‘Earth’ and ‘Heart’

This post was adapted from a news item by Laurel Airica that appears on the Unknown Country website.

Most of us are fascinated by astonishing coincidences when inner experiences collide with outer events outside of cause and effect and against all odds. However, one aspect of meaningful coincidences that we often overlook is linguistic synchronicities, including anagrams, puns and homonyms.

For example, the word coincidence is a homonym for co-incidents. Although the meanings are something different, the words are linked through synchronicity.

Then there’s prescience. Opened up it becomes ‘pre-science.’ That’s something to think about.

An anagram of significance can be found in the two words, ‘earth’ and ‘heart.’ The synchronicity is that we need to treat the earth with heart. And ‘heart’ is about compassion.

The human heart has a two-way dialog with the brain—each influencing the other. The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field, which changes with our emotions. We actually evolve from the heart, not the brain. The heart has over 40,000 sensory neurons that have both short and long-term memory, and more information is sent from the heart to the brain than the other way around. So we need to bring heart-based thinking, the home of compassion, into the world, into our everyday lives.

One way to do so is through meditation, in other words not-doing, rather than doing.

An eight-week study conducted by Harvard neuroscientists supports that idea. The study involved 16 participants practicing mindfulness meditation for about 25 minutes a day for eight weeks.

Magnetic Resonance (MR) scans were taken of their brains two weeks before they began the program and two weeks after they completed it. Scans were also taken of a control group to make sure that any observed changes in the brains of the meditators could not be ascribed simply to the passage of time.

The researchers found an increase in ‘grey matter’ in the areas of the pre-frontal cortex related to empathy and compassion, memory and a sense of self. At the same time, there was a decrease in the density of the amygdala – the primitive area of the brain responsible for the fight-or-flight response.

Notes Laurel Airica, creator of WordMagic: An Enchanted Literary Entertainment, “Given that meditation increases the part of the brain related to compassion, and the effects of meditation show up throughout the day in more compassionate interactions – even with strangers – perhaps meditation should be widely encouraged as an important form of mental/emotional hygiene because it makes us more socially responsible. Meditation may even be an evolutionary strategy that could give our species the necessary impetus to make the ultimate, life-saving leap from Humankind to HumanKindness.”

You can find more details in Laurel’s article.