Open Your Heart to Reduce Stress and Be Creative If you can imagine being in Heaven, wouldn’t you suspect it would be a peaceful experience? And from that lofty place, we might look upon earthly troubles with a wisdom that surpassed normal understanding. William Blake once offered an instant passport to heaven, one that would bestow the joint blessing of peace and inspiration. "Gratitude," he remarked, "is Heaven itself." Giving thanks to God, praising the Creator, especially for the trials and tribulations, has often received special recommendation from spiritual teachers. Greeting a challenge with a smile of thanks for the lesson about to be learned can often transform a difficult situation into a manageable, if not enjoyable, experience. Practicing gratitude does require, however, learning to be able to make a shift in consciousness. Buddhists have called it "softening the heart," indicating a letting go of a "hard-hearted" resistance to the unpleasant externals, and getting in touch with a higher level of intelligence. One creative explorer has developed a practical, step-by-step approach to this philosophy. In his latest book, Freeze Frame (Planetary Publications), Doc Lew Childre, founder of the HeartMath Institute, describes the technique in terms of five simple steps: 1. Recognize the feeling of stress in your reaction to an event and call time out. Mentally hit the pause button on what is happening—"freeze frame." Stopping the action is your recognition that you have a choice in how you respond. 2. Shift your attention from your spinning mind or agitated emotions and focus on your heart. Imagine breathing through your heart and it will seem to soften and expand. 3. Recall a positive experience and how it felt. Re-experience the joy, compassion, love, or happiness of that experience. 4. Using common sense or intuition, address your heart, sincerely asking what would be a more constructive response to the situation that had been troubling you. 5. Listen to your heart’s response. The process involves shifting gears from a stressful, reactionary posture, to a relaxed, poised, and inspired. Focusing on a positive experience invokes the gratitude principle, raises your consciousness heavenward, and tunes you into a higher level of intelligence, a source of more creative options. We know that anger and stress is hard on the heart. It would seem that love is good for the heart. At his research institute, Childre has demonstrated that the experience of loving feelings gives the heart a more uniform and cohert electrical rhythm. A loving response to situations is less stressful. Love also seems to be creative and inventive. Childre provides many reports from practitioners of his "freeze frame" method to suggest that "coming from the heart" is indeed a creative method of responding to situations. For the purpose of becoming a channel of one’s higher self, it would seem that the heart is the place to be. |