It’s completely normal if you feel uncomfortable or disheartened about some of your responses to these questions. It’s helpful to view your answers as an opportunity or a starting point to identify and clarify areas that you’d like to address. Understanding what isn’t working can often help you to begin to find your way toward what will work, even if that means changing the dynamics of your current relationship or venturing into the unknown, alone. Remember, leaving a relationship when it’s no longer aligned or you feel complete and have grown all you can is different from leaving to try to find something better, which many of us, including myself, have done in the past. Be patient and give yourself time and space to grieve any changes or losses in any of your relationships, even those you’ve chosen to initiate for yourself.
As you explore your current circumstances or begin to create new ones, continuing to extend yourself grace and compassion and reminding yourself that each of us is a work in progress, doing the best we can. The fact that you are this far along in the work is an incredible sign of your desire and commitment to create change for yourself and your relationships.
HOW TO HAVE A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION
As you’ve already learned, taking a moment to pause and connect with your heart can help you move toward a more connected and collaborative space of heart coherence. Before you enter what could be an upsetting interaction or conversation, place your hands on your heart and take a few slow, deep breaths as you remind yourself what is truly important to you about this person or relationship. It could be as simple as calling to mind something you like or appreciate about who they are and how they show up in your relationship. Spend as long a time here as you’d like before beginning the interaction or conversation, noticing if your experience or outlook changes in any way. Pay particular attention to both the differences in how you approach the interaction and how the other person responds to any shifts in your energy.
Those of you who want to begin to address more difficult topics or realities may find the following guidance helpful.
Ask to have explicit and open conversations with others that directly address the source of conflict or issue. Attempt to break habits that may cause you to avoid or deflect difficult topics.
Practice validating others’ thoughts, feelings, and perspectives, even if you disagree. You don’t have to agree with someone or feel the same way they do to attempt to understand or validate and accept how they feel. To demonstrate that you’re trying to understand them, you can say, “I understand this really hurt you” or “I can see how you could feel that way.”
Break the natural habit of trying to make sense of another’s thoughts, feelings, or intentions or assume what they may be. Instead, practice asking questions and listening from a place of curiosity and connection to your heart space, allowing them to speak without speaking over or interrupting them.
Own your role in your shared experiences, be open and humble, and apologize or take responsibility when you hurt someone.
Practice trying to compromise and navigate conflicts as a team to come up with mutually workable solutions. Break any habits you may have of focusing only on yourself and your own best interests (when it’s safe and appropriate to do so).
Try to stick to the current issue or topic, and break any habit you may have of bringing up the past or using absolutist statements like “You always do X” or “You never do Y.”
Affirm your love and connection to your loved one during conflict, reminding yourself that it can be stressful and overwhelming for both of you, even if your loved one appears distracted or detached. If you can’t do so during a conflict, affirm your connection when you’re both calm, letting them know that you love them, appreciate them, and remain committed to the relationship. (This is particularly important for those who grew up in a home where conflict meant big blowups or the loss of love, like the silent treatment.)
HOW TO REPAIR A CONNECTION AFTER A CONFLICT
Conflicts are a natural part of navigating life with someone else who inevitably has different ideas, feelings, perspectives, and past experiences. Learning how to acknowledge our individual roles in conflict, including the impact of our emotional reactivity, helps increase our security and trust in a relationship. Emotionally healthy couples repair their relationship after disagreements or disconnection instead of ignoring their issues or pretending the conflict didn’t happen. Practice using the tips in the list below to help you repair your relationship or reconnect after heated or disconnected moments in your relationship.
Check in with your nervous system to make sure you’re regulated. You want your body to be in a calm and grounded state when you apologize or attempt to repair the disconnection. If you’re stressed or upset, you won’t be able to think or speak clearly or hold space for the other person’s feelings.
Be specific. Name the behavior, its impact (be curious and ask if unsure), and your role in it. For example: “The other night when I made that joke in front of our friends, I was trying to be funny and am really sorry I hurt you.” Or, “I’m wondering how you felt when I made that joke in front of our friends the other night?”
Listen without being defensive. This will be difficult if you came from a home where people deflected or invalidated one another’s feelings. Remember, you may not agree with what the other person is saying, but practice allowing them to share their experiences anyway.
Focus on the other person’s feelings, not yours. If you, like me, were raised by emotionally underdeveloped parents, you’ll notice the urge to center the conversation around how you feel. Try to shift out of this habit, since true and meaningful apologies are centered around others’ feelings, not our own.
State what you’ll do differently in the future. Identify your role or responsibility in creating change or decreasing the likelihood that it happens again. For example: “When I’m tired or irritable, I’m going to work on taking space and being aware of what activates me because it’s not okay to snap at you.” I’ve had to say this often myself!
Practice forgiving yourself. Remember, we all hurt people throughout our life; it’s part of being a human being. After you apologize, remember to practice self-care, extending yourself grace and compassion and reminding yourself that you are doing the best you can and take a moment to celebrate yourself for taking accountability. Practice redirecting your attention away from any self-shaming or critical thoughts.
* * *
Naturally, most of us want to feel loved in the same ways we learned to feel loved as children. For most of us, these ways are anchored in trauma and what we needed to do to feel safe, valued, and loved in our childhood environment. As we become more aware of the expectations we place on others and take responsibility for our unmet childhood needs, we become intentional creators of our experiences with others instead of allowing our past trauma to drive and dictate how we interact with them. When we’re empowered in our interactions and relationships, we’re able to connect more authentically with the people with whom we share space and time. We’re also better able to connect with the energetic power of the natural world in which we live, a life-changing power you’ll learn more about in the next chapter.
10
Reconnecting with the Collective
The summer of 1993 was both sweltering and deadly in Washington, DC. At the time, the city had one of the highest crime rates in the country and was experiencing the kind of temperatures that send even the most ardent of heat seekers into air-conditioned cool. Despite the heat and the violence, four thousand people chose to descend on the city to sit in silence and meditate with one intent in mind: to lower the crime rate by focusing their mental energy on spreading peace and safety to others.
It worked. At the height of the two-month experiment, violent crimes in DC dropped by 23 percent.54 Prior to the study, led by the quantum physicist John Hagelin, Washington, DC’s, police chief had told reporters that only twenty inches of snow during the summer would cause as noticeable a fall in crime.55
What happened that summer wasn’t a one-off incident. Decades of research provide evidence that when groups of people focus their attention on promoting peace, harmony, health, or well-being, they achieve their intended outcome in quantifiable ways. Another notable study found that during the Israel-Lebanon war in 1983, deaths dropped by 76 percent as a result of a heart-centered daily group meditation.56 Everyday stress like crime, traffic accidents, and fires also decreased in the surrounding area.
The “field effects of consciousness,” as Hagelin termed it, go beyond meditation: Any practice that creates physiological safety in our nervous system and coherence between our heart and brain can impact the overall well-being of others. More surprisingly, when we band together to focus our mental energy on specific feelings, intentions, or outcomes, it can spread those feelings, intentions, or outcomes to people around the world, not just to those in our town, city, or even country. This is known as nonlocal consciousness.
Some of the strongest research into nonlocal consciousness has been conducted with prayer or other intention-setting practices. Cardiologists at Duke University found that when people of various faiths from around the world prayed for 150 cardiac patients by name, those patients fared 50 to 100 percent better than those who didn’t receive any prayer, even though the patients and those who were praying for them were separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles.57 Another study of nearly a thousand cardiac patients reached similar results, showing that those who were prayed for nonlocally had healthier outcomes than those who weren’t.58 As researchers point out, their results don’t prove that God exists or that He/She/They answer prayers but that collective consciousness is extremely powerful.59
Though the term has various meanings, I define collective consciousness as the combined state of energy in a group of people, whether that group is our family, circle of friends, work office, sports team, university, company, corporation, town, city, or country. There is also global consciousness, or the mass energetic state of everyone on Earth who is alive at any given time.
Our collective consciousness can be calm, collaborative, productive, and harmonious—or stressed, agitated, fearful, and chaotic. If you’ve ever thought that everyone you encountered one day seemed a little on edge or that the energy of your office, community, or even the entire planet was off, you were likely feeling the effects of the collective or global consciousness.
What determines collective consciousness? We all do, based on how physiologically safe we each individually feel in our nervous system and whether we’re in a coherent state. This is because everyone’s individual safety and heart coherence affect those of everyone else in our group and around the world, as if we are all playing one giant game of dominos.
With 8 billion hearts and nervous systems communicating with one another all the time, unseen signals are constantly boomeranging around the world, faster and more effectively than any wireless network. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we all affect one another in a continual feedback loop.
For more proof of our collective and global consciousness, it’s interesting to look at research conducted by the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). This international collaboration of scientists analyzed the effects of hundreds of events, including the death of Princess Diana and the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, that have activated a worldwide emotional reaction or outpouring. Over the past few decades, the GCP has found that these globally impactful events alter the output of random number generators—quantum-based devices often used in research—in a statistically significant way that cannot be explained by chance. This has led the scientists to conclude that it is our collective energy shifts the outputs.60 Though the GCP has been criticized by some for being biased, the project has analyzed the quantum output of more than five hundred worldwide events to date, enabling its scientists to argue that their results cannot be misinterpreted.61
There’s no denying that we as human beings are interconnected in a state of collective or global consciousness. We’re all made of the same natural elements, share the same space here on Earth, and pass nervous system energy back and forth to one another every second of every day. We may spend most of our attention and energy interacting with those in our immediate environments, but we’re also connected to wider groups, networks, systems, and humanity as a whole. And because we’re connected, we as individuals can begin to use the peaceful state of our own body to impact the bodies of those around us.
YOUR HEART IMPACTS OTHERS
In chapter 8, we learned about co-regulation and some of the ways in which we can use the safety of our nervous system to help our loved ones feel safe and open to connecting with us on a deeper level. Now we’re going to explore how we can use co-regulation to communicate safety not only to those in our immediate proximity but also to those in our groups and communities and even people we don’t directly interact with or even know. What I’m referring to is a phenomenon known as social coherence, which occurs when our state of heart coherence spreads to others in our wider groups, networks, and systems.
On the simplest level, social coherence occurs because kindness is contagious—literally. When we embody core heart feelings like compassion, appreciation, acceptance, tolerance, patience, forgiveness, and love, we radiate these feelings through seen behavior, including our words, actions, vocal tone, and facial expressions, in addition to unseen signals, like the energy we emit from our nervous system and heart. This spread of social coherence is a form of entrainment, which occurs when cooperative rhythms are generated between individuals. Anytime we interact with others, whether they’re near or far, our individual system will actively coordinate with their energetic communications. This energetic entrainment joins the “me” of us as individuals into a “we” in a relationship with another.
This synchronization of human energetic communication has been documented by a phenomenon known as emotional contagion. You already read about the meditation studies at the beginning of the chapter, that illustrate the widespread impact that a small percentage of peaceful individuals can cause. Emotional contagion is the spread of emotions between and among individuals. Emotions spread because we subconsciously mimic the behaviors of others, as our brain activates mirror neurons, cells that fire when we witness another person’s actions.62 Mirror neurons help us attune to or feel the emotional state of the other person, which can spread emotional energy and deepen our bond with them.63
Lots of research has been conducted on emotional contagion, in part because businesses and corporations have used the findings to influence consumer decisions and purchases, as well as employee satisfaction and loyalty.64 By eliciting certain emotions through ads and marketing, businesses have learned how to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. Though this can understandably be viewed as cause for concern, the research can help us comprehend why our individual safety matters so much to the collective consciousness.
