Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - You Have Neurons in Your Heart! Heart-Centric Menopause with Kimberly Snyder

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Kimberly Snyder, author of 'The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts,' shares fascinating insights on the concept of heart coherence and its transformative power. Discover how emotions like appreciation and love can align your heart, brain, and nervous system. Kimberly also explores the 5 stages of heart coherence, shares personal experiences with emotional healing, and provides practical tools for achieving a more coherent state. As a special bonus, the episode includes a guided heart coherence meditation to help you experience the profound effects of these practices on your well-being. Don't miss out on this enlightening episode! To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep285 Kimberly Snyder is the 3-time New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, who is the change-maker of the heart-led living and wellness movement. The founder of the holistic lifestyle brand Solluna and host of the top-rated Feel Good Podcast, Kimberly is a wellness expert, creator of the research-based HeartAlign Meditation, nutritionist and international speaker. She co-authored Radical Beauty with Deepak Chopra, and has been the go-to expert to help celebrities feel their best, including Drew Barrymore, Reese Witherspoon and Channing Tatum. Kimberly's work is featured on Good Morning America, Today, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, The New York Times, and many other publications.    Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of The Resetter podcast, I bring you Kimberly Snyder. She is a three-time New York Times best-selling author, lots of books, lots of thoughts. And she is here to share her latest book, which is the hidden power of the five hearts. And this conversation is going to center you. So get ready because we really start. off talking about this incredible mind-blowing idea that we have a brain in our heart. As somebody who has studied neurology for over 25 years, this fact has blown my mind. There are so many times that we think we have to think our way out of a situation or we have to use our mind to create something. But what you're about to hear is research is actually showing us the opposite, that everything we are trying to create in our world begins in our heart and then moves to the mind. This will blow you away if you have never heard about heart coherence, if you have never thought about thinking from your heart, if you're not a feeling intuitive-based human, but you are curious what that might be like. This is an incredible conversation. So what we're going to go through is we're going to talk in the beginning about science.

So we break down that there are 40,000 neurons in the heart. She talks about some of the clinical studies about how the heart coherence can improve immunity and it can prove DHEA, which is a huge important steroid for hormone production. And then in the middle, she's going to go through what she calls her five stages or the five hidden powers of the heart. And it's really beautiful. You'll hear me really emphasize how I really feel like these five stages are very much like what we go through in the perimenopause and menopause journey. And she and I kind of had a geek out moment there between her work and my work.

And it was really a beautiful lens in which I hadn't really thought about the frequency or the heart coherence changes that happen as we move from a perimenopause to a postmenopause state. so we bring it into that lens. And then at the end, she actually leads us through a heart coherence meditation. And it's phenomenal. This is one that you're going to want to sit and listen to. This is one where I hope you don't click off when she does the meditation. I will tell you a little interesting fact that birds started singing outside my window. As I was doing the meditation, they were not singing there.

They're not singing now. my podcast producer sent me a message afterwards and said that his cat came and sat at his feet while the meditation was going. So there's really something to this getting into the heart, especially at a time when there's a lot of chaos in the world. And one of the things you'll hear from both Kimberly and I, we both evacuated from the fires in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, and so we share our stories there. but I will tell you an hour after doing this conversation with this beautiful soul and doing the meditation, at the end, I feel a lot more grounded. And so if you are in a place where you are feeling turbulent, I really encourage you to listen all the way through. I encourage you to get her new

book and to learn the power of your heart. It will blow your mind literally. So I'm so excited to bring Kimberly Snyder to you all. And I hope that this conversation, and her work and her book touches you as deeply as it has touched me. Enjoy. Welcome to The Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. So Kimberly, let me just start off by welcoming you to the Resetter podcast. I appreciate you being here and having this conversation with me. So welcome. Oh, thank you so much, Dr. Mindy. I'm so excited to chat with you. Yeah. And as I was telling you, we'll fill our listeners in on this. Your book had been sent to me. And there were many things I loved about it before I even got into it. The first was the color. Yellow is one of my favorite. And so I was like, ooh, I'm a total judge the book by a cover kind of gal, just so we're clear.

So that was neat. And then when I got into the book, the first thing that just grabbed me was this 40,000 neurons in the heart. And I want to tell you that I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the neurons of the brain. And my brain, when I read that in the beginning, was like, what? Wait, we have neurons in the heart. and there's 40,000 of them, and they talk to the brain? What if I've been doing, studied the brain? I should probably be studying the heart.

Yeah. So that was a big aha. I just have to share that with you. Well, thank you so much for, first of all, sharing that you love the cover. I have to say, Dr. Mindy, this is my eighth book. This is my favorite cover. My first three books, my fourth one was written, co-written with Deepak Chopra. It was always our faces.

It always felt a little bit. different to have my face right on the book cover. And it just started to feel, you know, this universality of what I wanted to share. And so just having these swaths of color and talking about these stages felt like it really represented this material because we all do have these power centers inside of us. And when I came across this knowledge, Dr. Mindy, I too was blown away. I've been in wellness now for over 15 years. I've been studying nutrition and wellness and yoga and all these different aspects. And sometimes something's right in front of us and we gloss over it. And I remember these moments. I have two

boys, two young children. And I remember when you go in to get an ultrasound and the doctor is, you hear the heartbeat, right? And the doctor says the heart is here. The brain isn't formed yet. And I remember hearing that and sort of just being like, oh, cool. And then kind of going about. But then as we start to get deeper into the science, we realize that the heart is actually this brain, similar to our gut is the type of a brain and then there's a brain up here. And the heart actually sends more messages to the brain than vice versa. So we get into more material in the book, but it has absolutely changed my life in so many ways in terms of feeling more calm, more centered, having more vitality. I've gotten my DHA measured subsequently to writing the book and just everything

from a measurable standpoint, my heart coherence, numbers, and just how I feel more peaceful and grounded every day as well as those that I have led through these programs now, my clients, I've introduced this to. So I really just want to share with everyone this miracle, which is power center, which is right inside of us. Yeah. And so can we start a little bit off with just sort of like when we look at neurons in the brain, this is the lens in which I see it. Yes. When we look at neurons in the brain, those neurons in the brain are fueled by our hormones, a lot of them for women. And so when estrogen specifically goes away, those neurons don't have the same kind of reaction. They don't, this is why we forget.

This is why stress is so acute. And so the conversation in the collective right now has been, well, let's keep your estrogen up so these neurons work well. But I have been saying, but menopause is a natural process. So why should we keep the hormones up too high? Isn't there something that's supposed to happen? And this has led me to understand from a hormonal level how important the heart and the brain are and how they change with estrogen. So I'm just kind of curious and I want to start off by just like, how do neurons in the heart work? And then my next question is, are they, are they fueled by estrogen? I don't know if you know the answer to that. So maybe we could step back for a moment, Mindy, even first talk about what heart coherence is, because it relates to your question. Perfect.

Great. Yeah. First of all, this idea that the heart is a brain, that there's neurons in the heart, that the heart sends more messages than vice versa is, again, just a surprise, a shock to many of us because we don't learn this in school. And even those of us that have been in wellness for many years, I know I, I'm speak for myself and saying that I didn't know this. So when I started at all, I started learning this research.

For me, it's twofold, right? I love the science. I love learning all the research and the papers. But I also am a student of spiritual teachings in the Vedic philosophy. And the Vedas are the oldest teachings on the planet. So the reason that the book is called the Hidden Power of the Five Hearts is that a monk from India called Shwamehriq Deshwar talked about in his book. The Holy Science, he was a scholar of the Vedas, that there's five stages that we go through to awaken into this potential of openheartedness, which also means, you know, from our standpoint, just feeling, you know, really high health, high vitality.

We can talk about a study with DHEA in a moment and just this ability to be fulfilled and loving and peaceful and content. So I was going really deep into these Vedic teachings on the heart. at the same time I came in contact with the Heart Math Institute. And I found some of their work when I was writing my last Hay House book, actually called You Were More Than You Think You Are. So anyways, not to go on a long tangent, but I ended up doing a research study with them and learning a lot about these neurons and the heart. And so basically, to sum it up, what heart coherence is is when you start to improve the communication and you create alignment between your heart, your brain, and your nervous system. So you think of it like a triad. And as Dr. Roland McCrady, the research scientist that we did the study with says emotions run the show.

Right. So when you're looking at these patterns, a lot of people are wearing, you know, Apple watches and they're looking at their HRV numbers. But what research on heart coherent shows, it's not just the pattern. It's not just the numbers, but it's the actual patterns. And I'll show you a graph in the book right here. Right. So this is when you're experiencing an emotion of anger, which is really jagged. And this is what appreciation is, right?

Simple practice to go in. It's these smooth sine waves. So what their research is showing is when we start to become more coherent, entrainment happens. So all these other systems like digestion and hormones and immunity start to become more efficient. You're spinning less energy. You become, that's what coherence feels like.

The example I'll use in the book is you swim from one shore to the next, right? incoherence is like you you hit a rock, you scrape your knee, you get annoyed, you get angry, you're taking the fog out of your goggles. So my understanding is when we shift our energy and attention through these simple practices into the heart, we start to wake up these neurons. And it starts to change our perceptions, our thoughts. It starts to take us out of fight or flight, rebalance the nervous system. So there's this overall hormonal balance versus let's work with the hormones to try to support the neurons in the heart. Right.

What I've seen, it's actually the reverse, like get coherent from within, and then you have a positive effect on the neurons. You know what? That fits into something that I've written about in all my books called the hormonal hierarchy. And the hierarchy is that sex hormones sit at the bottom of the pyramid. And above that is insulin. So FASCA girl was all about let's get your insulin in check so that your sex hormones can be in check.

And then above insulin is cortisol. So if your cortisol is off, then insulin, you'll be more insulin resistant. If you're more insulin resistant, your hormones will be off. But at the top of the hierarchy that like calms the whole system is oxytocin. And one of the unique qualities of a female's body and brain is that we have a massive amount of oxytocin receptors in our amygdala. and we have a massive amount of oxytocin receptors in our heart. Yes. And we also have a massive amount of oxytocin receptors in bones,

which is fascinating to me because I wonder if that's why we get a little bit like, I feel it in my bones. But oxytocin runs the hormonal show. So when you're talking about heart coherence, I think the way I think about it, correct me if I'm wrong, is I think what you're saying is from a frequency place. And what I'm hearing and interpreting is, yeah, that makes sense from even a neurochemical place. Like you're neurochemically changing yourself when you're thinking from your heart along with your frequency.

Would you see it that way? So when we think about what I call in the book, the wild horse mind, right? when we think about what the stress response is, which is resistance upset to what is, you start to get caught up in thoughts, right? It's not the traffic that causes the stress or the bad weather or whatever it is. It's the thoughts. Or in our case, the fire that we just went through. But it's all the thoughts like, oh, my gosh, you know, this is overwhelming or the traffic.

Like, why does it have to be this way? So it's the mind sort of spinning. And then it starts to then create this cascade effect in the nervous system and the cortisol all gets secreted and all that. So through these practices, which I can't say enough, how much they helped me get through this fire, how much they've helped me just in my life, Dr. Mindy, something is simple, for example, right now all we're speaking, is if we, and if you guys listening to this, if you place some of your attention on your heart, now for some people, it could mean even just touching your heart, but for many people, it's just putting some of your attention

here. And what research published in the American Journal of Cardiology shows that this alone starts to rewire your nervous system, just moving attention. This is how powerful we are. So what it means is calming groundedness means that we aren't so over-identified in the thoughts, which create the stress, which makes us feel very ungrounded. This very grounded place, which the science, again, is showing there is this epicenter of, it entrains everything else when we come here. And spiritually, Dr. Mindy, we think about these ancient texts, Vedas, but also the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, they all assigned special significance to the heart. Pretty much all world religions as well. You think about this sacred heart of Jesus Christ, the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the Anahata chakra, right? The Lev and the Torah, the word Kalb, which translates to heart, is mentioned 132 times in the Quran.

So when we look at modern society, which is so thinking, like heady, confused, fear-based, right, all up in the thought, I get so excited about sharing this work because there's this place where there's clarity and groundedness. And then, of course, the modern research is over 500 papers. Because it's like, why don't we know about this stuff that talks about the heart brain and its profound implications, again, on digestion, on immunity, on energy, on vitality. on hormones on all of these different aspects of well-being. What does it look like to think from your heart? Like, again, the way I know neurons is I know them to carry information. Yes. And so if I'm thinking from my heart as opposed to thinking from my brain,

is there a way that I would know the difference? So there was a team of a husband-wife team of researchers back in the 70s known as the Lacey's. that discovered that the heart has its own intelligent language. So when we think about thinking, we think from a mental standpoint in terms of, you know, sentences, thought patterns. But what the heart speaking to us is a completely different language

that centers around intuition, right? Which is this knowing this guidance, this sort of, I don't know what it is, but I don't want to go on a second date with that person or I just feel guided to email that person. It's a deeper knowing Dr. Mindy, and it doesn't speak the same language as we're used to. So one of the things about coherence,

as we center the heart brain nervous system, there's this calming effect. Another analogy I use in the book is like a lake, right? When you calm the lake, you can see the rocks on the bottom. But when you're chaotic, when you're incoherence, it's very disordered. You don't really, that's where confusion comes. You don't know what's left or right. So as we become coherent,

one of the most powerful things that arises is clarity, right? I've been working with clients for so many years on their lifestyle and their diets. People say to me all the time, I don't know when I'm hungry. I don't know what my body's telling me to eat. I don't know when I'm really tired, right? Because we've lost that clarity. So we don't get there from a mental place, doctor. You know, we get there from this, this powerful, here I am, just true self, right?

not the thoughts, but then we get to this place, this real stillness that the Dow Day-Ching talks about, that Eckhart Tolly is talking about, because I used to listen to his lectures and say, but how do we go beyond thought? How do we actually do that? So this presence is, you know, meditating for so many years and then the thoughts come in.

But as you learn these simple tools and techniques and the hard-aligned meditation, which we did the research paper on, which is featured in the book, you actually come into this heart brain and you start turning on these neurons and it starts to get everything in alignment. And I can just say experientially, you know, the last few years since I've come into this work, doctor, just the calmness, the more fulfillment. And yes, the numbers have gone great, but just enjoying my life, feeling more deeply connected to my husband and my kids

and the day. I used to be a perfectionist. I used to be so wrapped up in achievement. and always on that hamster wheel, which is actually known as the propelled heart stage two, where we're always going, going, going. There's a major, incredible antidote to stress, comparison and judgment, all these things I hear about in our community, people are always asking about from the heart. You know, it's interesting because for a good portion of the back half of my clinical career, I helped really sick people get well. and part of my job was to recreate their lifestyle.

Part of my job was to put a team around them that, like, supported and helped them find their own path to healing. I was always like, you're going to do the healing. I'm not doing it. I'm just here to create the container and to guide you. And we all the time, I would, like when I would get a test result back, I would say, here's what the test results are. Here are options of what we can do. Now tell me what feels right to you. Give me what you're.

And so I would bring the intuition, their intuition into their own healing journey. And now you just are, you were making me think that I get why that works so well because the patient needs to have a buy in, an intuitive buy in to their own healing experience because of exactly what you're saying. Yeah. So have they, have they done anything? like we have a real, you know, our traditional health care system would call this conversation quite woo-woo. So do we have examples? I know we have the old Norman cousins. He laughed himself out of cancer and those kind of stories. Do we have any like stories or evidence that you can heal yourself by starting with heart coherence? Well, I guess it would depend how we talk

about healing, right? There are many measurables in terms of, again, over 500 research papers. When I was putting the studies into the book, there were so many to choose from Dr. Mindy. And again, the only reason we might call this woo-woo is because people are like, wow, there's a brain in the heart. I don't actually know this. But one thing we know for sure is a precursor to so many different illnesses is inflammation. And there's a lot of research around how heart coherence, again, is just bringing your body back into that entrainment and reduces inflammation. There's another incredible research paper here, which I reference in the book around, here it is. It's on page 35 of the heart copy. And this was measuring immunity. And this

was a really interesting study where they brought people into the lab and they asked them to recall Dr. Mindy, not actually be in anger, but recall something that made them angry for five minutes. So, oh, remember when she said that to me or my mother-in-law did this. And then also to recall care, right? Like, oh, you remember when I cared for my sick mother or whatever it was? So in both cases, the IGA, the secretary antibody for immunity spiked. It's like that good stress, bad stress hormone. Yeah. But then for six hours, those that recalled anger, their IG was down for six hours. Wow. This is five minutes, right? So one of the things, and it was elevated for five minutes with care. So back to what Dr. Roland McCready says,

which is emotions run the show. When they were doing all these research papers, one of the things he said was two minutes of irritation puts into motion over 1,500 different biochemical processes, which ultimately drain your energy, which of course is the antithesis of, you know, the opposite of healing and bringing efficiency and vitality back in, it's leaking it in so many ways. And the other research paper showing one, maybe we could even do a practice on the show, Dr. Mindy. Yeah, no, I was going to ask you, definitely. But I would, but let's do it at the end because I'd love to have you sort of walk through the five stages. Yes. I found that interesting too. Yes. But what I was saying was in one month, they found that people doing these practices, so not, you know, having to go and,

you know, buy all these contraptions and buy a kingdom. Right. Right. Thank you. One month, cortisol on average went down 23% and DHEA, the precursor hormone, basically measuring vitality and other incredible, you know, for fertility went up 100%. So I get so excited about this after many because again, back to this universality of we all have this heart, we're underutilizing it. We're not even connected to it, but it is something that we can learn to turn on. So the stages, Do you want to get into them? Yes, please, yeah, go through. No, and I love what I just, I hope everybody listening catches that.

And I hope, what I'm really hoping in this kind of conversation that what people are grabbing is, there's so much more to healing than we have been taught. And that's what, you know, when you quote these studies and you talk about the immune response, you talk about DHA, this is, this has been one of my real complaints about the menopause conversation is we're just talking about lathering creams and patches. And I'm like, no, there's something we're missing. We're missing something here. There's a bigger transformation.

There's a bigger healing. So I just wanted to point that out. I just got goosebumps when you said that when it reminds me of something that said in certain teachings, we're talking about this fire, right, which is so much death and destruction, but there's also a rebirth that can happen. There's healing that happens afterwards. There's transformation. So in some teachings, they call the heart.

the organ of fire, meaning organ of transformation. So one of the ways that we can keep ourselves in this state of right or flight and incoherence is anger and an ability to forgive. So there's a six-part forgiveness practice that's based on research in the book about how we don't forgive through the head, right? We have to forgive through the heart and through doing this and letting go of the energies that can keep us in pain, in inflammation, that keep us from really healing, right? There's so much, I believe in healing that's just beyond the physical.

We can still eat the right food. We can do all the things. But there's so much emotionally, spiritually, mentally, that plays a role. Yeah. I think, again, I just think that's, that is the wave in which we should be moving with healing in humanity. that we have hit, we have all the technological healthcare that we can possibly dream up. And it's been incredible, but we have people sicker physically and mentally than ever before. So we've missed

something. Oh, yeah. And this is why I like to have these different conversations. So walk me through the five stages, because I found that fascinating as well. Yes. So the five, the five hearts, so to speak, Again, these came directly from the Vedic teachings around Swami Shrik Deshwar, but they also correspond to the science of heart coherence. There's five stages that we could divide them into. So the first is known as the dark heart. And when I say dark, Dr. Mindy, I don't mean as in bad or evil. I mean dark like you can't see, right? So imagine you walk across a dark room and you could hit your arm into the wall or you trip over a cord and you could really hurt yourself or someone else.

dark means the dark heart stage is incoherence. It means your heart and your brain aren't communicating well at all, right? So if we were to look at an HRV patterns, it would be the jagged, chaotic pattern. These are the times in life where you feel a lot of fear, separation, dark thoughts, low thoughts, low energy. It's hard for you to get off the couch. Maybe you're numbing all the time. You're watching Netflix all day or drinking or smoking weed or whatever it is. there's this disconnection from the heart.

I also want to say these stages we can move in and out, even in a day or even in an hour, right, we can have a dark heart moment. Like sometimes I wait in the night and like an old fear will come up like a nightmare. But we tend to be in one heart stage more at a certain period in our life. So it's a lot of low energy. And then we start to, let's say we make some lifestyle changes. We start to exercise more. We start to cut out the junk food or the sugars or whatever it is.

we start to get a little bit more coherence. That means the heart brain, start to communicate more. The HRV pad looks a little bit more smooth. So we have more energy. And now we move into the propelled heart. So there's more energy. There's more vitality. But we're still up in our head.

So this is the stage where we're always on, always trying to achieve working harder on our phones all day and all night. Overwhelm, burnout, stress. right? This is the overachieving. This is the, you know, not feeling enough. This is the rigid life plans. I'm supposed to be married and have two kids by 32 and I haven't met my partner yet. I should be making this much money by a certain age. It's very rigid and worried and external validation. What do people think of me? What do I look like on social media? Right? So it's still disconnected from the heart. And the third stage is a big jumping point known as the steady heart. And this

is where we start to see more coherence grow. Dr. Mindy, if you were to look again at the HRV patterns, and this is the stage of Shawmei-Sri-Ektashwar says, where we realize that what we need is inside and it has nothing to do with anything on the outside. This is where, and again, going back to the personal experience of the fires, it's like staring at the fire maps and like, oh my gosh, this is really scary. We don't control the outside world. So we have to find this safe haven. this place inside of us, and we can't outsource it to anyone else. So this is where we start to see a lot more stress resilience. This is where we don't feel like we're being tossed in the waves, but we're actually able to increase our DHA. We're able to reduce our cortisol. We have

much more heart coherence, so we're able to flow through life, much more steady. And the fourth heart stage is where coherence, high heart awakening, we say spiritually high coherence, and this is known as the devoted heart. So this is where we've, become more devoted to these inner heart qualities, love, care, compassion, peace. Now instead of just rushing through, so we don't let that person into the intersection, or we don't treat that person checking us out at Target like a real human, we're just looking down at our phone, we're present. But because we're so coherent, and one of the things we didn't talk about is that there is an actual heart field around that's measurable by magnetometers.

It looks like this. Co-hearing. I saw that. I love, yeah, I love those. Yeah, and so there's graphs. I don't want to go down that tangent, but there's something called the Global Heart Initiative, and they have these magnetometers set up in Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, South Africa, and they can see how global events affect the overall magnetic frequency. We're talking about frequency.

So anyways, at the devoted heart, we're so much more coherent that people can actually sense, you know, when you go around someone and you can sense they're kind of in chaos or drama. They don't even have to say anything. So even though we're more devoted to these inner qualities, things tend to work out more, right? People, I don't know what it is. I want to work with you. I'm drawn to you. You know, I'm going to ask you on date, whatever it is.

Yeah. And I have an amazing story to share about that stage later, Dr. Mindy. And then the clear heart is where we're more transparent, right? This is where we still have these moments. You know, when you're washing the dishes or you're taking a shower, you're not really thinking. But out of the silence comes these amazing intuitive ideas. is or you're just in flow, you're not up in your head, you're just present, you're in full acceptance, high levels of peace and just love and connection and unity, right?

The wholeness that we're all seeking is in our heart, in our head, we're never going to be enough. There's always going to be some type of lack. But as we've had these clear heart moments, we really feel the truth of our nature, which is wholeness and deep connection. I love that. You don't have to feel fragmented and competitive. we can actually heal that others are enhancement

and that we are sharing this oneness experience. Yeah. So you just described the process of menopause and I can tell you as a 55-year-old post-metapausal woman, that's what going through menopause felt like to me is going from a place of that dark heart of feeling like there was no head and heart connection. Yes.

moving into a place. You do, you know, and this is what I've been studying through neuroscience, looking at the menopausal journey and seeing that they're actually the neurochemical change that's happening is actually working towards giving you that last clear heart that you talked about. Because if you hang out with any 60-year-old, 7-year-old, 80-year-old, they'll tell you like it is. They're clear, they're compassionate, they're not competitive.

and I really believe that that is the journey that you just explained is the heart journey of the menopausal woman. You just explained it through a different lens. So I just wanted to let you know that because it's beautiful. Well, even in the dark heart stage, it's like, ooh, like this doesn't feel good. I'm scared of menopause, even maybe leading up to the field heart is like, what do I do, like reading everything or just trying. Yeah.

Or like doing, doing into more steadiness of like, okay, I'm going through this. and it's happening. So I'm going to steady myself. And then this blossoming of, wow, this whole other phase can be so beautiful. And, you know, there's this like an unfolding garden, the wisdom and the peace that comes. So that's a really beautiful analogy. Yeah, no, it was, it was, it, I'm starting to see the pattern of menopause in a lot of different teachings.

Wow. And you just gave the heart coherence pattern, which is, is it really is a moment of like you're going along and then you kind of get. thrown on your bum and you're like, wait a second, I can't sleep and I'm depressed and I have hot flashes and I'm gaining weight. And then there's just a, you feel like your body's been hijacked and your brain's been hijacked. And as you wrestle with that, then most people go and they start finding all the information like you talked about. But the more you wrestle with it, the more you come to realize that the only solution is to go back within. And then there's clarity.

And that's, I mean, that's exactly what you described. Well, so. And one of the things, Dr. Mindy, as you go towards the clear heart, is you start to let go of all these attachments to identities and labels. Yes. There's so many stories we're told as women about, you know, just sexuality and being this and this. And then, you know, things are shifting. But as you start to move towards this deeper connection to the wisdom and the beauty and the fullness inside of you, you realize this can actually come forward more as I, as I go into this. And I stopped to be so attached to all these stories.

The personal experience shows that it's not true, all these myths. Right. And these ideas that actually, it's the ideas that cause the stress and suffering. Yeah. So is there a way, if we know that journey, is there, how do you move from each stage? Because I, now that you've given me some language to it, you know, I assume, like you said, you can move in an amount of them in a day. You can move them, you know, probably within an hour.

but if you get stuck in one of those darker spots, like, how do we move? Because I think we all hear what you just said and we're like, yeah, I just like to all, let's go to the fifth stage. I want to be there in the clear stage all the time. Right. So it's interesting. It's a nonlinear journey, right? Because they're moments.

Well said. Or you feel like, oh, wow, like I feel so much lighter. And then there's some sticky moments, right? You can call them Dark Night to the Soul or just kind of ego deaths where you're kind of like processing and going through something. So everybody's heart journey is different. And sometimes you feel like you're going backwards, but you're actually just shedding more of who you're not, right?

So a lot of times I'm in that devoted heart stage. I've gone through, you know, a lot of my life was in the propelled heart stage, the overachieving. But, you know, through this work, you realize, okay, I can be here. And then when I'm in a dark home moment, I have the tools to get out. So to answer your question, the book is full of, first of all, the knowledge to understand. what it is to be in the power of your heart,

what heart intelligence is. It dives far more deeply into heart coherence. And then there's tools in every chapter. So, for instance, the heart-aligned meditation, what we did with the 30 participants in our study, we took them in, we measured their HRV patterns with the Mwave pro equipment from heart math, and we used their technicians.

And all we did was give them this eight-minute track, Dr. Mindy, and we said, do this at least five times a week. And we practice it together as a group once a week. And then we took, in 30 days, on average, there was an increase of 29% of getting into a coherent state. So one of the things that we know is as you practice these techniques, which are very simple, we'll do one later on in the show. You increase your baseline. So you're starting to turn on those neurons. It's like neuroplasticity is not just up in the brain, but it's between the heart brain connection.

You're rewiring. It's like you're watering the plant, the wires. You're bringing it back online. Even if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, I'm really in a dark heart phase or moment. You can bring back the heart. You bring it back. And then the other thing is a lot of the practices in the book, Dr. Mindy, are not where you have to go and isolate yourself. And the meditation is eight minutes.

But the heart aligned study in life is a practice you do while you're driving your car. I do it while I'm washing the dishes and my kids are going bananas in the middle of life to steady big emotions. And there's a practice in the propelled heart chapter called the heart. harmonize in life. And this is where you break patterns of the mind, where you keep living out the same patterns, and you go into the heart, you get coherent, and you go a different way. So one of the things the research shows, you know, it's kind of like certain types of therapy or trying to rewire can take a really long time. It's up in the mind. You're just talking about things over and over again. But the heart, and specifically when we do the practice, focusing on the heart and taking

heart-focused breaths. So there's a coherence breath pattern that changes the input signal to your brain, giving you different thoughts, different perceptions, which lead to different thoughts. So like I say in the book, if you're up in your head and you're battling the thoughts, that's why a lot of people can't meditate. They're like thoughts battling thoughts. We're going to a different place to find a solution than where the problem is, which in this case is the overthinking mind. We're going to the heart brain and we're changing the thoughts. So over time, it's like this incredible rewiring Dr. Mindy. And as someone who is so anxious, me and lifelong recovering perfectionist,

I can't tell you how much this work has changed my life personally. And I assume it's a practice. Like, I'm an overthinker, no doubt. In fact, any of my friends listening to this right now would be like, oh, that was an understatement. And so I also, you know, resonated with that part of your book of how you moved yourself from an overthinker into a more peaceful, coherent place. All of the tools in there, is it something you should do every day, a couple times a day?

Like, what's the door into these tools so that people can just sort of step by step decide what to do? So in our research, if you practice the hard-aligned meditation, again, the participants, it was four to five times a week, eight minutes each time, increased coherent 29%. But the other tools, which you can just practice in the middle of your, life. It's, it's really experiential. It starts to become more second nature, right? So yeah, that's when I'm freak out. I'm like, you were going to say. Like, what is it? I mean, this fire happened a few years ago before I had these tools. I would be a rack. And then I was watching it and I just said, it would come into your heart, do the coherence, breath, the breathing,

you know, it just becomes more of your life. And even just doing the meditation, again, your baseline grows and grows. So all of a sudden, you're like, wow, you're just, would have gotten really frustrated or angry with this person or that person just to bother me so much. You don't bother me so much anymore. I'm sort of in my own way, you know? Yes. And so I would also say for you, Dr. Mindy, you know, you're a scientist, you're thinking a lot, but you're also naturally very heart-based. You're very caring, you're very compassionate. So there is this, you know, big heart there that so many of us say, you know, I know, deep down, I am a good person. I am a loving person, but sometimes I can be sharp, sometimes I can be a bit harsh or, you know, it's like not me.

It isn't us. It's just that we need to rewire and come back to this true self that the yogis and the Vedas had always talked about this gateway in the heart that connects us to the love and the kindness and also our creativity and our intuition that creates real success and abundance. Yeah. So well said. So well said. I had a prior to the fire, I had a really.

I've had a rough couple of months and a really good friend die in October. Sorry. And he was like a brother to me. And he was 54 and he just died. Like just healthy guy, vibrant guy, larger than life. Just, you know, at the end of the day, laid down on the ground in his office and died. And I was in Turkey when I found out with a friend on the very first vacation. I had really officially taken in like 25 years because I wasn't in my clinic anymore.

And when I found out, I was, I was just, I could not pick myself up off the ground. And my agent, believe it or not, my beautiful agent said, I know grief well. And what I want to tell you is that grief has a very interesting aspect to it. and that's that it gives you access to all emotions. There is a weird, like you, and I think it puts you in your heart. And I'm thinking about like the fires. I'm thinking about just, you know, when you go through the menopausal journey, you're grieving an old version of you as a new version.

And yet we live in a culture that doesn't really want women specifically to be too messy and too emotional. So these five hearts are so make me so curious, but they also, I wonder if there are different emotions that open us up to more of these neurons, open us up to more coherence. And maybe these emotions aren't all positive. Oh. Maybe there are some of the, yeah. And like, so I'm curious about grief. I'm curious about anger. Oh. A lot of women are showing up with rage right now. And so what is there, is. Are different emotions stimulating different intensities of these neurons in your heart? Yeah. Great.

Great questions. Dr. Mindy. And there is a lot of research and studies they've done around emotional intelligence and emotions specifically. So one of the things we see in the propelled heart. So dark heart is you're really low, right? Just feeling a lot of that fear, chronic anger all the time. And the propelled heart is that, like, I can identify with that.

Like perfectionism. So you actually cut off from a lot of. of feelings and you don't, you know, you kind of feel numb or you feel like you can't show anything and then it comes out, it bubbles out later in rage. So with the steady heart, when you become open-hearted, remember the heart is the organ of transformation. This is the heart-aligned study and life practice. You get really coherent and then you actually allow the big feelings to come up. It's like holding on to the shore to like a really tight rope while the waves come, whether it's anger or grief, being open-hearted means you're allowing your heart to process really hard things

and not push them down so that they pop up later in inflammation or constipation or whatever it is, right? You don't pretend they're not there. You actually do feel your emotions. But Dr. Vindy, and this is the really important part, you go through this process of like a wave where they come up and the research shows the really big peak of the emotion can last two to 10 minutes. And then you stay in the coherence breath and then it comes down. What you don't want to do is while you're in an emotional wave to act out, to speak, to inhale, to take action when you're in the anger.

Right? Because then you're just projecting it out. And there's a research study in the book from Dr. Andrew Siegman. And he's from, I believe, Maryland or Boston University in the book. And their research showed that when you act out anger, you just reinforce the pathways. right? So you keep that pattern inside of you versus you feel it through. It's like digestion, right? The 40,000, like trauma stored in the body. You want to feel the grief. When my mom passed away, it was like, I don't like this wave, but we're in it. And I remember just feeling such intense, dark night of the soul grief. And then you start to digest it. So there's a lot more research and tools, but you don't want to be in the emotion. You don't want to be the anger. You don't want to be the anger. You don't want to be. it, right? You say, like, depression is all this repressed anger. You have to let yourself feel and then digest. And the heart coherence tools allow you to do that in a healthy way and then come back to

center. Does that make sense? And, you know, yeah, I had a lot of friends when I closed my clinic. I closed my clinic and became an empty nester all at the same time. And some of my real wise elder women in my life said, lean in, lean in and feel it. And a friend of mine who's about 10 years older than me said, if you lean in and feel it, you will actually move through it much quicker, which is what I'm hearing you say. That is exactly it, Dr. Mindy. And this is why sometimes you meet people that are still grieving their lost wife

20 years later because they're still holding on and sort of this armor around the heart instead of actually allowing that, you know, fire, the transformation of the heart to allow you to transmute. Because what are emotions, energy and motion? So they're meant to move through you. If you kind of suspend the emotion, it stays as stuck, resentment, anger. Back to why forgiveness is such an important practice

in the devoted heart chapter. There's lots of things that many of us could forgive, including things about ourselves. So you actually get the motion going through. Like we're meant to move, right? Our bodies are meant to be fluid. Our veins move fluids. Our food is meant to digest.

It's not to be meant to be stagnant. We're not meant to have this stagnant energy inside of us. And so it's very powerful. I love that. Yeah. So, okay, take us through an exercise or one of the, what you had mentioned, there was a tool that, and if people are listening, I guess, if you're driving, I assume, you don't. All right.

You don't do this while driving. I don't know. You tell me which one you're picking. All right. So we'll do an abbreviated version of the heart aligned meditation. And I'll say also Dr. Mindy on our website, which is myceluna.com, there are free tracks that everyone can access with coherence, music that we used in the research study. If anyone's interested, they're available for everyone. Thank you.

Please pass them to anyone. You know, anyone that feels like they could use them, especially during this. Okay. So I just want to show this chart really quick and I'll describe it to anyone listening to this. This was some of the research that we incorporated it into the study, which is, you know, showing that these heart-based emotions aren't just feeling good. They're actually creating smooth sine wave patterns in the HRV. And so the emotion that we're going to work with in this particular practice is appreciation. And appreciation is easier to access for many people

in the busyness of life rather than, oh, feel peace or compassion. So we're going to be working with appreciation. So we'll do this for just a few moments. Okay, so everyone who can please close your eyes. Take a comfy seat if you're not already sitting down. And straight away, we're going to shift our awareness to our hearts. So for some that can help if you place your hand on your heart, it's not entirely necessary. I'm talking about your physical heart, also your energetic heart. So right here in the middle of your chest.

And now we're going to start to take some nice deep breaths in and out. while focusing on your heart. So here's the key. Sometimes we're not used to focusing on the heart. You can just keep training yourself. Bring it back to the heart. This was the research published in the American Journal of Cardiology, showing that this changes your nervous system,

changes the input signals to the brain. So we're going to focus on the heart and we're going to do a breath pattern of five in, 5 out, 0.1 hertz. This was shown to help coherence. So I'll do the counts. Once again, focusing on your heart. Imagine your heart is your lungs.

As we breathe into the heart for one, two, three, four, five, and you're going to exhale out of your heart for one, two, three, four, five. Once again, inhaling into your heart. One, two, three, four, five. And exhaling out of your heart for one, two, three, four, five. Now keep breathing nice and deeply in and out. You don't have to count anymore. And while we're we continue to focus on our hearts, I'd like you to recall someone or something that makes you feel appreciation, which is a mix of gratitude, thankfulness, and awe. Could be a loved one, could be a pet, or a beautiful sunset that you saw. And for just a few moments, while we keep our

attention on our hearts, to feel into this coherence, promoting emotion of appreciation. And if a thought comes in, if you got distracted for a moment, just come right back. Just another few moments, really go there in your heart, feeling this deep, expansive, feel a little tingly and warm feeling. of appreciation. Last moment. Now taking another deep breath into your heart, breathing, appreciation in, and then exhaling out, appreciation. And now we'll breathe into our heart's appreciation. You can naturally start to shift into other heart-based emotions, like love, peace, and we'll exhale them out to each other. Dr. Mindy, everyone listening or

watching this, to our community, to our loved ones. One of the things that the heart research also shows is that our hearts are like broadcast stations through this giant heart field, Jollinger sex. And last time, breathing in love, peace, appreciation, sending out all this love and peace to everyone, especially across L.A. and affected by these fires. All the firefighters have been working tirelessly and across our greater world community

and then taking another moment to thank your amazing heart for its incredible wisdom. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes. Do you hear the birds outside going crazy in my house here? Oh, I'm going to goosebumps. We did this meditation on another. I did it in person and another podcast, and the lights went down up, the magnetism of the electricity shift.

We turned them down. There's a, yeah. There's a bird outside my window that started going crazy the minute we did this. I heard it. And so even if when you started practice, Dr. Menn, even for a moment, did you start to, it feels like to me tingling, right? Yeah. So that is.

Yeah. And warmth. Yeah. rewiring happening. So the research shows when we sustain a coherence of motion, specifically in our case, appreciation and what the tracks on my website are two minutes. So we stay in that for two minutes. That's what ultimately leads to the 29% increase in coherence. If we're going to break it down in science. Of course, yeah, yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Thank you. So we did this little snippet and you're like, oh, so one of the things that we realize, this power we have, again, back to

this idea of non-attachment, we don't need an outside, outside object to be the love, to be what it is. We can self-generate these amazing emotions inside. So we start to learn that, and that increases our power, our strength, right? So we become so coherent. And again, the baseline just grows and grows. So in 29% increase in one month, they said, what if we kept doing this research study for another two months? What would it be at? Right? So it's just that we just start to feel, again, this clarity, this intuition rising up and all these amazing physical effects, including hormonal balance. It's feeling so much more peaceful and fulfilled. Yeah. And then it makes me wonder, like, you know, if one person does it, what if thousands

of people do it? And like, how do we start to change? It's just specifically where we are right now on the planet. And yeah, and I think that's really, I mean, I see the, if it's energetic like that, the benefit to humanity. It's, you know, I used to have in my clinic I had above the wall, Gandhi's quote, be the change you want to see in the world. Because I was like always like if you, you know, if it's all begins with yourself when it comes to healing. But what I'm now thinking through this lens is, gosh, when you make yourself coherent, you're actually contributing greater to the coherence of the planet. to your community and the people around you. Ultimately, there's this oneness, this field where we're all intersected.

So imagine you become coherent and you bring that energy when you're dropping your kids off at school or to your right place. Or you go to Starbucks to get a coffee. You're actually spreading this power of being in the heart, which everyday life looks like more kindness and presence. And being from here, not the rushing mind. That's not who we are. We don't mean to be a bit snippy or harsh or judgy. right? We just become disconnected, so we drop back in. And we actually start, this is where real confidence is to, too, Dr. Mindy, not just in these like societal ways of how we're supposed to look, but actually,

I feel so good about myself because I'm who I'm, you know, I'm meant to be. I'm a really kind person, right? So we feel so whole and good. Yeah. Well, this was incredible. How do people find you? So they, and go get the book. It was so good I got too. Well, the hidden power of the five hearts. is available. We say everywhere books are sold. And then my central hub is my saluna.com, which is s-o-l-l-l-una.com, which means the sun and the moon, it's the wholeness. That's where we have our courses and our digestion products and our feel-good podcast as well, which I'm excited for you to be a guest on Dr. Mindy next week. Thank you. Thank you. And social at underscore Kimberly Snyder.

Great. Thank you, Kimberly. And, you know, from one author to another, thank you for taking what is passionate to you and putting it in such a beautiful book. So that is not an easy endeavor. So thank you for doing that. And this has just been incredible. So I can't wait to squeeze you in a couple of weeks. I'll see you. And I can't wait to get a big heart coherent hug from you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. so please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.