Power Shift to the Heart

This is a great initiative is to provide millions of people with tools, techniques and technology to take charge of stress and find more joy, peace and quality in life.

HeartMath® LLC is creating a new partnership with the Huffington Post to release a new app in June called GPS for the Soul that will proactively address the persistence of the world’s stress epidemic.

The app development team consists of HeartMath, Huffington Post and bLife. The goal of this initiative is to provide millions of people with tools, techniques and technology to take charge of stress and find more joy, peace and quality in life.

Advances in technology have provided many options for staying connected, yet there can also be unforeseen consequences from all this hyper-connectivity.

“Our hyper-connected society can contribute to people feeling disconnected from an inner peace and balance,” said HeartMath President and CEO Deborah Rozman, Ph.D. “People can get so caught up with texting, emailing, posting and tweeting; they forget to pause for a few minutes to check in and ask what’s my inner ‘status’ report?”

Personal experience tells us when we are angry, inhospitable and uncaring, we affect not only ourselves, but also those around us. Consider how one unkind, thoughtless or angry person affects a roomful of people; the feeling of discomfort and negative energy is noticeable.

Conversely, have you ever felt the change a room’s atmosphere undergoes upon the entrance of a vibrant, cheerful or positive person?

What if people around the world intentionally experienced sincere love, care, compassion and other positive emotions simultaneously and fed this positive energy into the global field environment?

Are you your own worst critic?

It’s common to beat ourselves up for faults big and small. But according to psychologist Kristin Neff, that self-criticism comes at a price: It makes us anxious, dissatisfied with our life, and even depressed.

For the last decade, Kristin Neff has been a pioneer in the study of “self-compassion,” the revolutionary idea that you can actually be kind to yourself, accept your own faults—and enjoy deep emotional benefits as a result. Last year, she distilled the results of her research in the popular book Self-Compassion.

Kristin says: "I think our obsession with self-esteem and competition does mean that we’d have to engineer things differently here. Is that what we want to be promoting in the schools? Is that what parents want to be promoting?

We don’t want kids to hate themselves, we want them to feel worthy, but is life all about being better than others? Is it all about being special and above average? Or is about being a human being as happy and healthy as you possibly can be, about reaching your own potential? And I think if we made that type of cultural shift, at the level of parenting and education, I think we’d have a real chance of shifting things at the larger macro level."

April is National Stress Awareness Month. It's a time to consider how stress is affecting our lives and to become proactive about reducing our personal, family or workplace stress.

HeartMath LLC is excited to be partnering with The Huffington Post in collaboration with bLife on GPS for the Soul, to empower people to reduce their stress right in the moment and connect with their heart's intuitive guidance.

HeartMath was founded by stress researcher Doc Childre in 1991 out of a deep care for people and the planet. He foresaw that stress would become an epidemic in modern society and that people would need simple, user-friendly tools to connect with their hearts and spirits to manage today's stressors.

He started HeartMath to research and develop a science-based system of tools and technologies to help people reduce their stress and improve health, resilience and quality of life.