This is episode 2008 of the daily guided meditation.

I'm Mary Meckley and here you are as you get ready to give yourself permission to slow down.

In today's episode, we launch into a brand new series where you will explore your

heart-brain connection. This week, you will discover meditation techniques and insight to help you navigate your way through some of the disruption

that you may see going on around you, especially as you find a new normal in the days of this coronavirus pandemic we're experiencing.

Your heart-brain connection has been studied extensively recently, and I want to share with you

a little insight.

There is research that shows that the heart communicates to the brain in four major ways.

This is from heartmath.org and this is a company dedicated to the heart brain connection.

So the Heart Math Institute shared the research results where the heart communicates with the brain, neurologically, through the transmission of nerve impulses,

biochemically, through hormones and neurotransmitters,

and also biophysically through pressure waves,

and energetically through electromagnetic field interactions.

We'll be exploring this throughout this series, and the reason why this is important is because

you may realize that heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women in many westernized countries,

especially in the United States where I live.

Yet there's so much we can do to calm the heart and calm the mind using meditation techniques.

And with a lot of uncertainty happening around you, we really don't know what's going to happen next, it seems, these days.

And that can be hard on your heart. And it can also be stressful

for your brain because it's hard to reach any kind of clarity when there's so much uncertainty

going on for so long. We don't really know when the coronavirus will end,

and we're still muddling our way through how to live a fairly normal life

...