personal and professional development. It promotes vitality and well being, improves physical and psycho-social health, empathy, intuitive insights into ourselves and others. It reduces emotional stress and modulates extreme or negative emotions into positive personal and social skills.
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