“The new frontier of human evolution is one that connects us, not just as a catch phrase, but in a deep and meaningful way,” says Ronna Prince in her documentary film, Sacred Journey of the Heart. What does this mean?  “When we live in this interconnected way,we not only know it in our minds, we feel it in our hearts and in every aspect of our lives, in our relationships with each other and in every step we take on our journey to wholeness and love.” Ronna’s film presents the science and spirit of our connection and focuses on our hearts’ innate power to connect us, not only to each other, but to earth itself.

Here are Ronna’s 9 easy practices to change your life.

I see you

# 1) Making a heart-based connection with people around you is easier than you think! You can make a heart-connection to anyone at all in this simple way: look into a person’s eyes and silently say: “I see you.” That’s it, no words necessary. Try it and you will notice how this opens your heart to others. And often the person you are silently noticing will open up to you in a genuine way:  with a true smile, a heart-felt “have a nice day” or even to a more meaningful conversation. Establishing a simple visual connection with another person can be the beginning of cultivating a more heart-centered life.

Self-Acceptance, A Deeper Peace

# 2) When you live in your head, or in the world of ideas and analysis, there is a tendency to ignore feelings and shut down your heart. In making the film, Ronna discovered that she was living mostly in her mind and ignoring her heart. One of the easiest ways to reconnect to one’s heart, says Ronna, is to try this simple practice: Look into the mirror and say to yourself, “I accept myself.” In doing  this, you will learn exactly how you feel about yourself. You’ll instantly hear your inner dialog, and from there you can begin to give yourself new messages based on connecting to your heart. The rewards of being lovingly connected to yourself are many, including more energy, deeper peace, and an inner beauty that emerges for all to see.

Practicing Curiosity

# 3) When dealing something difficult or unexpected, we have a tendency to think about the possible outcomes in the future. We project, analyze and often, worry. If we remember that there is usually a deeper meaning in challenges, a silver lining in the clouds, so to speak, we can practice this heart-based action: close your eyes and ask yourself: “I wonder where my heart is leading me?”  Adopting an attitude of curiosity opens our hearts to a wider perspective. This simple question can help us stay calm rather than forever being buffeted by the external winds of change.

The Art of Expressing Feelings

# 4)  Expressing your feelings effectively is at the core of heart-based living. If you’re not comfortable with feelings in the flow of everyday interactions, try this simple practice: ask a person you are comfortable with, a friend or partner, to sit with you as you practice simple feelings-based phrases like: “I feel lonely. I feel content. I feel sad.” In response, your partner simply reflects this back to you by saying, “I feel your loneliness, I feel your contentedness, I feel your sadness, and it’s OK” – even if he or she doesn’t feel it. This is very powerful and will bring forth a lot of emotion, so do it with someone you trust.

Knowing what matters most

#5) If you live from your heart, you absolutely know what matters most to you at a core level. Heart-based living is about conscious choice in alignment with your values. It means that when change happens, as it always does, you are not left reacting to it. Rather, you draw upon a deep well of inner knowing. If you haven’t written down what matters most to you, set aside an hour to do this. Then review it every morning and you will notice a profound change in how you go about your day.

Choosing Peace

#6) As viewers learn in the film, Sacred Journey of the Heart, your heart sends out a specific emotion-based encoding that is broadcast heartbeat-to-heartbeat into the field around you. When you are stressed, frustrated or complaining, the signal broadcast from your heart looks like a jagged line. When you are in a state of inner peace and appreciation, your heart is broadcasting a smooth, coherent signal. Try this simple practice when you are feeling upset or riled up by something or someone: Take a deep breath, focus on your heart and silently say to yourself: “I choose peace.”  Doing  this diffuses your reactivity and brings you into connection with your heart. As shown in the film, your heart’s signal can actually influence those around you to react more peacefully.

Cultivating Joy

# 7) Living a heart-based life means consciously choosing to experience joy. Joy is defined as “an emotion of keen pleasure or delight.” Joy can be a fleeting feeling based on something wonderful happening “out there.” Or joy can be cultivated by taking time to connect with nature, with animals and, of course, with the people in our lives. Joy is an emotion that regenerates us and fills our cups so that when challenges arise, we know exactly what we can do to enjoy a moment of respite from the storm. Having a “joy-list” is an essential part of heart-based living. Take a few moments to write down your “joy-list” and then create a joyful experience every day.

Expressing Gratitude

# 8)  Heart-based living also entails the practice of expressing gratitude. Gratitude is a choice that becomes a lifestyle when practiced daily. Find something to be grateful for every day and take a moment to savor it. This is a key element to being in the connection to our authentic self and the world around us. The feeling of gratitude can be generated without an external stimulus. Just remember a time you felt truly connected to nature or to a person and you will know, without doubt, it was a heart-based connection. A simple practice to cultivate gratitude is to put a gratitude journal by your bedside and commit to writing at least 10 things that you are grateful for at the end of each day. This is also an easy way to set the stage for a great night’s sleep!

Celebrating Love

# 9)  Love is the greatest gift in life. Celebrating love takes many forms: a hug, a smile, a card on a special occasion or a gift given for no reason at all. Ronna notes that people who take time to celebrate the love they already have, usually end up attracting more! “This is beyond the popular ‘law of attraction’ principle that so many people are now familiar with,” says Ronna. “To me, it’s a higher law that I call the ‘Law of Confluence’ that is presented in the film.” Attraction is based on duality, like-attracting-like. Confluence is a weaving together of multiple streams of interaction. Confluence creates a wide-open field of possibility, compared to the limitation implied in attraction. Celebrating love is a key part of confluence. When we come from a place of love and the reality of our interconnection, we create a new world of heart-based living.

Leading the Heart Journey

To see an illuminating and heart-inspiring trailer, featuring such leaders as Greg Braden, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Mary Morrissey, Colin Tipping, Sarah McLean, plus Dr. Rollin McCraty and Dr. Deborah Rozman of HeartMath –along with Ronna’s powerful story—click here!

“I don’t take sides”.

That’s what I thought too! I aim to stay neutral and calm, to first gather the facts and after that, respond in a wise and measured way. But then a reality check came in yesterday to test me when my son, in his “new-used car” went careening off the crowded 101 freeway in Phoenix, Arizona and slid down an embankment in 8 lanes of speeding traffic. The good news is that no one was hurt. Even more miraculously, not a single car was scratched or dented. The “interesting” news was how I reacted, as you’ll see below.

The topic I am tackling this week is identification and anger. Admittedly, it’s a topic we don’t deal with often but it the emotion will come up at times to provide us with lots of information about who we identified with in our formative years and how we learned to express this important human emotion. In fact, I thought I had figured this one out! I even went so far as to express anger on-screen in chapter 2 of my film, Sacred Journey of the Heart. As I always say though, with insight comes opportunity to change.

After reflecting on my initial reaction to my son’s “near-miss”, I have to say I was surprised that a part of me had been identifying with my passive-aggressive, chronically angry father. But I’ll discuss my personal experience later on in the article.

Anger: A Normal Human Emotion

Anger is a normal emotion that is naturally displayed in infants around 6 to 9 months of age. In healthy situations, it simply indicates one of two things: 1) “I’m not getting what I want” or 2) “my personal space (in psycho-babble talk a “boundary”) is being crossed and I’m upset”. The interesting aspect of this topic comes in when we look into the roots of learned-behavior and examine the type of anger-examples and anger-messages we experienced in growing up.

Healthy vs Unhealthy Anger

Very few of us were raised with healthy anger examples. An example of a child seeing a healthy adult expression of anger would be this: 1) Adult A is angry about something and says “I am angry because you did (or did not do) x!” 2) Adult B would say, “I hear you.” And then the two adults would proceed to discuss what happened and what to do about it to resolve the situation. Often, all that is required is a simple, sincere apology. (And by the way, this is how my significant other and I handle anger! It’s not just a hypothetical.)

The reality we experienced as children is more like this: Adult A flies off the handle and accuses Adult B of something. Adult B becomes instantly defensive. A screaming match ensues wherein one of the two Adults emerges as powerful and victorious. OR both leave the scene still simmering with anger over the unresolved situation. Sound familiar?

Another variation is that one adult in the household is chronically angry but doesn’t express it outwardly. The rest of the family tiptoes around and waits for a passive-aggressive display of anger – like slamming doors, muttering to him or herself, cursing at the TV program, and talking about how everyone else is an idiot and moron… and generally making everyone else uncomfortable due to the underlying expressed emotion.

Identification

The fact is that growing up in any of these environments teaches children what is acceptable about the expression of anger. The question I am posing is this: if you grew up in an unhealthy anger environment, which “side” of the anger equation did you identify with most often? If you have this insight, you can then watch and commit to consciously ferreting out the vestiges of anger-identification. For most of us at this stage of the game, it’s subtle, like it was in my case. But unexamined, it can lead to underlying stress and relationship discord as well as a more pervasive world-view that will be reflected back to you in the form of frustration, anxiety and doubt.

I will be talking tonight at 5 pm Central Standard Time about a technique I use to shift old-learned behaviors. It’s based on my program called “Spirit-Heart-Intelligence-Feeling-Technique”. (Learn more by clicking here.)

What children learn about anger

As children, most of us typically learned that if we expressed anger outwardly we would be punished.  So we learned to suppress this natural emotion and we continued to observe how adults dealt with it. Without knowing it, we took sides with one of the parties involved in the emotional interchange. In my counseling and coaching practice, I’ve seen men and women who have an “angry” personality – they have a chip on their shoulder and feel that they’ve unfairly been dealt a bad set of cards. Some of them don’t even know they are projecting this anger. When I encounter repressed anger, it feels like I’m face to face with a cornered cat that has arched its back and is snarling with its claws out. These people wonder why they have difficulty making friends, staying in intimate relationships and in some cases, making babies cry when they come in the room. (I’ve seen it happen!)

The Anger Equation

After delving into the anger equation, my clients have experienced growing up, we often find out the they’ve taken on an identification with either the angry parent (aggressor) or the silent-suffering parent (victim). It really boils down to two entangled beliefs: “It’s all your fault” or “It’s all my fault”. These beliefs play hand-in-glove and complete the dysfunctional anger equation. And it’s surprising how easily we revert to the identification of one or the other roles in times of stress. Ultimately, we are not really tested until we experience a real-life situation that calls this old pattern up onto the real-life screen of our lives.

My blame-game anger reaction

In relation to the event with my son yesterday, I learned that a small part of me was still acting on learned behavior from my father’s passive-aggressive anger that would explode into accusations without facts. He would blame people without information and burn his bridges leaving a number of wounded behind. As a child, he looked like the powerful one- he was right, everyone else was wrong.

How that played out for me yesterday was this: after going through a myriad of emotions in about one minute after my son’s phone call, I landed on anger and found myself wanting to react. I jumped to a number of conclusions, none of which were correct. I found myself ready to call the used car dealer and launch accusations and a few choice words about their selling dangerous, mechanically deficient cars to young adults. Next I wanted to call my ex-husband to blame him for failing to take the used car to an independent inspector to check it out before completing the sale with our son. My anger was raging about as I was searching to cast blame on everyone I could identify as having been responsible for my son’s near-disastrous experience. I even blamed the other drivers on the road because not one of them stopped to see if he was OK. Mind you, I didn’t have any facts at this point.

The Choice to SHIFT

But through the phone line my son said: “Mom, chill out, I’m OK”. Then all my training and personal commitment kicked back in and I chose to SHIFT out of this state of reactivity. After all, I know how anger looks on an emWave readout:

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I went through my practice and got into coherence. At this point, my primary emotion shifted to gratitude and I stopped reacting without facts.

After all the facts are in, the car has been inspected and I had a calm discussion with my son, it turns out that the brakes are fine.  The primary contributing factor was a 20 year old, my son, driving too fast and too close on a crowded interstate highway. Lesson learned, all the way around.

The SHIFT foundation

As I listened to my son play guitar that evening, I immersed myself in one of the deepest feelings of gratitude and contentment I have ever felt. His music is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth to me. The opportunity to examine and SHIFT an old anger identification was just the tip of iceberg. The foundation, what lies beneath, is love and appreciation. I almost lost my son exactly 20 years ago when I was pregnant with him. I slipped and fell on the ice at 6 months gestation and went into pre-term labor. I defied all the doctors’ predictions and went on to give birth to him at full term. I realize that Spirit is at the core of this and every other life-changing moment, which is why I always begin my conscious-change creation process with an acknowledgement of the Spirit in all things, the perfection in experience, and gratitude for the big and small things in life.