Of Mice and Elephants

As animals get bigger, from tiny shrew to huge blue whale, pulse rates slow down and life spans stretch out longer, conspiring so that the number of heartbeats during an average stay on earth tends to be roughly the same, around a billion. A mouse just uses them up more quickly than an elephant.

Mysteriously, these and a large variety of other phenomena change with body size according to a precise mathematical principle called quarter-power scaling. A cat, 100 times more massive than a mouse, lives 100 to the one-quarter power, or about three times, longer. (to calculate this number, take the square root of 100, which is 10, and then take the square root of 10, which is 3.2.)

Heartbeat scales to mass to the minus one-quarter power. A cat's heart thus beats a third as fast as a mouse's.

With a slower heartbeat, those one billion heartbeats will last longer. Heart Rhythm Meditation slows the heartrate, not just while you meditate, but all day.

Given that we have a billion heartbeats to live, more or less, we need to make each heartbeat count. The way to do that is to follow your heart as it beats the path to the fulfillment of your life's purpose.