Our own healing work (both individual and couple) and our clinical work with clients in our LOVE-atory helped us create Hearth Field Therapy (HFT), our clinical approach for healing developmental trauma. HFT is based on the scientific principle of resonance. The experience of HFT is that deep healing happens when two or more people’s hearts synchronize and come into what is known as “coherence.” We learned that this very invisible experience was profoundly healing in our therapy sessions, both for us as practitioners and our clients and the training groups that we worked with.
Heart Field Therapy is based on the premise that disease and dysfunction are caused by a person’s or system’s disorganization and a lack of coherence, and that healing happens in the consistent presence of unconditional love. This consistent state reestablishes coherence and returns humans and human systems to living authentically from their True Self.
Developmental psychologist and metaphysicist Joseph Chilton Pearcen collaborated with the HeartMath Institute (HMI) before his death, helping to create a new field known as neurocardiology. It recognizes the heart not only as a muscle pumping blood throughout the body but also as a sensory organ that is part of the Central Nervous System. Pearce and the HeartMath researchers say the heart is sophisticated information encoding and processing center, and refer to it as the Heart Field.
In 1991 neurologist Dr. Andrew Armour from Montreal, Canada discovered a highly developed collection of neurons in the heart that are organized into a small but complex nervous system. The heart’s nervous system contains around 40,000 neurons called sensory neurites that communicate with the brain. Dr. Armour called it “the Little Brain in the Heart.”
Pearce was an adamant believer of the “brain in the heart” model, saying that its ganglia are linked not only to every major organ in the body but also to the entire muscle spindle system. He said that this unique system of sensory receptors, found within the body’s belly muscles, is what actually enables humans to express their emotions.
About half of the heart’s neural cells are involved in translating information received from all over the body in order to keep it working as one harmonious whole. The other half makes up a very large unmediated neural connection to the limbic brain. This half carries on a twenty-four-hours-a-day dialogue between the heart and the brain of which we are largely unaware.
The Heart Field concept has caused some controversy among medical researchers and metaphysicists, as the physicists are skeptical of the metaphysical perspective. For them, this leap is more metaphoric rather than actual.
New discoveries, however, indicate the heart organ is intelligent. It appears that it is designed to lead the brain in our interpretation of the world around us and in the actions we chose to take. Because of humanity’s recent emphasis on a rational and logical reality, the heart’s natural role has been suppressed, leaving us operating on only half our native resources.
A unified brain-heart field allows humans to synchronize both internally and externally with other humans, with the larger environment, and ultimately with the cosmos. When these brain and heart connections do not happen at the appropriate developmental windows, a very different kind of child (and human) emerges–one with a False Self who creates a False Life.
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Heart-Field Therapy – formerly Developmental Process Work
Clinical Resources
Heart-Field Therapy’s Scientific Foundation
A Chronology of our Research on Developmental Trauma
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