Dr. Li Interviews Rollin McCraty, PhD: Heart Coherence Science and Practice

What If the Heart Knows Before the Mind?

A Deep Dive Into Heart Coherence

The heart is by far the master rhythm maker in the body. Think of the heart as the conductor, and the body is the music it's playing. If the conductor gets out of sync and gets frustrated and frazzled, the music becomes very discordant. That's what's playing out in the body. It's a very energy inefficient state. Coherence, on the other hand, is a very energy efficient state.

What happens when an engineer who built a multimillion-dollar company discovers the world's problems can't be solved by technology—only by a shift in consciousness? Rollin McCraty sold his business, walked away from a $20 million venture, and met Doc Childre at a party. "I went to spend an hour," he recalls. "I left three days later."

For over thirty years since, McCraty has served as Director of Research at HeartMath Institute, proving scientifically what mystics always knew—the heart is the seat of intuition and doorway to our larger selves. His team's discovery that one person's heartbeat can be detected in another person's body and brain laid the foundation for a new understanding: we are energetically connected, broadcasting our emotional state into a shared field.

With over 21,000 scholarly citations, he is recognized in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. His pioneering work on heart rate variability (HRV) has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of wellness devices. In this conversation with ServiceSpace founder Nipun Mehta and Dr. Cynthia Li, McCraty shares profound insights about the heart as a portal to our higher selves, the science of coherence, and how what we feel inside doesn't stop at the skin.

Most people have an intuitive understanding that coherence is a good thing—things in sync. Basically, coherence is really talking about the coherent behavior of all the parts that make up a complex system. All those things have to work together in harmony for us to even be a living system, let alone an optimally functioning living system. In a coherent system, all the parts are working together harmoniously, which means energy efficiency. Also implied in that term is that the wholeness is greater than the sum of the parts when they're working together in this coherent, ordered way.