Your Heart-Monkey Brain Connection

As a yoga teacher I am constantly observing the human brain in action. In yogic terms it is fondly referred to as the monkey brain or even more fondly, the drunken monkey brain. Some days your left can be right, your right can be left, or while the class turns in one direction there are a few intent on going the opposite way. Sending the message from brain through the nervous system, your major communication network, and on to the appropriate muscle groups can get misdirected in a complex tangle of neurons. That same monkey brain is what responds to the world around us; interpreting our experiences, what we see and hear, our emotions at any given moment and our thoughts, oh yes, that constant stream of mental jabber that constitutes our consciousness.

Then there is your heart, beating one hundred thousand times a day, while moving 100 gallons of blood per hour through sixty thousand miles of veins and arteries. At one time considered to be merely a pump to move blood it has since been elevated to the status of electromagnetic generator and a brain in its own right. According to Stephen Harrod Buhner in his amazing book, The Secret Teachings of Plants, the heart both processes and generates complex patterns of multiple physiological events, which affects, among many other things, our consciousness. “Analysis of information flowing into the human body has shown that much of it impacts the heart first, flowing to the brain only after it has been perceived by the heart.”

In other words, information is first received by your heart, which processes or thinks about the experience and then sends the information on to the brain, which looks it over and adds its opinion and sends that bit back to the heart and so it goes back and forth between the two brains until out of pure frustration you shout out, “Should I listen to my heart or to my brain?” Good question, because it is at this point you must sift through all the ego driven survival bits that come from the brain as opposed to the idealistic leanings of your heart.

Neuroimmunologist-psychologist, Dr. Paul Pearsall, was involved in the early research of heart transplant recipients who also happened to acquire the memories of their donors. Transplanted hearts tend to bring along what Pearsall calls “cellular memories.” In these cases the recipient’s brain communicates with the memories stored in the donor’s heart. Pearsall sees the natural intelligence of the heart run as a network of blood vessels and cells that serves not only as our circulatory system but as an energy-information gathering and distribution system, much like a complex telephone network. In his book, The Hearts Code, Pearsall writes that by “listening to the subtle energy and wisdom each of us has in our hearts, we can learn valuable lessons for loving, working, playing, praying and healing. By unlocking the heart’s code, we can discover new ways of understanding human healing and consciousness.”

I would like to mention that research conducted by generations of women of the human male species  reveals that men have a third, rather unique, brain located in the nether regions of their body that is often considered to be a central functioning brain. Perhaps if Mother Nature had a less twisted sense of humor we would all be more heart-centric in our actions, or then again, perhaps that is the lesson to be learned and the goal we must all strive towards to protect our planet.