Well, what a lovely week to reflect upon work-wise last week.

It started with a lovely Nurture Club session on Monday where we talked about play, and it finished with a wonderful re- energising Lunch Club on Friday.

As I have learnt through Heart Math, positive regenerative emotions have the power to re-energise us like nothing else, and by Friday afternoon, an energy soured through me like no other.

So, I really felt inspired to sit down and try and put it into words.

So, what is ‘Lunch with a heart?’ Well, it is a community Lexi, and I are creating together, bringing people together to connect with their hearts, to practice heart focused breathing, and to be nourished with Lexi’s nutrient and love filled food.

We create a safe space for people to express how they are feeling, and to really open up their hearts, and through working with Lexi I am finally really understanding what opening up your heart really means.

You see so many of us were conditioned to push down uncomfortable feelings, and rarely invited to express them… we learnt to become afraid of difficult emotions, worrying that if we allow ourselves to feel them, they won’t ever stop.

However, pushing them down, ignoring them, repressing them never works. They build up and build up and show up in our body somewhere shouting to be heard!

Lunch with a heart is not a therapy group. I am not a therapist, and deep feelings need to be explored with a qualified therapist.

However, as one of our beautiful Nurture club members described Nurture Club, it is certainly therapeutic.

You see when people are given the safe space to connect with others and express their authentic selves, they no longer feel alone with their challenges. They feel heard, they feel supported, and they feel cared for. I would hope they feel relieved. To have found a space where they can connect with others and feel safe to share their true selves.

We can all listen without judgment, we can all show care and compassion, and that is a powerful force.

Many Heart Math techniques invite us to lean into positive regenerative feelings. These feelings have the power to shift us re- energise and help us feel better. They literally change our physiology by sending messages from the heart to the brain and bring many systems in the body back into coherence.

However, Heart Math also invites us to pay attention to all our feelings, positive regenerative feelings AND negative depleting feelings. By acknowledging and recognising and giving space for ALL our feelings, we learn to be less afraid of them and can start to learn to manage them. The point is not to allow negative feelings to run unregulated through our bodies.

We learn to welcome them all in and to view them with curiosity, to listen to what they are trying to tell us and to let them go.

As a dear friend who joined us articulated so beautifully, our feelings are like the weather; sometimes it’s a bright blue sky and other days it is raining. She also shared so brilliantly  that we are not here to be ‘fixed’ We never get to a point where everything is always rosy and sunny. Our feelings ebb and flow just like the weather, and that is OK. It’s OK NOT to be OK sometimes. When we start to  accept that, we can start to navigate life with so much more ease.

So, what does open up the heart actually mean? Well, to me it is about allowing our feelings to flow, to let go of the fear of expressing ourselves, and be open to giving and receiving love and care kindness and compassion. When we don’t allow our feelings to flow, we create blockages. Yet when we let them flow and let them go, we can open up our heart, and access all the true qualities of the heart such as joy, love, gratitude.

I have said it before, but the heart is so much more than an organ that pumps blood around the body. The heart forms in the embryo before anything else. It is who we really are. It is where our love, joy, and gratitude come from, and the more we allow ourselves to open our hearts, the more love, and joy we will all experience.

Quite simply, when we focus our attention on our hearts, and make a conscious choice to re-experience regenerative emotions, all the organs and systems of our bodies become coherent. It re-energises us, and we find that everything in life flows more effortlessly.

And the beauty of it all is that the more coherent we are, the more coherent we make everyone else around us. We are all energy, and the heart has a powerful magnetic field. We can literally feel another person’s open heart. It is a powerful force, re-energising us like nothing else! I will certainly remember the energy I felt on that Friday afternoon for a very long time to come.

If there is one thing I am really starting to understand so profoundly, it is that we weren’t meant to be alone. We really ARE better together. We are so much stronger as a collective. What an absolute privilege it is to be on this journey, bringing people together and witnessing the power that happens when people really allow themselves to truly open up their hearts. The mission for Heart Math is to spread this out into the world; to create global coherence. It’s a big mission, but one I for one feel honoured to be a part of.

On a more Personal level, I would love to see Nurture Club and Lunch club ripple out into the world, because the impact it has really is something very special. If you would like to join us one time you really would be very welcome.

In the meantime, thank you for reading, and please take good care of yourself.

Harriet x