EP #136: Exploring Heart Coherence & Unlocking Your Inner Power with Kimberly Snyder, Founder of Solluna & NY Times Best-Selling Author

Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Endorphins, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joint happiness and daily living. I'm your host, Stella Staphanopoulos, and this week's topic is a little different from, I think, anything that I've released yet on the podcast. Now the concepts aren't necessarily new, but I think that the terminology is. So today, I'm talking all about heart coherence with the multi-hyphenate Kimberly Snyder. Now I think I start almost every podcast episode introducing my guest as a multi-hyphenate, but I truly mean it. I am so impressed by what so many of my guests have accomplished and are continuing to do in their lives, and how they blend all of their interests into a career that they've built for themselves. And Kimberly is definitely one of those types of people. She's a three-time New York Times best-selling author, spiritual and meditation teacher, nutritionist, certified yoga instructor, and holistic wellness expert. She's authored six books, including Radical Beauty, which she co-authored with Deepak Chopra, and she's also the founder of Saluna, which is a lifestyle brand dedicated to empowering people to live their true beauty. So back to heart coherence, which is the topic that we explore today. Kimberly's most recent book is called The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, and it's all about understanding the different stages of heart coherence, and how to align the mind in the heart so that you can tap into your hearts and your power. We talk a lot about magnetism, how to understand your energetic field, how to think about heart brain coherence, and how that relates to becoming more magnetic. We talk about the impact of resentment and anger and negative emotions on being able to extend love and compassion in our lives. Of course, Kimberly shares a little bit about her own perception and philosophy on happiness, cultivating joy, and what brings her endorphins. Really excited for you all to tune into this episode, and you can also grab a copy of her book, which I will link in the interview. So definitely make sure to check it out. It's a great read. I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Hi Kimberly, thank you so much for coming on to Everyday Endorphins. It's so great to have you here. It's amazing to be here with you Stella. Thank you so much. It's so nice to also reconnect after getting to hear you speak at the Jack Taylor Wellness Summit last October. So very full circle. And I think at that time, I'm not sure if you were working on your book. Maybe it was a little under wraps, but really, you know, excited today to get to talk about this whole concept of heart coherence and the amazing book that you've written that I read and I loved. But it's so funny how just now like six or so months later, we've gotten to reconnect and sit down today. It is funny how things unfold and this is my eighth book, Stella. And I've always had a guiding light when I write a book, which is waiting for that spun out, which is a Sanskrit word, which means that inspiration, like what wants to come through me. And I started learning about some of this research around the heart, the science part because there's the energetic and the spiritual part, the all converging the heart. And I started finding out about this incredible research when I was writing my last book, actually, which published in 2022 called You Are More Than You Think You Are. And I started to take this really deep dive on the heart. And we'll get into this more. To learn about it more spiritually, energetically, the science, I have never been changed so much in the writing of a book. My life has completely changed Stella from this in every way, my thoughts and my connections and my energy. I thought I had energy before because I lived this lifestyle for more than a decade, but everything has changed. And I cannot wait to share this with you and everyone I can't. Before we dive into the transformation that you've experienced tapping into your own heart coherence and definitely would love to level set on a definition, because I think many people may not actually know what heart coherence means and how to align the mind and the heart. Before we get into that, I'd love to hear a little bit more of your story and how you got into the health and wellness space and what really sparked that passion for health wellness spirituality. All the things that you do. So we're all on a journey, right? To come back to self, to come back to peace. And it just plays out in so many different ways. My particular journey, I mean, it goes, you know, it's like how far back do we want to take it? But, you know, I grew up in an existence where I didn't ever really feel comfortable with myself. I grew up in a very white town in Connecticut, I'm half Asian, I always kind of stood out. I, you know, as I would define it now, the propel heart, always seeking validation outside of myself. So I was a perfectionist for me was about achievements and grades and being the smartest one and just very externalized existence, lots of anxiety, which then led to eating disorders through high school. And so I was such a ball of anxiety, Stella and bloatedness and I was seeking relief. And so long story short, I ended up saving some money and going backpacking after college, which I thought might be a few weeks or even a few months. It ended up being three years. I was out on the road, camping across Africa, pretty much every country in Asia. And what this gave me was this break from Western thinking and these ideas. And I was, you know, just in this completely different mindset. And one of the countries that I spent a lot of time in was India. And this is where I started to learn about meditation, specifically through Paramahansa Yogananda. This great Yogan guru who brought yoga to the West, brought these ideas that I had never really heard about. And I had this kind of awareness, awareness, awareness, and universal energy in this connection. So it put me on this path, Stella, when I came back, I moved to New York City, where a lot of my family lived in that area. I went back to nutrition school. I started teaching yoga. I was interested in trying to feel better. And then something really interesting started happened. I started a free blog. And then it started to spread organically because my mantra, as I mentioned, has always been what do I want to share. There was this really deep passion in that it started growing and I started getting book deals. I started, I found my first celebrity back then was Uma Thurman. I got on the film set. It just was very organic. I moved to LA because I had so many Hollywood based clients. What also started to happen was I started to see this, what I call the four cornerstone lifestyle, which is the basis of my brand Saluna, which is food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. And started to really teach around this more holistic idea of wellness, where it's not just the food that we're eating that's going to make us feel great and look great, right. It's emotional aspect, which is such a big part of heart coherence, how much our emotions affect our digestion and our energy and our relationships and the field that can be registered around our heart by magnetometers and the spiritual aspect, which is really about connecting to who we are. Deep, deep, deep us beyond the identities beyond the appearance beyond what we put out externally. This changes our health style, this changes our moment to moment existence. So it's expanded along the way. I wrote a book with Deepak Chopra about spirituality and our Yuveda. I mean, just kept expanding to where we are now with the heart, which I believe ties everything together and the heart is the center of our being and the center of our power. Wow. What an amazing story, especially just how your reach grew so organically. I recently went to, I'm sure you're familiar with Dr. Bruce Lipton. I went to his six hour seminar in New York last weekend. It was very much like at a high level his research and this concept around like our energy being the ultimate source and how our energy and our thoughts actually really dictate our health and our well-being and his research is more so in epigenetics. But I saw this parallel between what I was learning in his talk and what I was learning in your book and our heart has this intelligence. There's like this energy that emanates from the heart and I think there's such a direct tie between what you share around heart coherence and magnetizing that to how you bring certain things into your reality and into your life. I want to hear a little bit more about some examples where you were able to tap into your own heart coherence into your life before you even really realized it. Maybe when you think about the journey of your career and being in the health and wellness space where there are certain moments that were kind of like, "aha, I'm tapping into my heart's intelligence that led you to the next and to the next thing." So first of all in the hidden power of the five hearts in the new book what we're really talking about is the power of the heart. So there's different terms here. Heart coherence is a way to tap into the heart's power. It's a scientific aspect of it but I just want to, I just wanted to be clear and what this book is about is really awakening your heart's power which is so much more than heart coherence. It's so much more than what we can measure but there's different aspects. So the heart is a gateway. And what's amazing is when we look back, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, all these ancient cultures valued the heart as something more than a physical organ. They didn't remove the heart from the mummies because they believed it was necessary in the afterlife. And then we look at world religions. There's this convergence in the heart. right the same. hatred heart of Jesus Christ and Leve used in the Torah, in the Tabernacle, the Anahat that chakra, the Heart chakra Hinduism and Buddhism, the Heart Sutra, right? The word Kalb is used 132 times in the Quran. So there's this power center that the ancients have always sensed and felt and this field that we're talking about is something that's been talked about since ancient times. Now in modern times, there's been this emphasis on the brain, right? For the past 100 and 150 years, you know, I think therefore I am like all this thinking, overthinking. So I'm not saying the brain is an important, but now what we've learned through the science of heart coherence, which again backs up this overall energy of the heart is that the heart is another brain. The heart has 40,000 neurons. The heart sends more messages to the brain than vice versa. And for me and any parent out there, you see when you are going into the doctor for the first time, first few times on the ultrasound, the heartbeat comes in the baby before the brain is formed. So there's a different type of directive intelligence. And so what I see today in the world, Stella, is this pushing, right? This confusion, this purposelessness. So and there's an antidote to that, which is in your heart. So the book is called the hidden power of the five hearts. And what I'm talking about, this hidden power is this ability to wake up your heart, the power of your heart, the intelligence of your heart, your heart brain. And this happens over five heart stages. Now, Shwami Shriuk Deshwar, who is Yogananda's guru, was writing about the Vedic tax, these ancient texts. And he writes about these five stages, I didn't make them up, that we all go through to awake in the heart. We can break those down in a moment, but the dark heart propelled, steady, devoted, and clear. And guess what, Stella, when I was researching and connecting with the heart math institute, and eventually did a study on heart coherence, the science aligns with these five stages. So the dark heart, for instance, which is where we have a lot of fear, confusion, it means your heart and your brain aren't communicating properly. And that's a state of incoherence. And then it goes all the way up to the clear heart, which is known as heart brain harmony. And we kind of dip in and out of different stages, although we tend to inhabit one stage primarily. And so I can give you examples of when I was in different stages, and how that affects our relationships and our work outcomes and opportunities and so on. When we think about the dark heart, my brain immediately goes to operating from a place of ego, where you're not tapped into your own heart's intelligence. And when I reflect on certain moments of my life, when I've had trouble with certain things, I feel like maybe it wasn't coming from a place of authenticity, and I wasn't actually listening to my heart. I was just acting and behaving based off of my ego, thinking that I wanted to look a certain way or come off a certain way to others. And it didn't feel very in alignment with really who I am or who I was at that time. And so when I think of like the dark heart, I see the ego interplaying with that. Would you agree with that sentiment, or is it a little different? Yeah. So let's describe the heart stages, because I think this will make it really clear. And again, dark, so dark means there is the highest level of incoherence, right? Our brain aren't talking. Dark not as in bad, but dark is in that we can't see. So dark means often low energy. And again, this is this can be a moment, an hour, a day, a period, years. We can dip in and out of these different stages, right? Even when you awaken your heart more, there's dark moments. So the dark heart moments are when you feel really confused, overwhelmed, full of fear. You see something on the news or about the election, and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know about the future, right? There's lethargy. Maybe you spend hours watching screens or smoking weed every day or drinking or just drowning yourself out. We just don't feel that power yet inside. The light is always there though. We can always reawaken it, but it's the state of lower energy. So we're up in our head a lot. Now the propelled heart Stella is still up in the head as you're describing. It's still up in the ego, but there's more energy in it. We start to feel propelled, right? So you should make sure you just write, describe this, we're propelled into seeking truth and to figuring out what am I supposed to do with my life, right? So this is where we run around trying different diets, different self-help books, different workouts. We have a plan. This is my career path. I should be making this much money by a certain point. I should be married with two kids by the time I'm 32, right? Very externally focused. We put a lot of our self worth and what people think of us, how many likes we get, how many TikTok follower views. Whatever it is, it's very externally based. So I can see a lot of my life in the propelled heart, the perfectionism, the achievements, wanting people to think I was smart. I think all this stuff out here. I can think of dark heart moments where for instance, I chose relationships with really nice guys, but really safe because I had this abandonment trauma from my childhood. So I didn't want people to leave me. So I didn't really want to love them too much because then it was too scary until I could awaken my heart more, right? Propel heart, I could see relationships that I chose that kind of fit into the plan. We know the same people. We go to the same events. This looks good. This seems right. There's only so far we get in connection with self and others, right? So we can look back and a lot of society reflects the dark heart and the propelled heart stage. What we think, what we're told is important, it doesn't bring us that piece. It doesn't bring us that joy, even when we get it, right? So there's just a lot of delusion and ideas, which deep down as we start to connect with our heart, we realize that we can redefine what success is and happiness. Although as we continue to awaken our heart Stella, this is the interesting part. We become so coherent. This field becomes more magnetic, which we can talk about in a moment. We feel more clear. Our emotional intelligence opens up. We're not an emotional turbulence so much. We actually are able to create on a material level so much easier. Our goals and our dreams and I'll give you a story in just a moment. But the steady heart Stella stage three is where we start to be the anchor to ourselves. So this is where we start to drop some attachments. I need this to be a certain way. I need you to validate me. I need this. I need that. We just start to feel that through the ups and downs of life, we always have this anchor in our hearts and ourselves. And then stage four is called the devoted heart. And this is where we don't just feel that steady as we become more devoted. To moment, to peace, compassion, unconditional love. This is such a high level of heart awakening. As the heart awakens, the third eye opens. So we see things differently. We're able to blast through patterns. We can see the reactivity. We can see other people. The more clearly, we can forgive more easily. So we have a high level of tapping into more success at work, more creativity. And then the fifth level is known as the clear heart. We transcend even that level Stella to this oneness. We become transparent to the universal hearts. We feel that deep connection with everyone and everything else. And it sounds like such this big lofty stage. We all experience glimpses of it. Let's see your watching the dishes and you're just sort of out of time and space where you look into your puppy's eyes or your child's eyes. So what we can do with these tools and teachings in the hidden power of the five hearts in this book is that you can actually learn to train and increase your heart coherence and transcend the dark heart, transcend the propel heart heart into more of this steadiness. So there is a meditation that's less than eight minutes that we did the study on. But a lot of these tools, Stella, this heart-aligned study and life, heart-aligned, harmonized tool, these are ones you do in your life in three to ten seconds under a minute. So you keep coming back into the heart out of the overthinking, out of the fear. So you still may get triggered, but you get triggered less and you're able to come back much faster. I love that, especially because these are strategies and practices that are so quick and easy. You doesn't take up a lot of time. You can slowly implement those things into your days, into your routines. And another thing that I love about that is when we think about taking care of ourselves in our health and our well-being from a holistic perspective, sometimes it can feel really overwhelming. Like oh my god, I have to check off all these boxes to seem like I'm healthy or to be healthy, but really it's not about like all those external things that obviously do contribute to our well-being, but it's I think to your point, it's like how quickly can you come back to yourself, how quickly can you self-regulate, how quickly can you learn to calm and tap into your own intelligence, your own intuition. And I wonder, you know, moving through those stages of the different phases of the heart, what that life cycle looks like. Because I do feel like when we go through challenges in life, maybe we catapult back into that dark heart stage, but then as you do the work and as you do the self-healing and as you do the growth, you're able to transcend out to that the highest level of our heart intelligence. And I'm wondering like what that kind of life cycle looks like, because when I just reflect on my own life in having certain moments that were a catalyst to kind of waking me up and seeing things differently, I can see how I've moved through those different phases. And for me, it's taken between like six months to a year, I think those transitions really do take time in our lives. It's non-linear, right Stella? There's in a day we can go through these different heart stages, but over time we steady more and more. And one of the markers for this is having more energy because we don't realize how much energy is taken up just as your describing the overthinking, going on social media, I'm supposed to do this, I'm supposed to be doing that. There's a practice in the propelled heart aligning the brain in your heart with the brain in your gut and going into this deep knowing, increasing your intuition, right, instead of all the overthinking. And that being said, there's also a practical part of each heart stage, an embodiment section where I teach about different foods and, you know, drinks and things that help you put you in that state again, everything affects everything else. So there is energy in food, there is energy in this lifestyle. But I will say this, I thought I had so much energy, Stella, you know, I've been living this lifestyle, I've been eating whole foods, plant-based food combining, getting good sleep, non-toxic products for so long. But when I started doing this heart coherence work and diving into these teachings, I would quantify that my energy, especially at the end of the day, went up around 70%. And there's some incredible graphs in here. And this is something that we can all benefit from. Five minutes of anger. This was a research study that I believe is in the propelled heart. Well, first of all, I'll show this graph here. Five minutes of recalling an angry experience, dropped your IgA, which is a biomarker for immunity, six hours. Two minutes of irritation, Stella, put into process over 15 different biochemical processes that ultimately drain your energy. So we're flowing through life. We're like, okay, I want to eat well, I'm going to go to the fitness class or whatever. We don't realize these upheavals. I saw something on the news that bothered me. I don't like this text. Why is there traffic? The subways taking too long. If we don't get back into coherence, it really does ruin our day. It really does ruin our health. We actually age ourselves so much more when we're in that in coherent state. So it's really powerful about this work for me and I speak out of the research just every day life. More energy, more clarity, just moment to moment, just lighter. The heart sends more messages to the brain, which means we can change our perceptions of that moment, of that situation. And when we change our perceptions, we change our thoughts, then we change our feelings and our emotions. And then our life starts to change. The heart is like this expansive energy. And I'd love to do a practice here with you, Stella, in just a moment, so we can experience a little bit of what I'm talking about, because this is experiential. So much of philosophy out there. I'm supposed to be mindful, supposed to meditate, supposed to be like all these things also stop thinking. It's from this heavy place. So when we do this work and these tools, we're getting out of the head, we're getting out of where the problem is. And we're dropping into the heart, going to a different place to find the solution. So what's so amazing about this, you're turning on the heart brain, it changes everything. It's not disassociative. We're not saying imagine I'm somewhere else to calm myself down. We're saying right here in our life, in our full power. So this is where we turn on that magnetic field we're talking about. This is where we turn on success. This is where we turn on true connection. Before we do the practice, Stella, I want to show you this graph, which I know you've seen, but if anybody's watching this, the heart field, the tourist field, I want everyone to know this. Right here, right now, Stella, you, me, everyone listening or watching this, we're emitting a field field. You hear this energy vibe. It can be measurable by sensitive equipment called magnetometers, which measure magnetic fields. So what is the field made of? It's made of frequencies of light. Everything comes down to light. So your field goes out of your skin. It's way past your body. It extends about eight to 10 feet from you and it's a hundred times stronger than the one by your brain. Your field, as you become more coherent through these tools in the book, right? Your heart, brain, your nervous system start to communicate better. Your field becomes more strong, like synced up. It's just this beautiful field. And guess what? That literally means you become more attractive. It doesn't matter what you say. You could say you want that healthy relationship. You want to land that role or that job, but energy doesn't lie. So if you're in chaos, if you're in incoherence, you can repel people from you. You can repel opportunities away from you. And you can also attract more drama and chaos if that's what's in your field. So practically speaking, this heart work isn't like optional, right? If we want to find that love, if we want to have a more peaceful day, if we want to have better communication, if we want to have more opportunities at work, we want to know how to create differences in our heart field. Emotional turbulence directly affects your field. Yeah. And to your point, the way that you will manifest certain things into your life that are really a direct reflection of where you're at and what your field is like. If you want to bring more love into your life, you need to be that source of love so you can radiate that out and attract it back in. And I thought that that graph and the study around anger, and I saw that in the book that really resonated with me, because I've thought about moments in my life where I've held on to resentment. And it hurt me more at the end of the day. It was exhausting. It was draining. It was months and months of build up where I was like, I can't hate it anymore. Like this is not who I am. And I think it's a really difficult thing to do when someone has caused you to feel upset or someone has hurt you in a way. How do you protect your energy, but still do it from a loving place and extend compassion rather than anger and resentment. Because at the end of the day, it's only going to hurt you more. And that's like a really fine line to walk and to figure out, but I do believe at the end of the day love is like the purest energy and it's it's only going to be in service of you and in your energetic field. So how to release resentment and anger. So we can know that mentally, right? This hurts me. I should forgive. But if we continue to look at it from an egoic place or as I describe in the book, the mind not harnessed to the heart is just going to tell you all the same patterns, right? The neural networks are the same thing, the same reactivity. We store those memories in our meagdala, our hippocampus. So it's going to say this person wronged me. This isn't right. How could she do this? And we just stay in that resentful state, which does lower the field. It does create more incoherence. It's not of the highest vibration from a mental place. It's almost impossible to fully forgive. But in the devoted heart chapter, the fourth stage, I give a six part forgiveness practice through activating your heart brain and letting go through your heart, not through your head. And there's science to this. There's incredible research around specifically the forgiveness practice that graph that I was going to show here about cortisol. And here it is. All this research is incorporated through the tools in the book. And also we did a hard-aligned meditation study, which we'll talk about in a minute with hard math with 30 participants, where we found a 29% increase incoherence in four weeks, Stella. But this graph shows, okay, when you start to really go into your heart, including forgiveness, cortisol went down 23%. DHEA, which is necessary for a precursor hormone that's so important for vitality, for fertility, for so many things, went up 100%. So now we can see that this heart intelligence is measurable from a hormonal standpoint as well. And so I want to say something to Stella, we feel so personally about things, right? Like this person wronged me, like this that when we get to that clear heart stage, there's a really a big shift because one thing is that all fields intersect. So we start to step into this field of miracles and synchronicities. And I don't say that like, oh, like that sounds really great, but in a way that we can all tap into, because you know, these movies, these western movies tend to say, oh, I woke up, I had the power, you know, like the die hearts. Like I could do this, I can save the people, I can save the world, you know, that the movies, all the movies, the aliens and things, whereas in the deepest heart stages as we're taught by the Vedas, the ancients, it's not that you have the power. It's like so personalized and again, ego, it's that there's a power moving through you through you. So it's non-specific. You just step and you tap into a different field. And I'll give you an example. I wrote a book called the BDTox Power and I sent it to Deepak Chopra. And I was really in a clear heart state. I was meditating. I was in my heart in this moment. But he gave me a great review. And then I just remember walking around and I was in it again, that state of just feeling really open and clear. And I was in a living in New York City at the time and I was supposed to walk across Union Square to get to a meeting. And just something inside of me Stella, this is out of the mind. Just this deep, deep guidance said, walk this way. So I walked around the outskirts of Union Square to the west instead of across, which would have been the faster way. Who did I run into on the sidewalk? Literally on the sidewalk, Deepak Chopra. This is true story. So I go up to him and I said, Deepak, it's Kimberly, you just reviewed my book. And we had this incredible connection. He gave me his cell phone number, a text in him a few weeks later, two weeks later, we met at a coffee shop for two hours in two hours. We decided to write a book together called Radical Beauty, which became a New York Times bestseller. We laid out the six pillars for the book. So the thing about moving through these heart stages is that this intelligence of the heart allows you to step into a different reality. And it's hard to see that from the dark heart place, but if anyone's listening to this and they're really struggling and they're in confusion and they feel that slothfulness, they can't get off the couch or they're stuck in the comparison, the judgment, the stress, the overwhelm, the anxiety of the propelled heart. I'm here to say that I have felt that too, but at any time you can start to create coherence, you can start to awaken that heart's power. And what happens again is your heart awakens, you start to see more, right? In yoga terms, we would say your third eye starts to open. So you can see different solutions, you can see experience that way to forgive, where you didn't think you could ever let go of something. You can see a different way to communicate or to come up with a different creative project, or maybe you tap into that amazing screenplay or song, if you're an artist or project or website, there's this whole other level of intelligence. So when we're stuck in the brain and the head alone, it feels so hard. Oh, I just don't have enough energy, use my willpower amount more or this sort of fake, forced positive thinking. So it's amazing as last week's Delo was really excited that, when I said the books at Tony Robbins and he gave a great review for the book and he talks about this too. There's very limited capacity and energy of we're just coming from the ego. We need to learn how to draw energy from a different place. So once again, what this book is about is what the ancients always knew, right? If you go back into the sacred text of the Vedas, which is incorporated in this book, even in the Bible, and then you look at how the science lines up, it's saying we don't utilize. We were not really ever taught how to tap into the heart brain, but this Stella, and again, I say from personal experience, clarity, peacefulness. My business relationships have transformed. Incredible speaking has come to me, you become this magnet, 90% less bickering with my husband, the sacredness that's been brought into our family life. This is possible for everyone. We just have to change our energy from our hearts. I loved your response and the examples you gave. That's also in the book too, about how you came to run into Deepak on the street and ended up co-authoring a book together. And it's those moments of magnificence. You're just like in ease. There's no friction, there's no forcing, there's no resistance. You're calm, you're tapped into your own sense of inner peace. And I think that's so beautiful. - Yeah, thank you. - Exactly, no thinking. We're out of the head and into the heart. And I've noticed for me too, certain synchronicities have happened in my life when I've approached it from a place of not needing to prove myself, or needing to work so hard to get something, there's just this ease, this relaxation, this inner knowing, this inner confidence that radiates from within and it allows certain people, opportunities, experiences to just effortlessly be drawn to you. And I think once someone gets a glimpse of that in their life, it kind of confirms like, oh yeah, this can happen. And then once you have that evidence, then it's easier to lean into that and to build that trust, especially for the things that we can't physically see in life. And a lot of this really, the science does support it, but it's still sometimes hard to believe unless you see it happen to yourself. What I love about what you lay out in the book is that there are these little practices and habits you can incorporate into your life to build those muscles and to really shift your energies that you can tap into that magnetism. And I know earlier you mentioned wanting to run a little meditation and exercise. So let's dive into that. Let's do it. So even before you see things appear, what precedes the external is the energy shift. And so what's beautiful about this work is that you can experience it. Stella, you don't have to know about it. You can actually be it. You can experience it. And I'm going to show you, in less than a minute, first I want to show you this graph on page 29, right? This is what if we were to measure your body when you're an anger, see these chaotic HRV patterns. And this is the sensitive equipment of heart math. This isn't like wearing an aura ring. This is far more specific and an individualized moment to moment. This is what a graph of what your body looks like when you're in appreciation, right? Which is an easier heart emotion to tap into. See these smooth sign waves? This is magnetic. This is where the psychological becomes the physiological. The physiological becomes your energy fields. This is literally drawing things in as you're describing from a scientific perspective. So let's experience this right here. So we're going to close our eyes, unless you're driving, of course. But if you're able to do this for about 30, 40 seconds, go ahead and close your eyes. Straight away, we're going to shift our awareness to our hearts. So you can actually place your hand on your heart if that feels organic. Or just shift your attention. And it feels really good to come back to ourselves and scientifically research published in the American Journal of Cardiology shows that even just shifting your awareness, your attention to your heart, starts to rewire your nervous system. So now we're going to take a few deep breaths in and out of your heart, imagining your heart is a big long. Now we won't get into it now. But in the book, there are coherence increasing breaths. So very specific breath practices. But for now, without counting or doing anything specific, just take some nice deep breaths in and out of that amazing heart of yours. OK, now we're going to recall someone or something that makes you feel appreciation, which is a mix of gratitude, approval. So it feels like expansive and maybe a little tingles, how it feels to me. So focusing on your heart, once you recall that person, it could be your child or your parents or a beautiful sunset you saw on a trip, once you recall whatever makes you tap into that heart and the emotion of appreciation, drop the visualization and put your attention on your heart, put your attention on just feeling, feeling appreciation. And we're going to sustain this for just a few moments. And take another deep breath in and out of your heart. Take a moment to thank your amazing heart for all its incredible wisdom, always being here for you. And you can open your eyes when you're ready. Wow, that was beautiful. That was so beautiful. So all we did Stella in this meditation study was we gave people the track. Now, this is an abbreviation. The research would show when we stay in that state, we keep coming back. There's music in the tracks, which are available also on mycelena.com/fivehartsbook for anyone to access as well with the music. Two minutes, we start to create what's called-- we increase what's called our coherence capacity. So it's like training a muscle or doing a new workout class. So what happens is those sign waves I showed you, this is happening inside of your body. So what does that mean? That means when you do this meditation at the beginning of the day, you can go in more clear, more coherent. And over time, you keep getting more coherent. So we gave the track to people. They were to practice it four to five times a week. We brought them back after 30 days and measured them with a sensitive MWF Pro-Way equipment. On average, their coherence went up 29%. Again, that means better digestion, slower aging, better hormonal balance, higher immunity, more clarity, different perceptions, more emotional intelligence, incredible things, almost one third in one month. So I said to myself, what have we got this study going for two months or more? So this is the meditation, the hard-aligned meditation, which ideally you would start the day with or do when you can. But the other practice is I want to make this clear. This book isn't about just meditation. The hard-aligned harmonize tool, the steady in life tools. These are ones you can do in three to 10 seconds. So you want to read all the stages of the book. So you know how to get out of those dark heart moments, out of the fear, out of your head, out of comparison, whatever hits you, you keep coming back. And then you do these practices and you shift your state, which shifts your perceptions and your thoughts. And shifts everything, your digestion, that interaction, positive upward spiral, absolutely. And it's not fake forced positive thinking, which we've been taught. You just be positive, that toxic positivity, be positive about this. You're doing it from a mental place. When you dip down into that heart, power, and intelligence, it just changes everything from this authentic place, authentic stuff. Yeah. And it allows you also to-- it gives you the permission to actually experience the wide spectrum of emotions. You know, without sadness, there can't be joy. And without joy, there also will be some sort of sadness and anger and fear and all of these emotions. Emotions are okay and normal because we are human. We're meant to experience these emotions, but when you're able to come back to your heart into that authenticity, I think it allows you to kind of remove yourself from identifying with that emotion so you can watch it, come and go, pass you by, move in and out. - Exactly, so these emotions, if we go into them, they become incredibly draining, if we identify with them. If we push them down and pretend they're not there, they come out in other ways, indigestion, who knows, cancer, illness, low energy. So there's research from a doctor, I believe it's University of Boston in the book, Aaron's Dr. Aaron Seigman, and he found that if you are angry and you express your anger, there's so much more inflammation in your body, right? So we've been taught different things, like go into the rage, express yourself, what we know now from this research around heart coherence, and this has to do with the steady heart, steady in life practice, which I teach in stage three, you stay with this anchor. This is like the shore of that, you're on the rocky ocean, you get off the boat, you go to the shore, you go into heart coherence, and then you allow those emotions to flow through you. Like emotions are energy and motion, so you can really feel that searing anger, that jealousy, that sadness, but you don't get stuck with it. So there's like incredible tools that have helped me so much tell, I use them, and I get triggered far less, but I used to feel these triggers, we all have wounds and reactivity, stored in our magdala from the past. So instead of living through your past over and over again, you go into this anchor, and it just allows so much more to be digested through you. We can digest our feelings and emotions, like we digest food. - It's bringing a conscious awareness to some of these subconscious thoughts that we built through just our conditioning and the patterns that we have built into our lives between the years of zero to seven years old, really in your childhood, where that's imprinted in you. It's actually very empowering to have agency over recognizing that you're not that conditioning, you're not your thoughts, you're not these feelings that you have to identify so deeply with, right? But it's interesting, 'cause when we do think of happiness, there's this whole conversation on the pursuit of happiness and being happy and a message I really try to hone in on with everyday and orphans is that happiness is not about some sort of outcome. It's not about some desired and state. Just like we're talking about not holding onto anger, to fear, to resentment, we also don't want to hold onto happiness, 'cause what happens when that moment's gone and it's bleeding, then we feel the sadness, this depression. So based upon your work, your research, your wisdom and expertise, how would you define happiness and how do you cultivate joy in your life? - Okay, so first of all, happiness and joy are completely different. They are not synonymous, right? So as the heart awakens, there's this incredible expansive energy. Did you feel it a little bit? We did such a short practice there and we didn't do the full coherence breathing. But when you go into the heart, you feel this, it's almost like this widening, it's expansion out of the constriction, the rigidities of the mind, the thoughts, the tell you need this certain thing to be happy, you need to be in a relationship, you need that thing, that purse, that amount of followers to feel successful. There's this greater expansion. And you know what happens with greater expansion Stella? Non-specific. Non-specific. So that's where I talk about in the devoted heart, love, it becomes more non-specific. You still love your family, but without this attachment, this rigidity, that means I only love the circle of family and friends I don't care about anyone else. Love becomes this state that you are. It's not specific on loving that person or that person loving you. You don't need it outside of yourself. There's an incredible quote here in the book, which I'll say in a minute, but you become this center, you said earlier, right? It's coming from inside of us, but we don't understand how that can be until you wake in the heart. We don't understand that from a linear place. What happens is love becomes more non-specific. And so you can be in this state and my experience is Stella and I really want people to have this lighter existence. Listen, joy, non-specific, not tied to this does well or I got that job or whatever. Happiness is often, I'm so happy that person liked my gift. I'm so happy that person complimented me. I'm so happy, you know, I got that job. And there's nothing wrong with that, but if we put all our everything into these externals, that's the propelled heart, we run it to never really feeling content. So as we awaken the heart, what happens, which is far more powerful than happiness is bliss, enjoy, and it's not based on anything outside of ourselves. Read this part against Stella page 95. This is one of the most powerful parts of the book, Steady Heart. This is where we go from propelled to steady. This is where coherence starts to really grow. Shwami Shreya Kutra teaches that the core essentials of life are sought existence. We already have that, we exist. Cheat, consciousness, and nanda, bliss. These three are the real necessities of the human heart and have nothing to do with anything outside his self. There's nothing, we don't need anything. We can enjoy, we can love. We can connect with others, but this pushy, pulley, need, need, need. I need you to make me happy. I need the certain life circumstance. I need to have that house. I need to, when this dissolves, we go into the real power. And then the ironic thing, like I said, is when we have this state of not needing in this power, we tend to attract more easily. We tend to get what we want without all that pushiness. This is the crazy part. We become magnetic. We attract that love we want. We attract those opportunities, but it's not this neediness, which we can't see until we awaken the heart more, right? The propelled heart says, no, I need to work harder. I need to try to make this happen. I'm not doing enough, right? There's a totally different way about going beyond that and being really present. Like you said, oh, I need to be present. I need to be, get out of my thoughts when I'm meditating, but we're still in the head. So there's this different way, Stella, and I'm telling you and I'm so excited to share this with you and everyone. We can tap into this different power and energy, and it really will change your outcomes. - So beautifully said. And it is funny how it's ironic. When you learn to let go, things actually come to you, but it comes from that place of authenticity and from a loving source. And that's a beautiful, beautiful note to land with, especially as we think about this difference between happiness and joy and entering into a blissful state in our lives. I love that. And Kimberly, there's one question that I'd love to leave you with that I ask every guest that comes on the podcast. And it's really around endorphins. What is something that just brings you a bit of joy, an incremental joy, incremental bliss in your life every single day? What would that practice be for you? - Well, I think that, you know, we're gonna reiterate some of what we talked about here, but what I call heart-based living and the book, right? Stella and the devoted heart means the more we're in our hearts, it means we keep our hearts activated. So when we wanna really increase our endorphins, when we really wanna live a joyful, peaceful, blissful life, you start to filter everything through your heart, every word, every action, every interaction, every decision, every guidance, is this the most heart-based? Is this the most loving kind thing to do? This is going to create an avalanche of those amazing endorphins. This will change your moment to moment life. And like we're saying, you can get all those things and still feel totally empty and disconnected. Life is right here. This moment, we can claim the joy in this moment, we can start to awaken our hearts. It has nothing to do with any outcome or anything we need from other people. This is really the message, Stella. And then you guess what? The more of us that awaken our hearts, this is how we're gonna change the world. This is how we're gonna change society. So thank you for sharing this. And I encourage everyone that connects with this message to share this podcast, to share the book, the hidden power of the five hearts. From my heart to your heart, this is not, you don't have to buy a biohacking device, you don't have to take any pharmaceuticals. This is this power that I believe we all need to know about. And this is gonna have, we're gonna create a more unified, peaceful society going forward. So I say please be part of this heart-based moment movement if you resonate with this because all hearts contribute, all of us can intersect and raise this, change the world. - What an inspiring conversation. Thank you so much, Kimberly. This was amazing. I'm gonna link your information and the interviews to everyone out there listening. Definitely connect with Kimberly, follow along. Check out Salooni, can order a copy for yourself of the hidden power of the five hearts. I read it, it's fantastic. And I am just so excited for this wisdom to be shared now with the world. So thank you for communicating this message with others and taking time to be on the podcast. It really was so wonderful. And a lot of things for me to continue to think about as well as I try to live my life from a place of abundance and openness and loving kindness. So thank you again Kimberly. This was wonderful. Oh, thank you so much, Stella, for your beautiful big heart. And I appreciate you so much. Thanks for tuning into this episode of every day in doorfans. If you liked what you heard and you want to continue to follow along, make sure to like, rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer. If you want to stay plugged into every day in doorfans outside of the podcast, I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok and you can also drop your email to subscribe to my newsletter. It's the everyday and orphaned sub stack where I talk about the interviews that I've done that month. Any events happening in New York that I've hosted and just a stream of consciousness of my thoughts. Thanks again for tuning in and reminder to keep spreading and orphans and finding the things in life that bring you joy. Until next time.