In short
The Rich Roll Podcast - Episode Summary
Episode Title
The 5 Stages Of The Heart: Science-Backed Practices To Empower Your Thoughts, Balance Your Emotions, And Unlock Vibrant Health
Guest
Kimberly Snyder
- Renowned nutritionist
- New York Times bestselling author
- Wellness expert
---
Episode Overview In this episode, Rich Roll interviews Kimberly Snyder about her innovative approach to wellness, emphasizing "heart intelligence" over conventional mindfulness practices. The discussion explores Kimberly's journey from anxiety to peace, the science behind heart-brain communication, and the five stages of heart awakening. Additionally, Kimberly guides a heart coherence exercise to provide a practical experience of this transformative practice.
Key Themes and Concepts
- Heart Intelligence vs. Mindfulness
- Heart Intelligence: An approach prioritizing emotional and physiological well-being through understanding and engaging with the heart.
- Conventional Mindfulness: Often focused on cognitive techniques for stress management without engaging the heart's potential.
- The Journey from Anxiety to Equanimity
- Kimberly shares her personal struggles with anxiety and how connecting with her heart led to a more peaceful existence.
- Physiological Implications of Heart-Brain Communication
- The heart communicates with the brain through 40,000 neurons, influencing thoughts, emotions, and overall well-being.
- Research indicates that focusing on the heart can help rewire the nervous system and affect stress responses.
- The Five Stages of Heart Awakening
- Dark Heart: A state where the heart and brain lack communication, leading to confusion and stress.
- Propelled Heart: The constant striving for achievement, often resulting in burnout.
- Steady Heart: A balanced and resilient state, characterized by stability.
- Devoted Heart: A focus on love, compassion, and service.
- Clear Heart: The highest state, where individuals move with flow and harmony, experiencing synchronicities.
- Heart Coherence Exercise
- Kimberly guides listeners through a quick heart coherence exercise, illustrating the practice's effectiveness in re-centering emotions and thoughts.
Key Takeaways
- Empowerment Through Connection: Tapping into heart intelligence allows individuals to access innate wisdom for emotional balance and overall health.
- Scientific Backing: The practices discussed are supported by research, including studies from the HeartMath Institute, showing measurable improvements in stress and well-being.
- Simplicity of Practice: Many techniques can be incorporated into daily life without extensive time commitments, making them accessible for all.
Discussion Points
- Overthinking and Emotional Suffering: The conversation addresses the common struggle of overthinking and how it contributes to emotional distress.
- Resistance to Letting Go: Rich discusses the difficulty of breaking free from ingrained patterns of achievement and striving, highlighting the challenge many face.
- Integration of Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science: The episode emphasizes the alignment of spiritual teachings across different cultures with modern scientific findings.
Conclusion The episode concludes with a strong message about the importance of awakening to our heart's power as a means to transform individual lives and society as a whole. Kimberly encourages listeners to explore heart-based practices, emphasizing that everyone has the potential for profound change.
---
Additional Resources
- [Kimberly Snyder's Website](https://mysaluna.com)
- Book: *The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts*
Podcast Links
- [Rich Roll Podcast Website](https://richroll.com)
- Subscribe on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com) | [Spotify](https://spotify.com) | [YouTube](https://youtube.com)
Sponsor Offers
- Discounts from sponsors such as Bon Charge, LMNT, Squarespace, and more are mentioned throughout the episode, providing listeners with opportunities to enhance their wellness journey.
---
This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for anyone interested in integrating heart-centered practices into their life for emotional, mental, and physical well-being.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00We're brought to you today by Momentus. As an athlete, as a cookbook author, a wellness advocate, and a podcaster who has hosted conversations with countless experts on diet and nutrition, I can tell you that nutrition is extremely complicated, extremely personal, all of which has made me more skeptical than I once was when it comes to supplementation products and the claims they make. That said, I truly do believe in responsible supplementation as an important part of nutritional health. Even the most diet rigorous among us has deficiencies, many of which go unnoticed until we undergo a comprehensive blood profile.
0:38All of which is why it's very important to be conscientious when it comes to selecting supplement products, which is what Momentus is all about as a company that is radically committed to quality, rigor, and purity, which they call the Momentus standard, an approach to nutrition that truly captures the essence of performance for life. Where most brands perform cursory checks, Momentus actually conducts exhaustive NSF certified testing that goes well beyond industry norms. Every batch is meticulously examined for purity, label accuracy, and potential banned substances. Their philosophy is simple.
1:13If a batch doesn't meet their exacting standards, it simply doesn't exist. For someone always seeking the most intentional approach to nutrition, Momentus represents a genuine commitment to performance for life. A reminder that nutrition is about supporting our body's potential, not just filling a gap. So if you're ready to elevate your nutrition, head to livemomentus.com slash richroll or use the code richroll at checkout for 35 % off your first subscription. That's livemomentus.com slash richroll for 35 % off your first subscription.
1:50We live in a world that continues to foster this lifestyle of dopamine hits. This is why people drink. They turn out to screens. They're chasing the next thing. We all want to feel good. This work is teaching you the truth. You don't need something outside of yourself to feel love. I tend to live in my head probably most of the time. But I also know that the brain isn't the only source of intelligence at our disposal. Often overlooked is a greater and more powerful source of wisdom, the intelligence of the heart. What science is showing now is that there's this power center inside of us that when we start to waken, it gives us the energy, the greater health, the deeper relationships that we're looking for.
2:41Here to help me and you unlock the whys and the hows of nourishing a more heart-centered approach to life is Kimberly Snyder. Kimberly is a multiple New York Times bestselling author. And the occasion for this conversation is her latest book, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts. Just by putting some of our attention on your heart right now as we're talking, research published in the American Journal of Cardiology shows that that alone starts to rewire your nervous system. Your heart sends more messages to your brain. So this changes your perceptions. The next thing that changes is your thoughts.
3:18Then your feelings, your emotions change. Your stress responses change. This is how you change your life, Rich. Most people don't know about this stuff, which is why it's so exciting. Because A, it works. B, it's evidence-based and scientific. And C, it's experiential. Just try it. Where should I begin? What should I do? Well.
3:43Kimberly, delighted to have you here today. So nice to see you. It's great to be here with you, Rich. I'm excited to explore being more heart-centered. And I think I'm probably not alone. Most I imagine live most of their time in the head. And I would say as sort of a preface for this discussion, I am fully aware, I have a great deal of self-awareness that every great leap that I've made in my life, they've all been a direct result of tapping into my heart or originating from that heart-centered place. And yet in the wake of those experiences and those successes, my head can always be counted on to rush back in and fill that void to take credit for whatever happened and allow the ego to take residence there.
4:38And this is a constant conversation, ongoing conversation that I'm having with my wife, because without action, some kind of contrary action, I will continue to reside in my head. So you're absolutely right, Rich. So much of the suffering we see today, the self-doubt, the confusion, the lack of purpose, the fear, is because we're overthinking. So when we're talking about heart-centered living, I think right away a lot of people will say, oh, that sounds nice. As a culture, we sort of assign the heart to romantic or sentimental or Hallmark cards. But what we're talking about when we say the heart is really the heart brain.
5:20There's so much science now showing that it's not that the brain up here isn't important, but we're talking about heart coherence and syncing the heart, the brain, and the nervous system up. there's actually 40 ,000 neurons in your heart. Those of us that are parents, I remember going in when my two children were, I was pregnant early on in the pregnancy and the doctor's like, look, the heartbeat comes before the brain. And I'm like, oh, wow. But then we sort of keep going and we forget this miracle, this incredible intelligence. There's something directing what's going on in development that's not involving the brain.
5:57So what science is showing now is that there's this way of creating more clarity and more focus, more energy, more vitality, hormonal balance, gut health from actually going in and accessing your heart. And to your point, it can heighten intuition. This is something that's been talked about in ancient traditions around the world from the Babylonians to the Greeks. The Egyptians didn't take the heart out of the mummy and spiritual traditions. And only in the recent, let's say a hundred years or so, has been such an emphasis on just brain, brain, brain, linear, linear, linear. So the research that is in this book that we've even done our own study shows that all the things that we want, that clarity, the more success, the material things, the greater health actually comes from starting to sync up this power center.
6:47It's not sentimental. This is really practical what we're talking about. Yeah, it's, you know, on the one hand, there are all of the ancient traditions and the traditions that are shared across a multiplicity of faiths and practices over millennia, of course. And I wanna get into all of that, but what I didn't expect in your book is to see all these graphs, you know, like sort of heart rhythm graphs and, you know, science and studies on the actual impact of what certain practices to bring you into greater coherence between heart and brain can do to you physiologically, emotionally, and et cetera, all the way down the line.
7:32So I was researching my last book, which came out in 2021. And I came across this really interesting piece of research about the heart brain that I've been working in wellness now, Rich, for close to 15 years. And I didn't know this. And I was like, what is going on? How come I don't know this? Why doesn't everyone know this? And so I started going down this rabbit hole with the science. And at the same time, I was reading this book, The Holy Science, which is, you know, Yogananda is the one who brought yoga to the West. And I've always been interested in spirituality worldwide. And in this book, he talks about these five states of the human heart that are from the ancient Vedic texts.
8:15And as I was going into the science, I was like, whoa, these heart stages line up with the science. So basically the dark heart scientifically means the heart and brain aren't communicating. So that's where we start to feel like push-pull, life is really arduous, I'm so confused, all the way to what's known as heart-brain harmony or the clear heart, where we're just moving from this deep place of flow and harmony with life. So yes, to comment on that, there is the spirituality, which I love, is where it starts to really line up with this science. You don't have to be spiritual to really benefit from this heart brain information and to learn how to awaken the heart brain.
8:57There's so much science, but there is also an intersection that's really fascinating. So what is your main thesis before we dig deeper into this idea of heart brain communication? So the book is called The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts. So this hidden power, Rich, is I want everyone to know because it's affected my life so much that there is this power center inside of us. It's this anchor that when we start to waken, it gives us the clarity, the energy, the greater health, the deeper relationships, the access to more intuition that we're looking for. and it's not outside, it's not needing the attachment of this relationship or all the biohacking devices or all the specific foods.
9:44Those can be great too. And I've gone down that rabbit hole and I live a really healthy life and I sleep well and I use non-toxic products. But when I started accessing this power, I would say my energy increased about 70%. And that's because all these little ups and downs, this is where the psychological becomes the physiological. For instance, two minutes of feeling irritation puts into motion 1500 different biochemical processes that ultimately drain your energy. So while my lifestyle was really clean and well-conceived on the outside, all these little triggers, right? Our amygdala stores these emotional resonance of certain things.
10:26So it'd be like, I didn't like that email or going to stress response or here's traffic or what did that person mean by this up and down all day? So when we learn to actually create more coherence, what it feels like, Rich, is zooming out, not so up and down in daily life. So I want people to know there is this way to increase your energy, to reduce stress, and to just increase the things that we want from inside. Blew me away, and I want everyone to have this knowledge. And how is that qualitatively different, like this idea of tapping into the heart brain? How is that different from the more kind of commonplace discussions around mindfulness, anxiety reduction, mental health, improving your sleep?
11:14Like we can segment all these different areas and say, if we can arrive at a place of greater balance and equanimity through a variety of practices, is that not the same thing? Or are you talking about something altogether different? I say thank you because how many times do we hear, be mindful, think more positively, don't get in your head, love yourself. I love Eckhart Tolle. He says, go beyond thinking. But the difference with this work is that we're going to a different place to find a solution than where the challenge is. In this example, the challenge is the thoughts. We're in our heads.
11:52You said it yourself, you're in your head a lot. So we actually come down into this place and these practices, which some of them are so simple, so powerful. Just by putting some of your attention on your heart right now as we're talking, research published in the American Journal of Cardiology shows that that alone starts to rewire your nervous system. This term neuroplasticity doesn't just refer to your brain wires. It's between your heart and your brain as well. What does this mean? This means in daily life, you start getting out of your old patterns. Why this is different? Your heart sends more messages to your brain.
12:28So this changes your perceptions. The five hearts are five stages. They're also five different realities. When you change your perceptions, the next thing that changes is your thoughts. Then your feelings, your emotions change, your stress responses change, and then your life changes. So right here, I could be in this perception of, oh God, this is so hard. I don't really want to be here. or I could have this perception of, you know, I'm really excited about this. This changes what's happening on a physiological level. So it's so practical. And again, what blew me away was how simple some of these tools are.
13:04A lot of the tools in the book are three to 10 seconds. I use them all the time when my kids are having a tantrum or I get like an email I didn't like for work and you shift time and time again to this different heart brain. And suddenly you're not in the same triggered reactive patterns. So it's different, you're going to a different place. So much of the discourse around these things tend to pivot around not just mindfulness, but mindset. Right? Like what is your mindset? How are you, like that goes to perception, right? Like how are you perceiving the world? That perception is as the argument goes, some function of your mindset.
13:49But this is really about letting go of that or transcending that to arrive in a place of no mind. It's like letting go of that whole mind idea altogether to go to a different place. So one of the experiences when you do these practices and these tools is that people over and over again report this feeling of expansion and feeling bigger and wider. So we get really locked into this perception or I need this one thing to work out. You used the word control earlier, like this has to happen. I'm supposed to be married by the time I'm 30. I'm supposed to make this much money by the time I'm 40. All these thoughts versus the bigger picture.
14:31There's this creativity and this way to find solutions and this way to move through life in a much different way. Also, emotional intelligence grows, which research study after research study shows is more on par with actual success than IQ. And so this ability to get out of these patterns, this dynamic way that the heart can show you, spiritually, we can say as the heart awakens, the third eye opens up, this ability to just see yourself more clearly. Every day it's like, whoa, I could see why this person thinks I'm acting harsh. Or I could see why my part in this over and over again, this repeated argument with my spouse or whatever it is.
15:12So there's so much practical benefit to this, Rich. And again, I say I've been studying spirituality for a few decades, backpacking after college, going to India, going around the world for three years. I've been meditating for over 15 years. When I started working with this, like right here in the middle of life, you're bringing it moment to moment. Some of these lofty ideas like, oh, just be mindful, be positive. look at it differently, it's almost impossible to do because we've built in these neural networks, these patterns, the amygdalas going off. So instead, like you said, when we come to this deeper place, we have this ability to blast through patterns.
15:56And I've seen that in my work as I bring this work into clients. I've seen people get past food cravings. I see people that are really angry, start to be calmer. People become more patient mothers. So many incredible things for daily life. What led you to this field of inquiry specifically as somebody who has been immersed in wellness and all these practices and by your own account, been studying spirituality for so long, like what jumped out to you about this whole world of heart coherence that made you feel the necessity to write a book about it and like, share all of this? Okay, so this is my eighth book, Rich.
16:37And since the beginning - You're in a lot of books. You crank them out. I crank them out. Okay, but listen, there's never this moment where I kind of sit around and I think, okay, even though I do get this pressure from my publisher, what are you gonna write about? You need to have a book. I always wait for spanda, right? This Sanskrit word for inspiration. So my mantra has always been, what am I dying to share? What do I really want people to know? What has helped me the most? So I was not planning to write a book around the heart. To be honest, I was in my last book and I came across this research.
17:12Like I said, I was going down the rabbit hole. I contacted the HeartMath Institute. We did a podcast swap. I started reading hundreds of their studies. They published over 400 studies. We ended up doing a heart aligned study together. The change I saw in my life, and then I started practicing it with my clients. And even though I have two small children, I still keep a core group of clients. And it was just blowing me away what I was seeing. And so this passion inside me said, everybody needs to know this, what's going on in the world, Rich, with all the separation within ourselves, the confusion, the fear, the low energy.
17:51It's happening on an individual level, and it's happening on a collective level. And I truly believe that the more of us awaken to this, it is for individual benefit, but it also is how we start to change the society around us, our worlds around us, starting with a circle of our families, friends, workplace, our kids' schools. There's a resonance to this. And we can talk about the measurable ways in which the fields. Yeah, I'm really curious about this like HeartMath Institute, the fact that this even exists. I wanna know all about that. But before we get to that, I think anchoring ourselves in an awareness of the great Maya that defines the world and specifically the West is this delusion of separation.
18:37This idea that on some level, we are in control of our destiny and in order to feel safe and secure. And as if we have agency, we cling on to these ideas that are rooted in our mind about how we should live our lives. but those notions are a product of the environment in which we're raised, of course, right? And that environment is one of competition. It's one of individual achievement. That's what we celebrate, right? Me, me, me. Yeah, we sell, exactly, right? Like, and as a result, we explore that sense of connection through accomplishment. And I think where you and I are very alike is being raised in environments where that was through osmosis interpreted as a priority, like get good grades, climb this ladder.
19:36This is how you make your way in the world. And as a result, we gain our sense of self and we form that architecture of identity around external validation. Like what are the signals we're getting from the outside world that make us feel like we're on the right track? And that is antithetical to what you're talking about here, which is letting go of all of that and tapping into something deeper about who we are that has to do with an identity that transcends those definitions and is difficult for the Western mind to grasp, but essential in terms of our journey towards greater self-actualization and purpose and meaning and happiness and all these things that we lack to some extent, but so desperately desire.
20:27So the five heart stages is sort of like going on a hike, Rich. It's like from the bottom, maybe you only see the parking lot and you start to go up and you have a different vantage point and a different vantage point. So for anyone listening to this, that's like, oh, that sounds nice, but I can't even imagine, you know, being in that level of letting go of everything. It starts to shift. You can't even imagine how different things can be until the heart starts to awaken and awaken. So what's really powerful about this work, the Heart Aligned Study, I'll just mention again, we found in participants, they did this practice that was less than eight minutes.
21:05We measured them with M-Wave Pro equipment, really sensitive, not like a tracker, like an Oura Ring, really sensitive equipment. All we said was, here's this track, listen to this practice four to five times a week. Come back 30 days later. coherence on average was 29 % higher. How is that measured? So these M-Wave probes, not just the actual HRV numbers, but the patterns, which we can look at some of the graphs here in a moment. So it was, again, and there's the research that shows that as this clarity was coming up in people, their cortisol was going down 29 % and DHEA was going up 100%. There was so much intense research around this.
21:48So what I mean is, even if you feel really disconnected from your heart, and we've all been in dark heart stages, we've all been in moments where we're in that hustle and pushing and pushing of the rest of the propelled heart, you can start to just awaken in small steps a little bit by a little bit. And what happens is you start to build what's called your coherence capacity. And what this means in everyday life is you're more resilient against stress. You have more natural energy. The dark heart scientifically is incoherence. So what that looks like is very erratic HRV patterns. It means you have low energy, you feel that confusion.
22:24The propelled heart, as you mentioned, where I've lived a lot of my life and perhaps you have too - That's where I spend most of my time. That's stage two. Well, it's like always on, never enough, never really content, restlessness, anxiety, burnout, checking things off the list. what's the next goal and the next thing, right? It's this energy where there's a little bit of coherence. So a big shift comes when you reach stage three, which is the steady heart where you just start to feel more anchored and resilient inside of yourself. And to be clear, Rich, we can flow in and out of all the stages in a day, in an hour, right?
23:03I can feel pretty steady, but then I see something on the news about the election or whatever, and then I feel that fear come up, but you tend to inhabit one stage primarily through different periods. I feel like I live most of the time in that stage two and I occasionally flirt with the stage three. And then when you get to the four and the five, I'm like, that looks like foreign territory to me. It looks like - It's scary. Well, it seems - Because there's a letting go, there's a surrender aspect. Like you have to let go of all these ideas that you've held for so long about like who you are and what's important?
23:42So, oh, I just opened up to the page. There's a quote I wanna read you. This is Shiyuk Cheshwar. He teaches that the core essentials of life are sat, existence, 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. So when I started doing this work and just doing the practices, coming in, building heart coherence, doing the breath work, you know, there's, again, simple practices you can do in under a minute. I was like, what's this guy talking about? Like, I need this. I need my family. I want people to be safe.
24:19Like all these things. And as my heart started to awaken more, I realized how deeply entrenched I was in attachments. I need you to like me. I need you to think I'm smart. I need you to love me. I need you to spend time with me. I need you to choose me. I need you to follow me on social media, like all these different things. So what happens as you start to anchor in more and more, and again, this shows in the sensitive equipment, which is training, not just tracking your HRV patterns, you start to drop the attachment and what builds is connection because the neediness, like I need you to love me.
24:57When you don't need people, you can be more connected to them in a more authentic way. So again, communication opens up, emotional intelligence opens up. That expansion we talked about is needing this to work out or this email. So to say, oh, you pivot, you flow more with life, which is, oh, this didn't work out. I guess that person wasn't the right person for this. Let me go in this other direction. Or this person didn't ask me out on a second date. So it's okay. I'll find another person, whatever it is. There's less of this tightening, which is the stress response. That resistance is stress.
25:30So this is why it correlates so much to that higher vitality, hormonal balance, better immunity, because our body isn't in that, like jammed into that sympathetic nervous system response all the time. There's a lot of parallels with 12 step and recovery. This notion of detachment, detaching from those externalities is really another way of saying surrender, right? Like you have to surrender your idea of yourself and your sense of what you think you need, right? And holding on or clinging to those outcomes, whether somebody likes you, whether you're getting the approval or the affirmation that you think you need that makes you feel safe and secure is a tall mountain to climb for a lot of people.
26:20And so walk me through how like these practices that you talk about in the book can liberate us from them. Because I think on some level, we all are attached to externalities in the world in unhealthy ways. And it's refreshing to hear that it's possible to let go of them. And that perhaps it's not as complex as the Byzantine kind of mental health world would have you know. Like, should I go to a therapist and sit with them for years and years and years and talk through all of this stuff and try to make peace with my childhood trauma or whatever it happens to be in order to get to that place where you can let go of those things?
27:02Or is there more a direct route? And it seems that you're saying that there is. There is. And I'll also preface this by saying from personal experience, just to give a little context, because of my childhood, because of the way I grew up, extreme anxiety, extreme insomnia, never feeling good enough, having eating disorders, being bulimic, never enough. Gotta be a published author. Gotta be a New York Times bestseller. Gotta be number one. Like it's just endless through life. So we live in a world that continues to foster this lifestyle of ups and downs, dopamine hits. Look how well this post did or look how much money I made from this project or that vacation was amazing.
Read the full transcript
27:48And so we tend to rely more on these things because that's how we've been trained and that's how everyone around us is living. So what happens when you start to do these tools and really experience coherence, not in this, oh, I love that idea of going beyond thought that Eckhart Tolle, who I love, by the way, I'm not downplaying it, but actually I feel lighter. My perceptions change. Somehow I feel more peaceful. It's the experience. This isn't disassociative, like a meditation where we're imagining we're in a waterfall, we're not where our bodies are. This is right here, Rich, the center of your body, literally the center of your power, your heart.
28:26So you're here and suddenly your experience of that very warning you usually have or work, you're feeling lighter, you're feeling better. So this is what propels you to go deeper and to keep doing these really simple practices. That was my direct experience. I started to notice, wow, I'm bickering about 90 % less with my husband about the dirty socks on the floor. I didn't like how he made this comment or why is he texting me like this? You start to just let go, not from this forced, like this uphill way, but it's happening. And again, a more dynamic way, which is how these neurons in the heart brain works.
29:05It's very different than the linear mind. So then the fourth stage, as you alluded to, which feels like, oh, it's the fourth stage. We all experience these stages in different moments, but the devoted heart is where you start to be not just anchored inside, but you start to have different priorities devoted to love, peace, compassion, care. And that sounds like, oh, like maybe if you're not there yet, but what happens is it starts to feel so good. Moment to moment, it's like having an amazing conversation. What really matters? Connecting to this person versus the normal hamster wheel, just checking things off the list.
29:42And then what happens is there's a section in that chapter, which is about never miss an opportunity to serve. You hear this and there's research. It feels really good to serve other people. It feels good to volunteer. And we're like, we're so busy. We're so, you know, I'm going to do that. Work at the soup kitchen. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about moment to moment. The heart is present. In this moment, I noticed that person's having a really hard time on the Zoom. How can I be kind? In this moment, I'm checking out at Target. How can I look in the eyes of this person and just give them like real care and dignity?
30:15How can I be really kind to my child's teacher? How can I let that person in the intersection? So you start to feel this natural confidence and energy. And the ironic thing is the propelled hearts like, you know, outcomes, do this to do this. At the devoted heart, you have such a high state of coherence that you naturally have more emotional intelligence and you tend to create what you want more easily on the material level, but from the very different place of pushing and grasping. It just feels so arduous even talking about it. Is there any science on whether or not your motivation needs to be pure?
30:54Because there's this idea that if you are, okay, imagine the person who's like, okay, I hear what you're saying. So I'm gonna interface with that person at Target and I'm gonna treat these people with kindness, but I'm gonna do it for a selfish self-serving reason, which is like, it's gonna make me feel better as opposed to the kind of virtuous person who's not doing it from a place of ego, but doing it from that higher heart-centered place. You know, it's kind of funny when I used to do yoga in New York City, you know, I had this idea coming from India that yoga asanas, like you're coming and it's a spiritual practice.
31:34And then I meet these people that are like, I wanna have good apps, right? So it's not they weren't into like the mindfulness or, you know, trying to create more stillness. They were there. Who can say, though, as they're on the mat and they're spending that time, some of that, you know, the other part of this stillness was still filtering in. So whether you come into this hard work because you really want to create more success, more material success, you want to have better outcomes at work, or you really want to help the world. ultimately when you start to read these teachings and you start to do this coherence work we don't know where the heart's journey is going to take you but i know one thing you're going to get more coherent you're going to get more clear and in that clarity you're getting out of those little perceptions which often cause the unkindness that often cause the selfishness rich because you're only seeing like me me me instead you're like oh this person's really struggling this isn't about I need to take this so personally, it just opens up.
32:38And what the Vedic teachings say, and what I believe is there is a natural kindness and more peacefulness inside of each and every one of us, but it's all these layers and all the wounds and all the things stored in our amygdala and the reactivity from the past that comes, that blocks that. There's a great - Does that answer your question? Yeah, it does, it does. I mean, basically the cliff notes that I get from that is, irrespective of your motivations, the practices and walking this path transforms those motivations over time. And if you can approach it from whatever perspective you are harboring in the moment, the mere doing of it becomes transformative.
33:23That's it. Yeah.
33:30After hosting more than 900 episodes of this podcast, I have noticed a pattern. And that pattern is that the highest performers don't buy into the latest trendy hacks. Instead, they obsess on what actually works, which is always the unassuming basics. And there is nothing more basic than hydration. But here's the kicker. Your body can't hold onto water without the right minerals. Without them, water is just like this temporary visitor. But Element has cracked the code on this, which is why I've been using it religiously for years. Zero sugar, no artificial junk, just sodium, potassium, and magnesium in the ratios that actually work.
34:11And look, I'm not exactly crushing ultras right now, healing from this surgery, but in some ways I need it even more. In order to properly recover, I need to treat my body even better than ever so it can heal properly and expeditiously while also maintaining my focus and my energy levels to rock out all of these podcasts, write a book, be a husband and a dad. And I got to say, Element keeps my brain firing in a way that water alone can't. Their new sample pack features their most popular flavors. Citrus salt, raspberry salt, watermelon and salt, that's my favorite, and orange salt. Eight stick packs total, perfect for finding your favorite or sharing with a friend.
34:54Get a free eight count sample pack of Element's most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase at drinklmnt.com slash richroll. Find your favorite Element flavor or share it with a friend. When it comes to health, sleep is a big deal. And there's just so much science out there to back up the role that it plays in every facet of wellbeing. from heart health to mental health, recovery, cognition, and just being able to show up as your best self. Getting a quality eight hours per night is a personal non-negotiable that I go to great lengths to ensure. It's sort of a commitment, not only to myself, but to my career and to those that I love that all begins with what I'm sleeping on.
35:38Now, I've tried many mattresses, but the one that's really won my heart is Birch. And there's many reasons for this, all of which boil down to the simple fact that Birch just does things right. In addition to being incredibly comfortable and cool, helping you regulate temperatures at night, which are essential for quality rest, Birch mattresses are also firm in all the right places and all their materials are sustainably sourced, including organic fair trade cotton. And also everything is hypoallergenic and toxin-free, meaning no harmful off-gassing typical of most mattresses. Birch is so confident in their product They're offering both a 100-night risk-free trial as well as a 25-year warranty.
36:22Plus, they provide free delivery right to your door in a conveniently sized box-up. And so I want to offer all of my listeners the chance to enjoy a deep and restful night's sleep with a new mattress from Birch. So right now, you can get 27 % off site-wide plus two free EcoRest pillows with mattress purchased. Just go to birchliving.com slash richroll.
36:53You have a great Yogananda quote in the book that I love, which is, from the minute you set foot on the spiritual path, nothing happens by coincidence. I know this to be true. I've seen this borne out many times in other people. This is the way my wife lives. She's very heart-centered. and she approaches the world and her relationships from that place, right? And as a result, things kind of just come to her, you know, like you can chalk it up as coincidence, like, oh, she happens to meet the right person at the right time. You talk a lot about dating and how that kind of, how this heart-centeredness kind of operates in that world.
37:37But the point being that when you're inhabiting that more heart-centered perspective and approach to life, you become like this beacon that attracts whatever, you know, you need to be experiencing into that experience without effort. It's a place of allowing rather than the hard kind of intellectual focused approach of like going out and like making it happen or hustle porn in order to create the outcome that you so desire. So the clear heart, the fifth stage, alludes to what you're speaking about, which isn't, again, everyone's heart has this potential. I believe everyone's heart is equal. But the clear heart, you think of something clear, it's more transparent.
38:22So these five heart stages are also different realities. So there's so much ego in the West, you know, these movies that are like, I woke up, like the Bruce Willis movies, or it's like, I have the power. I can save the world. I can save the building. I save the people. me, me, me, I have the power. Versus as the heart awakens, you realize, you become more humble and you realize that there's just different fields of energy that is moving through and you're kind of stepping into a different field where more synchronicities can take place. And I'll give you a personal example about that. That's amazing.
38:58But first, Rich, see this? And I opened up to this So this isn't just like, oh, this energy feels good. This is measurable, again, by HeartMath, by sensitive equipment known as magnetometers, which measures magnetic fields. So the heart is actually emitting a field. You and I are in a field right now. It's 100 times stronger than the brain. So it goes out eight to 10 feet. Electromagnetic field. Exactly. And so it's measurable. And as you become more coherent, which again, scientifically, the syncing up of heart and brain, your field becomes stronger. It becomes more harmonious and you could say more magnetic.
39:36And so this is why you just feel more approachable. Someone could say, Hey, what are you working on, Rich? Like, I'd love to help you. Or, Hey, you know, what's going on? Or someone may want to ask you out on a date or all these different things. I remember, and I'll give this as an example, but to be clear, it's not like, oh, this person's more powerful or I have this power. It's just a different energy resonance. So I remember a day when I was in this clear heart, just feeling really clear, not overthinking. I remember stepping out of my apartment in New York City, the sun, and I was just sort of really present.
40:12And I didn't have the language to say it was the clear heart, but I was just walking around the city. And I had sent my book, my third book to Deepak Chopra and he gave a great quote after a lot of following up. but I always had this feeling like I'm supposed to do more with this person. So then I get to Union Square and I would always usually walk diagonally across the park to get to this meeting, this place where I had a lot of meetings. And there was something, I was just so clear. I just felt this real deep gut heart impetus. And by the way, there's a lot about connecting the heart and the gut.
40:43And it said, move this way. So I walked around the outside of the park, which didn't make sense because it would take longer to get there. Who do I run into on the street? Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra. I said, Deepak, it's me, Kimberly. You reviewed my book. He gave me his cell phone. We met for about three weeks later at a coffee shop, sat for two hours, decided to write a book together called Radical Beauty that went on to become a New York Times bestseller. This is not anything. Yeah, you can't plan that. Exactly. You can't whiteboard that. You can't script that. You can't script that, but it's also not, oh, I'm so powerful, I'm special.
41:20Right, you're a powerful manifester. No, it's like we all have this potential. The groundedness of this work shows you do these tools, your coherence will grow too. This isn't like anyone's better than anyone else. You actually spend the few minutes a day, the participants in our study were spending about 32 to 36 minutes a week to grow 29 % coherence. We think about all the time we spend, you know, extra workouts or scrolling. if we just spent a little bit of time in our daily life on this hard work, that's what I'm so passionate about sharing, it will make a huge difference in your life. Give a taste of what that work is specifically.
42:02I mean, you go through it at length in the book time and time again throughout the chapters, but if somebody is new to this notion, they don't understand what you mean by the work or the practices, what do these entail? Do you wanna do a one minute practice? Do you want me to tell you about it? No, let's just do it. Okay. All right, so. I need to Kimberly, because I came to this podcast. I've got my outline, I read the book, I'm coming from my mind. I want this to be a great experience for you. I want you to like me. I want the audience to be nourished by this. Like all of that gets in the way from me just being present with you and kind of in the moment and connecting with you from a heart space and just trusting that whatever we're gonna talk about is gonna be the best version of whatever this could be.
42:52And that's the war that's always going on in my mind. But you know what? I also feel in the second I saw you today, there's also this incredible heart field around you that's natural and huge. And I think this work as heady as you are, it's gonna start to give you a taste of actually not just talking about the heart too much, how it feels to actually be in your heart more and more and how simple this is. All right, let's do it. What are we gonna do? You're showing me some graphs. As I say that, I'm holding up this graph and I just wanna show, this is the HRV pattern, not the number that you get on an aura ring, but the pattern of someone who's angry.
43:32So it's chaotic and it's disordered. This is what it looks like when you are in appreciation. So you see these smooth sine waves, these beautiful regularity. It's sort of like a lake where the water is just lapping time and time again. This is the experience of clarity and energy and vitality, right? So I preface that as we go into this practice. We're gonna do an abbreviated version. Okay. So the first thing we're gonna do, and anyone can do this with us, except if you're driving, don't close your eyes, of course. You can come back to this later. We're just gonna close our eyes down and straight away, You're going to place your attention on your heart.
44:15So we're talking about the physical heart, the energetic heart, this place in the center of your chest. If it helps you connect, you can even put your hand there, although it's not entirely necessary. And again, just incorporate this incredible research for the discerning mind. Just by doing this, you start to rewire your nervous system. This is published in the American Journal of Cardiology. Just by putting some of your attention and eventually more and more of your attention on your heart in this moment, you start to awaken those neurons. You're starting to create change in your organs right now.
44:58And now keeping your attention on your heart, you're going to start to breathe in and out of your heart as if it's a giant lung. So I'll do one round of counting, what's known as coherence, building breath of five in, five out. So you're going to focus on your heart. We're going to imagine we're breathing into it for a count of one, two, three, four, five. and you're going to exhale out of your heart for one, two, three, four, five. Now we're going to drop the counting and you're just going to keep that nice slow breath going with your full focus on your heart. So it helps to imagine you're breathing in and out of your heart.
45:57and now while you're continuing to focus on your heart I'd like you to recall someone or something that makes you feel appreciation which is a mix of gratitude and awe and approval it could be a loved one it could be a sunset or a pet but really tap in to that feeling you can self-generate it by recalling that person or that thing. And then once you have that deep feeling of appreciation, which can feel expansive, for me it feels a little tingly and warm, drop the visual and just focus on the feeling of appreciation in your heart. And we're going to sustain this for just a few moments.
46:54if it dropped thought came in just come right back really go there feel really appreciative of that person or that thing in your life feel that energy in your heart for just a few more moments
47:15and then you're going to take another deep breath in
47:21and out. And then just take a moment to thank your amazing heart for its wisdom and to feel gratitude and appreciation for anything that arises spontaneously.
47:38And when you're ready, you can float your eyes open. I love it. do you feel that energy shift definitely uh my mind is a blank slate now which might make for uh a different type of conversation going forward i feel really good it definitely was an energy shift i would say that it peaked when i had to conjure the image and then when you said to let go of the image, then it became more difficult to hold on to that. So I can feel the energetic. Emotional state. Yeah. So this is sort of like learning a new workout. It's like, it gets easier over time. Remember the participants were doing it four to five times a week.
48:29And what happens is, back to what we were saying in the steady heart, where you realize you don't need all this outside stuff to really feel good. You can self-generate these incredible energies inside of you in your heart. And there's such intelligence that comes from that. And then it starts to get easier to do it. And then you know what, Rich, this becomes your new baseline. So instead of all the chasing and doing things the same way and always feeling the stress and always being up in your head, you're like, oh shit, it feels so good to be in here. Simple. We did that for a minute In the research study on this very meditation, we sustained that appreciation state for two minutes.
49:11This is what led to almost a third increase in coherence. And on our website at mysaluna.com, we have tracks of these meditations, which are free for everyone to use, paired with coherence building music, because the music also helps you stay. Not in the same place. I was gonna say, what is the half-life? Like how long does this persist? or does that increase with daily practice? It increases with daily practice. I said to Dr. Roland, who I was a scientist I was running the study with, what if we did this study for two months or three months, right? It just keeps building. And he talks about this new baseline.
49:48So, you know, when you run a lot, you have this baseline for what you're, and I'm kind of making this up because I'm not a runner, what your baseline is for running a mile, right? And then it just sort of gets easier and easier to sustain. When we're talking about activating this heart brain, Most of us have never experienced this going in and activating these 40 ,000 neurons. So it's like, at first it may be difficult for anyone listening to this or watching this. You're like, well, I didn't feel much at first. You keep going in. You keep going in. The dark heart, the first heart stage is like turning on lights a little bit at a time.
50:23You start to feel a little bit more of that connection, a little bit more of that coherence, which feels so peaceful. This is how you change your life, Rich. This is how your perceptions change. When you came out, you weren't so heady. You weren't so thinking. You're in a lighter state. So things come in and you're like, okay. You know, we realize this is what people are looking for. This is why people smoke weed so much. This is why people drink. They turn out to screens. They're chasing the next thing. They want to have a lot of followers on social media. We all want to feel good. This heart work is teaching you the truth, which is that you can feel good inside and not just this airy fairy, like, oh yeah, think the positive thoughts, be mindful.
51:05No, activate the heart brain, go into heart coherence, sync up your nervous system, learn about this. This is how you feel good. I'm imagining the individual who has a spiritual allergy or for whom anything that even tiptoes into the realm of the woo is received with a complete tuning out. And I would imagine you've talked to some of these people from time to time. Make the case to the scientific minded person who is anemic to more ethereal ideas. So there's nothing ethereal about this, Rich. We're talking about science here, right? It is true that the ancient cultures have talked about the heart, But these practices are evidence-based.
51:57They're based on lab studies. This one here, right? We referenced this earlier. What's so incredible about creating hormonal balance is that we've been taught that you need to take something to balance your hormones or there's all these things or biohacking devices. This is measurable in a lab and published respected journals like the American Journal of Cardiology, hundreds of studies. This one showed doing these simple practices. We didn't get into the full coherence breathing and how that activates different parts of your nervous system, right? It's here. We're not going to talk about it too much here.
52:32It would take too long. This reduced cortisol on average 23 % in one month. The DHEA, I'm talking about measurable hormones that you can measure in someone's body, 100%. Here's another thing I want to show you, Rich, on this topic because this is like, this is nothing. I mean, you can take it to a spiritual level, but if you wanna stay straight, scientific, evidence-based, we're talking about neurons, we're talking about pathways, you can live that too. This, see this graph here? This is where, in this research study, this is so powerful. People were asked to recall anger, not being angry, recall.
53:12Remember that that person said that to you or whatever it is and to recall a time they felt care. So remember when you took care of your mother when she was sick or whatever it was. In both cases, IgA spiked. This is one of the ways they measure immunity. And then it dropped for six hours in the person that recalled anger. This is measurable science, okay? And then with care, it was up for six hours. So what I'm talking about isn't like, okay, you have to be a yogi or read the Vedic text. It's great, it's there if you are interested in ancient texts or ancient cultures. but this work is very scientific.
53:51It's practical. It works. It's been measured in labs. It's been measured in everyday life. I have experienced it for myself. And this is why I'm so passionate about this book, Rich, and this work. I want everyone to know about this. I want everyone to know there's a different way of living. It's interesting how the wisdom of Sri Yukteswar measures up with the science. Like the science kind of validates what he was talking about. about however many, how long ago that was. Well, but what about, oh, look, ashwagandha is being studied now and the curcumin and the turmeric and the acupuncture. Haven't we seen that demonstrated time and time again?
54:30But to be clear, if someone is very rational and they're an atheist or they don't subscribe to that at all, this still works. We still have 40 ,000 neurons in the heart, whatever your spiritual beliefs are. One of the things that I think it's important to talk about here is the level of disconnection that most people inhabit with respect to their relationship with their heart. as a culture that lives in their mind and as a culture that is constantly being impulsed by inputs that make us reactive and further disconnected from whatever you wanna call it, your higher self, your more self-actualized self.
55:17As a result, I think what happens is that when people believe that they are acting in their heart's interest or that they're following their heart, they're actually just reacting impulsively based upon, you know, some kind of external stimuli that is confused as being heart-centered, right? You know what I'm talking about? So for example - Thank you for bringing this up. The person who, you know, my heart is telling me, I mean like, all right, like mindful eating is a good example. Like this is what my body is telling me it needs. Like, is it really? Like, are you, have you done enough work on yourself to have that level of clarity?
56:00Or are you making a rationalization to eat the thing that you wanna eat? Or my heart is telling me that I should go on a date with this person or I should stay in a relationship with this person despite evidence that this is not, you know, or continuing to get into a relationship with the wrong person because you have some childhood trauma that creates a preset that attracts you to that wrong person. And you think like, well, my heart is telling me to do this. that's very different from true heart-centeredness. And you have a quote in the book by Gandhi who basically says, renunciation precedes certainty.
56:37In other words, you have to do enough of the inside stuff in order to level up to a place of clarity where the heart-centered messaging is trustworthy enough to be relied upon. Exactly, the renunciation of also ego's way, this old pattern, my ideas, my opinions, how I want it to go. So one of the scientific attributes of coherence, and you can see it on those graphs, and what this feels like and what it actually is experientially is calmness, Rich. Calmness precedes clarity. Most people are not calm on a daily basis. Most people are in the restlessness. They're on their phones every second they can.
57:18They're in their heads. They're this, this, and this. What we've attributed to the heart, these erratic emotions, jealousy, overexerted passion, envy. Oh, my heart's telling me to go this way. When you're not calm, that is your ego. That is not really following the heart. So it starts to happen as you do, again, the science of heart coherence, and you just start to feel more calm. There's this difference in your nervous system. You're not in sympathetic nervous system overdrive. So the parasympathetic nervous system starts to rebalance. So that creates this calmness that creates a very different state of being a different place from where you start to perceive back to this and you make decisions so maybe like oh i really thought i need to go on a date with that person the ego's talking as you start to calm and you get clear you're like oh there's actually some red flags here and it's hard for me to be alone but i'm gonna be okay i'm gonna just pause here and you know go on my own for a little bit there's a deeper or detachment, we use that word.
58:21There's an incredible calmness and this clarity, again, which lends itself. We can start to see this in our day-to-day reactions, our up and down emotions, our emotional intelligence. This was a huge one for me, Rich, and I'll say this on a personal level. When I said my energy went up 70%, whether I said - I mean, that's a bold claim. That's a bold claim. Because you're already an energetic person who eats well and sleeps well and all the like. Listen to me. Yes, but at the end of the day, do you know what I would often experience? Frazzled, like just feeling frazzled. Like I've held it together.
58:58I've taken my kids to school and back. I've worked all day. I've shot these podcasts. I've written all this stuff. But along the way, there'd be little arguments with the husband. There'd be, ooh, like, I don't like how this happened at work. Like all these little shifts. So now at the end of the day, I feel really good. I feel lighter. Because of the detachment, like it's all water off your back now. So, okay, go back to the heart stages. The dark heart is heart and brain aren't speaking. So this means incoherence. And what this also means on an organ level is there's less efficiency. So this means when you're constantly being in that fight or flight out of rest and digest, there's blood flow being pulled out of your GI tract.
59:39There's less efficiency in your endocrine organs, your immunity drops. These are very real measurable things. So literally your energy is lower back to where the psychological becomes the physiological. Because there's this heart center living, you're just less being dinged around with life. You're able to just stay calm and less reactive and more responsive. Your body and your energy is being conserved and it becomes what the science shows is more regenerative instead of depleted. So yes, I had great diet and I got my bloating down and my digestion got in check. But because I wasn't dinged around so much, there was just this natural lightness that came back.
1:00:22I don't even remember the last time I felt so light and peace. This is priceless, Rich. I could say, oh, great. I got to my ideal weight and all these things. Peace matters above all of that. But as a fellow striver. Yes, thank you. I'm curious as to whether this shift also created great discomfort. And I say that as somebody who knows what it's like to inhabit that space, but always kind of rubber bands back into this approach to life that does leave me frazzled and exhausted at the end of the day. But part of that is because I have this thing that's trying to convince me that if I'm not exhausted at the end of the day, then I haven't left it all out on the field.
1:01:15Like I could have worked harder. If I'm writing a book, like if I'm not just totally depleted, it means I didn't work hard enough on it. If I go home tonight after this podcast and I don't feel some kind of sense of exhaustion, it's telling me like, well, if it was easy and graceful and fun and light and I'm energetic at the end of the day, then maybe I didn't put enough of myself into it to get the result that will have the most impact on the audience or whatever, blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? So even though it goes back to the self-awareness piece, like even though I know, like I aspire to inhabit that place that you're sharing about more than I currently do, I have a resistance to it because I have a certain way of doing things that I've convinced myself is the best way and the way that works for me.
1:02:05And that also is informed by my history as an athlete. Like you train hard and you wanna be tired at the end of the day. That's how you're making the game. You know what I mean? It's like a whole, it's like a roadmap. It's like a whole like architecture in my mind. Exactly. That I would have to relinquish to get to this place of, you know, one of the ways I talk about it is like, like what if it was easy, right? And that's very uncomfortable. It's like, it has its own kind of scariness to it. Well, first of all, there's a difference between easy and easeful, right? We can think that there's a different way.
1:02:44What you're talking about, very deeply ingrained patterns and beliefs. This means this. I have to be exhausted to be successful. Like these are very deep mentalizations that have really imprinted patterns. So I'm not asking - And they get further entrenched because I'll have a success and that affirms that. Like, oh, okay, well, this is because of this. So this is how you do it. And this is how I'm gonna repeat that pattern and repeat that pattern. And then you tiptoe up against burnout or exhaustion, or you have a intervening health incident or something like that as a result. Well, it's really how - And you're not happy.
1:03:21Yeah. I'm not asking you to believe what I'm saying. I'm asking you to experience it, right? When you start to go in and you actually, just for that micro moment when we did the meditation and you experienced this feeling of like a little bit foreign. What is this? This feels different. This feels expansive. I'm not in my head. What happens is you can still continue to live your patterns and your, you know, your limited patterns and your ideas. But when you start to just incorporate a piece of some of these tools around heart coherence, you start to see like, again, your baseline shifts a little bit.
1:03:51So it's like, let's say you're really heady and no heart, dark heart. And then a little bit, it starts to shift. I'm like, oh, that didn't bother me as much. I'm less reactive here. I actually felt this real hit of intuition. It starts to go like this. This is my personal experience. So heady, so linear. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, kind of like in this territory. It starts to shift because again, the science shows it's your coherence capacity that builds. So you start this very heady place where the neurons in your head and head aren't syncing up. So it's an experience rich. You start to just do a little bit of these tools.
1:04:28Again, some of them are three to 10 seconds. And you just start to experience different outcomes, which gives you the proof that this works. Why so many of these motivational programs are short-lived. Let's say you go to this retreat and this conference and you're all excited and you come home and you're like back in your negative thinking loop. It's not natural. It's forced. It's like, oh, I have to drum up this, you know, kind of fake forced positivity we hear about so much now, right? Versus, oh, like I'm actually activating this and my perceptions are naturally starting to change. So over time without force, which is a very mental way of looking at it, the heart is showing you a different way it can actually be.
1:05:13Again, back to my example with my husband, it was like, we are so different, right? Like when we met, I was like, I was in my heart. So we saw each other. Here's this guy who's like no one I've ever met or dated. He's from the neck down, covered in tattoos, gold grill, I'm plant-based. He's a carnivore, just CrossFit guy. Just everything was like, oh my gosh. Yeah. The love, like we felt this connection. But then when we got married, Rich, it was like, okay, there are some real communication differences here, some real different shifts in how we see things. Friction. Just to be real honest, There's just a lot of like this.
1:05:52When I started doing this work, I didn't think it would make such a difference there. That wasn't my expectation. But I started to just feel more coherent, right? It builds. And then it kind of comes out into your life. And suddenly it was like, whoa, we're not fighting so much. Like there's just so much more peace. There's more humor. There's more lightness, right? So I'm not asking you to say give up this whole way of being. I'm saying just spend a little bit of time in these practices and read through the teachings, which I think you already have, and just be aware that you have a heart brain.
1:06:26Be aware that there's these simple tools you can go into and then just see how it keeps unfolding. Because the other thing about the heart journey, it's not linear, right? The mind is like an instruction book, like, okay, I'm going to do this part of my career. Then I get promoted. I'm going to be here. Then I make this much money. What happens? You said sometimes there's pain. Sometimes I've had parts of this hard journey, letting go of attachment. I had a really hard morning, to be honest, because my younger son went to preschool for the first time today. It was me bawling in the car. He was fine.
1:06:59I was like, honey, remember your water bottles and you're coming? He's like, bye, mom. I'm sitting there like crying. And it's like, there's times it really hurts. But then you keep coming back and you realize that you don't need so much. There's times I could see myself and I'm like, oh my gosh, I feel so bad for how I treated that person. I was so harsh. Like you start to see and there's real pain. But then on the other side, there's just more freedom, more lightness, more authenticity and less needing on the outside.
1:07:37I own a bunch of spectacles. And I made the grave error the other day of donning a normal non-Roka pair on my indoor trainer when I was riding my bike indoors. And I got to tell you, it was a disaster. Every three to five seconds, I had to take my hands off the handlebars and push my glasses back up my nose until I got so frustrated I just tossed them aside. This is the dilemma of every active but optically impaired person I know. and as someone who has relied upon eyewear every single day since I was five years old, it is also the source of endless aggravation. Thankfully, now eradicated thanks to Broca, the stylish performance eyewear company founded by two former Stanford swimming teammates of mine who have gifted everyone like me and quite frankly, the world with their fashionable line of super lightweight prescription glasses and sunglasses with patented no-slip nose and temple pads that are just impervious to sweat.
1:08:40And no matter what you do, remain locked on your mug no matter how intense your workout. Without the dork factor, these things go everywhere with me from the trail to the dinner party. Put them on, feel the difference, and wear without limits. Unlock 20 % off your order with the code RICHROLL at ROKA.COM. That's R-O-K-A.com.
1:09:13Another quality of the strivers dilemma has to do with things like meaning, purpose, and happiness. And we've talked about like hormonal balance and immunity and all these kinds of physiological shifts that you can achieve through these practices. but the kind of more macro broader ambition that we all harbor is to feel more purposeful, to feel like our lives have meaning to inhabit a space of happiness. And one of the conflicts that I am always entertaining as a striver is this notion that things like happiness are luxuries that maybe I don't necessarily need. I can fulfill myself through achieving things that have meaning for other people.
1:10:14If I put out enough podcasts, if I write enough books, if I do these things that are nourishing and make me feel good, but also are helpful for other people, maybe that's enough. and it keeps me on that habit trail, right? That has me stuck at the second kind of heart centered. Yes, it's a pattern and it's a mentalization to say, well, maybe I don't really need to be happy because I'm doing this stuff. I don't say that as somebody who's unhappy, I'm not unhappy, but I also know that there is a greater feeling of happiness that does elude me. So our society, again, is this construct of I do this, I achieve this, I'm important.
1:10:59It's all out here versus what we're really experiencing on the inside. There's this really interesting part of my career before I had kids where I worked with all these celebrities and I'd live with them for many months. And I say, oh, this is interesting because I don't have a TV and I don't watch screens. but it was just this really interesting peeking into we're all struggling with the same things we're all struggling with this division inside of ourselves and no matter what we're say we want i think ultimately we do want to feel lighter more joyful more peaceful right but in our heads from this reality of the propelled heart we think the only way we can get there is to keep pushing to that achievement or to that accumulation of that thing, that thing.
1:11:46As you open and, you know, awaken your heart from a coherence perspective and also from an energetic perspective, what happens is that things become more nonspecific. So what I mean by that is remember when you step into the clear heart, these so-called synchronicities just happen because you're in a different field. What happens as you let go of attachments naturally without pushing is you don't need to be with that person to be happy. You don't need this outcome. It becomes more of a general state. You don't need something outside of yourself to feel love. You start to just, it's a self-fulfilling from this Taurus field of the heart.
1:12:23It starts to come from inside of you. And it's a very natural thing. As a fellow striver, this was completely foreign to me. I need you to love me. You know, when I was in the dark heart stages, I would pick people that were so nice and amazing, but safe because I had so much abandonment issues, so much fear inside of me. Like, I don't want you to abandon me. So I'm going to pick someone who loves me more than I love you. I couldn't see that at that point. But now I'm like, oh, that's why that pattern kept playing out. So it's amazing. Again, as the heart awakens, this expansion that we experienced a little bit in that very brief practice, it's a different vision, Rich.
1:13:03It's a different perception. So whatever you're perceiving of purpose and happiness now, as you awaken your heart, you're not even gonna believe how different it can actually, you'll actually perceive it. Purpose isn't just, oh, I'm doing this. I'm sending this podcast out to all these people. It's like moment to moment living. It's like, oh, I have purpose just because, you know, I'm in my heart and I just, I'm alive. I'm awake. I'm here. I'm kind, you know, moment to moment instead of these very mental ideas of what it means to have purpose, what it means to be happy. You just are it, you embody it.
1:13:42That's the difference between the heart and the headiness, the thinking. There's just this flow, this harmony, the clear heart, what the Tao Te Ching talked about, what Eckhart Tolle is talking about when it's going beyond thought. What we talk about flow state, which everyone's trying to create and they're taking nootropics and doing all this stuff. Flow state is when your heart and brain are really actually lined up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not thinking about being happy, you're just in the state more and more. Yeah, it's so true. It's possible too. Yeah, and I share what I've shared as somebody who's kind of, I've graduated more than I kind of let on.
1:14:24Like I've been doing this long enough to know that the empty hole in my spirit, that the hungry ghost is never gonna be sated through anything that I do in the material world. And I have arrived at a place where I embrace that and I understand that. And I fully grok that like the sense of meaning, purpose and happiness is not gonna be driven by any kind of externality and that it's an inside job. And I'm in that process right now, but I think the imprinting is so deep, this idea that my deservedness around love is directly correlated with what I can achieve or some level of specialness, whether it's getting good grades as a kid or winning a swimming competition.
1:15:14Those things when you're a child that you get affirmed for, I don't know about you, but I grew up in a household in which those were really important. And it felt like love and achievement were two sides of the same coin. And so it's a leap, it's a difficult leap. It's a growth curve to get to this place where you feel like you don't need to do anything to be deserving of love or for that matter to love yourself. I know exactly how you feel. And after all these years, it was like, and I described this in the book, it was when I was backpacking, I was like, oh, adventurous, but I was actually trying to run away from all that anxiety.
1:16:00I was like, here I am, I'm always where I am. And then I thought, oh, I - It's called a geographic in recovery, right? Like wherever you go, there you are. And then here I am like, oh, post backpacking, I'm doing this and now writing books and I've healed this and that, but it was always there when I was really honest with myself. There was always this pushing and this, you know, intense, not enough, like not really fulfilled. In the past, I would say three years since I really started going in, it's like, it's hard to put into words, but all I can say is this experience of like how long we think things are going to take in this pattern and, you know, these neuroplasticity because there's 40 ,000 neurons, because there's neuroplasticity between your heart and your brain.
1:16:49One thing I will say is that it can be non-linear and the research with HeartMath has shown this and some of this research and things I have seen myself with clients, people breaking patterns. I've worked with certain people for over a decade. It's like, whoa, you're so much less angry. Really? Like, and oh, like I'm just having a much easier time with my food choices and certain things. So I know what you mean when you're like, well, I can't really see outside of that, but there's a different intelligence and a different type of wisdom that we're tapping into here that I would say you've never tapped into.
1:17:25I had never tapped into it. Most people don't know about this stuff, which is why it's so exciting because A, it works. B, it's evidence-based and scientific and C, it's experiential, just try it. and you'll start to see how differently your health, your perceptions are, all these things in your life. Cool. How does this land with your husband? You know, he's, you know, as you mentioned, you know, he's in certain ways very different from you. He's a big burly man. Also kind of a biohacker, super into all the devices. Very numbers-based. All that kind of stuff, which I relate to, like on some level.
1:18:05and anybody who's kind of tethered to all of that data feedback is perhaps somebody who might be a little more immune to these sorts of ideas. Like, does he practice this or how does this work in your marriage? So he respects it and he understands how deeply I am in it. To be totally honest, right now, he's not - He's not into it. He's not doing the meditations, But, you know, and Byron Katie says this, with two people are open, but one person is really doing the work, it can be transformative. I am doing the work, Rich. And so it has changed our communication. He does say, wow, like this is way better.
1:18:46He does say to me, you're doing great. Like I see a big change in you, but in our marriage, because there's this coherence coming, there's calmness, instead of both of us being reactive, it has completely changed the dynamic. One day he may, but I'm not gonna push him to do it if he wants to. And how do you stay out of your attachment to him doing it? Because it's been so beneficial for you. Is there not some expectation that he will join you? Oh my gosh, thank you for saying the word attachment because again, as I did this work, I could not believe how deeply my whole life was based on attachment.
1:19:25You know, when my kids were born, it was like, because I didn't have that type of relationship with my mother, I think they were hustling. She was in the Philippines and they needed the money. She went back to work when she was two weeks old. With my kids, it was like every waking minute, I have to be with you. I'm the one taking care. So I was like working all hours of the night. There was just this like intensity. And then with this work, it's like, oh, like I'm self-reliant. I'm going to give you love. I'm connected to you. But you're not my everything. And so now I say that with my husband, I wish him well, it's here if you want it.
1:19:59I feel more peaceful. I'd love to share it with you. But if you don't want it right now, that's okay too. And what's his go-to like daily practice? Like how, I'm just kidding. I just wanna map out like the differences. So he loves, like for him, the sauna, like we have an ice plunge sauna, like actually the actual physicality of putting his body in different environments, I think can help soothe his nervous system. He's definitely more into screens. So I don't know. Yeah. He has his ways. You're device free. You're not even wearing a watch. I'm not wearing a watch. But again, I will say I am tremendously interested in the actual science.
1:20:45It just manifests differently in my life. I'll take these, you know, the science and the studies and live it. whereas he is someone who's tracking and he likes to see it all the time. It's just a different way. Yeah, we were talking about this beforehand. I think the tracking is great as long as you have a healthy relationship with it and it doesn't become like a tether or a prison that becomes predictive of behavior and mindset. It's a tool, it's not an outcome, right? And I think if you have an unhealthy relationship with all that data that's coming in, And it might not be serving you. I love the devices, but I've had to learn over time, like you kind of have to keep them at arm's length a little bit.
1:21:29Well, also, you can say, oh, I need to sleep better because look at my HRV number, whatever it is. But there's so much more, it's just so much more rich and no pun intended, but so much more beyond that, right? We're talking about two minutes of irritation, putting into motion 1500 different biochemical processes. We're talking about DHA going up when you're starting to activate heart coherence. These things that we don't see most in our culture, it's like, I'm wearing this thing, or I bought this supplement, or I have this sauna, whatever it is, all this stuff you see. But on the inside, the energy is moving through known as emotions, perceptions affecting all these energies.
1:22:06We don't wanna talk about that though. We just want that thing that we can go and buy that's gonna fix it for us. This is a pathway, Rich. This is so profoundly powerful. And you don't have to, like I said, if you just do some of these heart practices, and you start to just build a little more coherence. It means in practical terms, less going straight into that stress response. Being more resilient against stress is one of the most powerful outcomes of this work. Just being just more centered in your system, wasting less energy. This is incredible implications for our fitness levels, for our longevity, for our health, for skin health, like all these things.
1:22:45Yeah, well, really what it's about is opening up the communication channels so that you are starting to feel connected with all aspects of who you are. And this is a powerful practice clearly, but if you're not eating well and you're not sleeping and you're not exercising and kind of taking care of yourself in all the ways that we know we should, this is not going to solve all of your problems because actually you're not even gonna be able to open that channel of communication if all these other things are out of balance. So from a holistic perspective, this is a piece in a larger puzzle. No, thank you for bringing that up.
1:23:26And also, you know, coming into the wellness path as a nutritionist, I have great, you know, a lot to say about food and the environment and the things that we're doing in our lifestyle. So in each heart chapter, there's actually a practical embodiment section with helpful foods and practices and, you know, elixirs, drinks, herbs, things you would actually take because it works both ways, right? Well, if you're having sugar all day and you're like jacked up on taking Adderall or tons of caffeine, it's very hard to go into, it's not conducive to heart coherence and feeling that clarity and that calmness.
1:23:59And then the other hand, when you start to regulate your diet and you start to regulate your patterns, like the circadian rhythms, going to bed at the same time, waking up around the same time, it puts you in a better state to go into deeper heart coherence. But on the other, on the people that just say, oh, you know, diet, fitness is everything. This is a big missing piece of the puzzle for many. Sure. We talked about the heart brain, the head brain, but there's a third brain, which is the gut brain. Yeah. So how does the gut brain interact with these other two brains? Like, what do you have to say about its place in all of this?
1:24:36Well, it's essential as well, right? There's a section in the propelled heart that talks about a very somatic practice that again, research-based when you're connecting your heart and your gut. It started to sync up the rhythms, your brain waves up here. So they can work synergistically. We hear this idea like gut feeling, right? Or like your gut and your heart from this deeper place inside of you. When your vagus nerve, when your gut health, your microbiome is healthy and diverse, you are going to be more intuitive. You're going to be more... It's easier for you to sync up this heart coherence as well.
1:25:14Imagine going back to the food. You're not having any fiber. You're having sugar all day. You have bloating problems. That does have a very real effect on your heart coherence. So part of this work, cleaning up your lifestyle, getting your gut health really in check, and also just understanding, again, this deeper place where we get these messages and these intuitional shifts and guidance taking you out of just so much overemphasis on this one brain to even realize that you have these two other ones. How do you distinguish what the gut is telling you and what the heart is telling you? It seems like that's a subtle differentiation.
1:25:53Like, oh, my heart is saying, or my heart is telling me to do this. My gut, we kind of interchange, those are interchangeable, but are they different? Like, how do you think about that? Yeah, getting too heady, getting too linear, right? So the practice in the book is actually - You're like, forget it, heart, gut, whatever. Like, what are you saying? We're saying deeper place inside of you, right? So you can even think of your heart, gut as a unit, which is what we do in that practice. Whether you're saying it might gut or my heart, what we're talking about is out of this heady linear place. So as you do the heart coherence, call it your gut, call it from your heart, doesn't matter.
1:26:30It's coming from this deeper place of clarity and higher understanding from inside of you. I say my heart, I feel it here. Some people feel like lower heart, top of gut. Let's not get so into that headiness. The point is that it's out of the overthinking, over rational brain up in your head. Yeah, that's where I live. But anyway, I feel like the gut is more like the danger, Will Robinson sort of feeling like the gut will tell you when something is not right and you need to like get away. whereas the heart is more about moving in a more attractive direction, right? Like the gut is more about almost a fear or a danger response, whereas the heart is more of an attraction response.
1:27:20But as the heart coherence grows, your heart can also send you those messages like, eh, I don't think it's a good idea to follow that relationship or maybe it's better to sort of separate from this person or the situation. So there is a higher intelligence. there are centers, like very real brains in the heart and the gut. And again, in the propelled heart, there's a whole section that talks about syncing up this part of your body with the science. And so I do that practice all the time, by the way, like the heart gut unit and going for more somatic experiences and responses versus like the patterns you're talking about.
1:27:56If I'm not exhausted at the end of the day, it's your head telling you that, you know? Yeah. Yeah, how do these show up in all the ancient traditions as somebody who's kind of steeped in them? Like, what did you learn kind of returning to them in preparation to write this book about what all the great spiritual religious traditions have to say about being heart-centered? It was really interesting across different traditions and different religions. Like I mentioned with the Egyptians, they didn't take the heart out of the mummy, which I thought was really interesting. It was needed to navigate.
1:28:32And then as someone that grew up Catholic and the church, I didn't always connect with my church very much. It just felt very, there's parts of it that felt really cold. But then again, when you go into - You should feel really bad about yourself most of the time, basically. When you look at these real teachings in the Bible of Jesus and that image, which my auntie, my Filipino auntie growing up had this image next to the bed, this flaming heart of Jesus Christ. It was just this emanation. And then you go back to, you know, the peace that passeth all understanding, all understanding from this rational place.
1:29:11There's this place of peace. Do unto others as you would have done unto you from this, you know, zero sum game, me versus you, I have to win, super competitive. We can't even live those principles. but what these teachings are really showing us is this loving unit, you know, this way of being. There's so much separation in our society today, right? And then when you look at in Hinduism, the Ramayana, for instance, I don't know if you're familiar with this story with Hanuman, but basically, and this is an interesting, I'll fast forward. When he is going to rescue this princess Sita that was basically taken by a demon Ravana, he sits there at the entrance of the castle.
1:29:55He's like, I'm just a monkey. I'm not going to do anything. And the king of the wind, this Hanuman Chalisa starts, this mantra is being told to him that wake up. Remember who you really are. And so he lights his tail on fire. And he goes around the palace and there's all the smoke and he's able to take Sita and rescue her. So then he goes to the court and they, you know, Rama and Lakshman and Sita come back. and he's before the whole court. They give him this emerald ring and in front of the whole court, he bites it. And I'm like, well, what's going on? Don't you like the ring, Hanuman? And then he takes his monkey claws and he opens up his chest and he reveals on the inside and there's two different versions in Hinduism.
1:30:41One is that there's the face of Sita and Ram. The other is a Sanskrit Ram, Ram, Ram. He's saying, I don't need a recognition. I am in service to this, and this is part of who I am. The Western hero story usually ends with, I lit my tail on fire, and I have the power, and I'm it. He is saying, there's this, you know, another quote from Gandhi in the book, there's a force moving through me. It doesn't need to be recognized by others, but it's inside of me. It's inside of me. And so when I read and I reflect on these teachings, again, it's all lining up with the science. And, you know, these teachings, as you grow in heart awareness, you naturally become less selfish, which is the power of this word too.
1:31:24You naturally become softer, more kind, more service oriented. I'm good. I'm less needy and attached. How can I help? On a societal level, Rich, can you imagine each of us starts to awaken into our hearts more and more? And that resonance, it starts to create in the circles of your family and your friends and your work, child school, right? And then back to the teachings, the word kalb, if I'm saying it correctly, the translation for heart is mentioned 132 times in the Quran. And it's mentioned, the word lev mentioned throughout the Torah, the tabernacle, the heart sutra in Buddhism. We start to see that the ego has created all these ways of separating ourselves and me versus you and this group and I'm better and da-da-da-da-da versus this unity that the heart can see.
1:32:11The heart can forge that on an individual level. We see that with the emotional intelligence. There's a better way to communicate. Like, guys, how can we work this out? So like, I have to force my way. And then it's this incredible unity that's been written about through all the spiritual texts, which the science is now backing up. Yeah, I mean, given the consistency of that across all of these traditions and these religious texts that have existed and remain relevant, you know, millennia after being written. What is your sense of how we've moved so far away from what those messages are trying to tell us?
1:32:53So it's really interesting in that same book, where these heart stages originated from called the holy science, Shri Yashwar also lays out these timelines, so to speak, these ages throughout society. And there's the dark ages, which one could say that we're in right now to an extent across society. There's a lot of dark heart energy. There's a lot of disconnection from the heart. And this is why people can harm other people. This is why there can be violence against nature, against each other. But he says, these are natural cycles that have happened throughout time. We look at what's happened historically in times of war, the crusades, just many different times.
1:33:36But what he does say is the more of us that start to awaken into the higher heart stages. It ushers in a new age called the Satya Yuga, which is more truth, more oneness, less violence, more peace. So what I think plays out are these cycles in time that have been written about in the ancient texts. What's exciting, Rich, is that sometimes we see the news, what's going on around the world or the politics or and we're like, I can't do anything, but we can. It's like each of us contributes into this field. All hearts intersect. Each of us can put energy into the whole. And the more of us that wake it, it's not gonna take one person.
1:34:16It's not gonna just be when Buddha came down or Jesus came down or a few of us. It's like everyone's heart is needed to create this shift and this change, which I believe is really possible one heart at a time. Well, the only way to change anything, let alone change the world, is to change yourself. And that's the only thing that we have domain over anyway. There's another part of the book where this reporter asked Mother Teresa, who was in Stockholm going between Rome and India, and he said, Mother, what has changed after, and I'm paraphrasing here, what has changed after all these years and so much effort?
1:34:52You are 70 now. Soon you will die. You will pass. He says in a nicer way. soon you'll pass and not much will have changed. Why so much effort? And she looks at this reporter and she says, I never wanted to change the world. I just wanted to be a drop that reflected God's love. Does that seem like a small thing to you? Never miss an opportunity to serve. We're not talking about spending your whole summer volunteering in the Appalachian Trail necessarily. we're saying heart-based living moment to moment. How am I in my head or my heart in this moment? Am I connected? Or am I just kind of treating this person in front of me like a lifeless interaction?
1:35:37Am I thinking? Or am I really listening to you right now? Am I being kind? Or am I too stuck in my ego-based perceptions and taking it personally and like you did this to me and I hold onto this resentment? How are you being moment to moment? It's given me a lot to think about. In your estimation, where should I begin? What should I do? Well, I think you need to feel, I think you need to, and I say this, this is, I really, I just wanted to say this from my heart. Written eight books, Rich, I don't have the same motivations. I'm not trying to just sell things, But this book, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, does synthesize these teachings, this science, these tools that I really believe everyone should have access to.
1:36:28And the tracks are on my website. They're free. It's out there. I just, this is a really great place to start, to start to understand about some of the science and understand how the heart brain works. The tools are really simple. You don't have to go off and spend hours meditating. You can do the practice for less than eight minutes. You can do some of these practices in less than a minute. I think that's a great place to just start to understand that there's a different reality beyond this headiness, pushing, stressing myself out, overworking myself. I haven't done anything unless I'm exhausted.
1:37:03What do you say to the person who, for whom this lands or is being interpreted as somewhat indulgent? I'm imagining the person who's, you know, working really hard, maybe has two or maybe even three jobs just to pay the bills, has a bunch of kids at home. Like there's just no bandwidth for this type of quote unquote luxury because just getting through the day is all that person can handle. So this isn't like, oh, that sounds nice, the hard work. I wouldn't say it's just like, oh, like a happy add-on, this changes your stress levels. This changes your ability to more deeply connect with your family.
1:37:47This will change your vitality. This will allow you to feel more lightness and spaciousness. You can just practice a little bit here and there. Like I said, these heart shifts, the breath, certain things I do three to 10 seconds. I'm washing the dishes. I come back. I'm proud of who I am as a mother. The way I speak to my children is very centered. I feel more confident from that. I have more energy to get my work done. If you're working night shifts and you're doing three hours or three different jobs, this will allow you to find more of that easefulness in your life. And I get it. And I've been there and I've hustled.
1:38:27And I, you know, there's times where I haven't been able to pay the rent when I was living in New York City. and I just feel like, oh, this arduousness. Like if I could go back and tell myself it doesn't have to feel like this uphill battle all the time, it's amazing. You know, and just don't take my word for it. Just experience a little bit. We're not talking about a huge time commitment. Yeah, I like the fact that it isn't a huge time commitment and it's not some kind, you don't need a gadget or a device. You don't just spend all this money. As somebody who's been in wellness, you know, for a long time as I have, You know, I bristle at the ways in which the movement has sort of navigated towards this idea of being well as a luxury item to be purchased.
1:39:16Yes. And these ideas then become the purview of the well-heeled only. It's about green juices and expensive, you know, food at Erwan. It's elitist. retreats to Bali and things like that, as opposed to the core practices that can move the needle the most in terms of not only how we inhabit our own bodies, but how we inhabit our own minds and interface with the world. One of the core teachings of Yogananda and Sri Yukteswar that's written here is that all hearts are equal. We just have different journeys. so we all have this incredible, call it technology, call it this gateway, this power center that we can start to unlock.
1:40:04It flattens the field, Rich. It's not like, oh, I can't afford this retreat or whatever it is. We all have something really powerful that we can start to unlock. And so in closing, what is like the final message you wanna leave with people about what you're trying to express here today if you had to bring it to a summation? There really is this incredible power inside of each of us that is right there that we can learn to unlock, that we can all benefit from on a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level. And we just have to learn how to do it. I'm so grateful, Rich, that I came across this stuff in Williams for so long.
1:40:47I didn't know about this stuff 10 years ago, five years ago. I want everyone to know that this is really here for each of us. I think this is the birthright of all of humanity. I think science is showing it's all inside of all of us. The spiritual teachings have always shown that. I think this is a critical age for us to wake up to this different way of living before we implode with stress and separation. I think this is a critical time to come into this heart power and all of our hearts are needed right now. I would agree with that. But again, beautifully put is a real gift to have you come and share today.
1:41:23I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rich. And I'm gonna do this stuff. I'm gonna practice this. I need more of this in my life for sure. So thank you for that. I'm so happy to hear it. Thank you for sharing your big heart with me. Yeah, it's cool. So the book is The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts available everywhere. And if people wanna learn more about you, should they go to Saluna? Like where do you want to direct people? Do your Instagram? Yeah, we could say mysaluna.com. That's M-Y-S-O-L-L-U-N-A.com. Or my Instagram is at underscore Kimberly Snyder. All right. Thanks so much. Thank you, Rich.
1:41:59Beautiful. Appreciate it. Cheers. Peace. Peace.
1:42:16That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.
1:42:55This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com slash sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake.
1:43:37Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love. Love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.
1:44:13Thank you.
From the publisher
Kimberly Snyder is a renowned nutritionist, New York Times bestselling author, and wellness expert.
This conversation explores the nexus of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science in Kimberly’s iconoclastic approach to wellness, which emphasizes heart intelligence over conventional mindfulness paradigms. We delve into her journey from anxiety to equanimity, the physiological implications of heart-brain communication, the five stages of heart awakening, and how to tap into our innate wisdom for self-actualization.
Along the way, Kimberly guides me through a heart coherence exercise, offering a tangible experience of this powerful practice.
Kimberly offers a compelling dialogue between head and heart. This conversation is nourishing. Enjoy!
Show notes + MORE
Watch on YouTube
Newsletter Sign-Up
Today’s Sponsors:
Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉 boncharge.com
LMNT: Get a FREE Sample Pack with any drink mix purchase👉drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL
Squarespace: Use the offer code RichRoll to save 10% off 👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll
Waking Up: Get a FREE month, plus $30 OFF👉wakingup.com/RICHROLL
AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs👉drinkAG1.com/richroll
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp: Get 10% off your first month👉BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL
Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors
Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange




