On April 23rd, 2007, Dr. Steve Baumann of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, NC, was able to document how conscious and full breath controls the heart rate in Heart Rhythm Meditation. I was the subject in the experiment. The surprise was that HRM controls the heart rate in a way that is much stronger and directly opposite to the way unconscious breath or the HeartMath technique influence the heartrate. This accounts for the extraordinarily strong ability that Heart Rhythm Meditators have shown to control their heart rates.
Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) has long been understood in cardiology as the mechanism by which breathing affects the vagus nerve, which influences the rhythm of the heart. RSA causes the heartrate to slow down during exhalation and speed up during inhalation, but the influence of RSA on heartrate is not dominate and the breath pattern is usually barely discernible in the heartrate.
The connection between breath and heartrate is important to us meditators because coordinating the two, called entrainment, creates a state of internal coherence in the heart that increases cardiac function, suppresses random arrhythmia and speeds healing for heart tissue and nerves. As we've found in Heart Rhythm Meditation, entrainment is also the first step in accessing the energetic-emotional heart and the spiritual heart beyond that.
Since we've had our own instruments for measuring heartrate here at IAM, we've noticed that RSA doesn't function during Heart Rhythm Meditation (HRM). Instead, our breath affects our heartrate in exactly the opposite way: the heartrate speeds up during exhalation and slows down during inhalation. This effect of breathing dominates the heartbeat, which then follows the breath pattern closely. Our description of this unusual phenomena has been puzzling to those who know about RSA since the RSA effect definitely operates in ordinary circumstances.
Dr. Baumann is a member of the Board of Directors of Rhine Resaearch Center, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, Durham, NC. He is one of those eminent researchers that is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He's also personally interested in our work. He was immediately curious about my claim that RSA is replaced by some other, unknown mechanism during Heart Rhythm Meditation, and he asked me to demonstrate it for him.
The graph below is the result of our test. It clearly shows that the heart rate declines on the inhalation and rises on the exhalation. The remarkable thing is that with all the research that has been done on meditation in the last 30 years, this has never been documented before, as far as we know. My hypothesis is that this relationship between breath and heart rate is a characteristic of conscious, rhythmic, full and balanced breath, like we use in Heart Rhythm Meditation. It is an example of how HRM causes strong and harmonious physiological effects that are quite different from those of unconscious breathing or other types of meditation. The mechanism for how HRM controls the heart rate is unknown in cardiology -- it's the oposite of what a cardiologist would expect.
Look at how perfectly the heart rate follows the breath in the following graph. During every inhale the heart rate declines, and during every exhale the heart rate rises.
Something else this graph shows is that the EKG, a monitor of the electrical activity of the heart, dips at the top of the inhalations. We teach that the heart's magnetic field expands as you breathe out and draws in as you breathe in. This is our subjective experience of HRM, without having measured it. (Magnetic instruments sensitive enough to measure the heart's magnetic field are expensive.) Since the magnetic field of the heart is created by its electrical activity, we would expect to see a decrease in EKG voltage at the peak of each inhalation, and that's what we see in this graph.
This is just the beginning of our research with Dr. Baumann, and we're already excited at the discovery of a new, basic breath-heart mechanism.