Ease – An Active, Calm Way of Being

The state of ease is a highly regenerative state that helps us flow more easily through challenges and builds our resilience capacity. It is not merely a state of relaxation. It is characterized by a balance between the mind and emotions, which allows us to access a sense of inner stillness and make intelligent choices while on the move.

During times of global uncertainty and rapid planetary changes, practicing ease can save us a lot of energy, angst and downtime. Uncertainty and change can trigger increased discomfort and confusion, which may affect our behavior patterns in unexpected ways (memory lapses, brain fog, edginess, frustration, impatience, aches in odd places, sleeplessness, and more). If these type symptoms are occurring, it’s helpful to breathe ease and take deeper pause for discerning and double-checking communications and decisions.

When we pause and go to a place of ease inside ourselves, we make conscious choices rather than reacting mechanically. In this state of "active calm" our mental and emotional energy is composed, yet ready for swift intelligent action, if needed. Inner ease creates a receptive space for intuitive suggestions and feelings that are broadcast from our heart’s intelligent guidance.

Doing the steps of the Inner-Ease™ Technique at the beginning of the day reduces mental and emotional static, which clouds clear thinking and our reasoning capacity. Practice these steps for a while to increase the awareness of when you have effectively shifted to the state of ease, which is often a little deeper than your first few attempts achieve.

The Inner-Ease™ Technique

Before responding to a vexing e-mail or reacting during a tense situation, breathe ease and settle the mind and emotions. (This can often prevent an emotional mess and the downtime it takes for damage control.) When we discern our direction and act from a place of inner ease, our mind doesn’t override the intuitive whispers of our heart.

Breathing inner ease throughout the day helps us anchor new or more desirable patterns into our cellular memory. For many of us, knowing how to access inner ease is not the problem—it’s remembering to do it, especially when it counts the most. Ease gives us a chance to act and respond from our real self rather than from our mechanical, "predictable other.".

Use Ease to Change Unwanted Patterns

Suggested Practice:

1. Make a list of two to three behaviors or patterns toward people or situations you would like to change.
2. Write them down (You can add more to your list later). Examples could include impatience, hasty reactions, frustration, irritation or any other unwanted pattern. It is important not to judge yourself as you do this.
3. Next, ease into your heart and observe and honor your desire to change.
4. Then, have a sincere and honest self-talk about how to handle the item(s) you listed. The most meaningful self-talk occurs when the heart – your true self – speaks to the mind. (If indecision or self-doubt begin to surface, know that this is only your mind talking. Simply realize that it is your old way of thinking, and reconnect with your heart and recommit to the change you truly desire.)
5. Review the steps of Inner Ease and act on your insights and intentions.

Ease is not a place where your challenges will simply dissolve or your behavior patterns will change instantly. It creates an extra time window, allowing deeper discernment for heart intelligent choices — conscious choices that can help prevent and resolve many unnecessary challenges and unwanted predicaments. It helps us attune our mental and emotional nature to the most reasonable and effective way for responding to each situation that life brings us.

“Practicing inner ease increases our conscious memory to include our heart, with our mind and emotions as they navigate through daily choices and feelings that decide the quality and direction of our life.”

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We hope and pray to find peace in our lives when we are challenged by the trials that come our way. We seek to reach agreements for lasting peace between people and nations. We desire peace for ourselves and between all people and all nations.

We can help co-create an energetic field of peace as we choose peace within our own hearts. People around the world are joining together online to concentrate their efforts for world peace. The Global Care Room anonline room is a place to take a little extra time to become more peaceful within and radiate it out to the world.

Creating and expanding peace is an inside job.

There are many solutions, or paths to attainment each of these types of peace, which arguably are more valuable than all the world’s gold and the greatest palace ever constructed. You can sum up these solutions in two words, inner peace, or, as we often refer to it at HeartMath, inner ease. Inner peace/inner ease is there, not for the finding but rather for the creating.

The HeartMath Institute was founded in part on the principle that all individuals, groups and organizations are capable of creating their own peace from within. This is simply a matter of practicing simple easy-to-learn tools that take only a tiny fraction of the time that many of us spend on stressful responses to challenges in our daily lives.

Inner Peace through the State of Ease

There are, as we know, innumerable methods people have utilized through the millennia to create inner peace/inner ease. At HeartMath, one that we have found highly effective and which is based on our scientific research involves accessing what we call the state of ease.

The state of ease, as HeartMath founder Doc Childre explains in his booklet, The State of Ease, is a balance, alignment and cooperation between the heart, mind and emotions. This balance is known as coherence and it “promotes more intuitive connection with our highest potential for effective reasoning, discernment and interactions (with others).”

When there is coherent alignment between the heart, mind and emotions, Childre explains, “It’s easier to choose less stressful perceptions and attitudes and re-create ‘flow’ in our daily routines.”

How can we access the state of ease to create inner peace and inner ease? Again, people have tried and succeeded with many methods for this. HeartMath developed a tool called the Inner-Ease Technique that also has enjoyed great success with many people. Here are its four abbreviated steps and benefits, followed by a link for the complete text and details of the technique and its benefits.

Inner-Ease Technique

“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” –Dalai Lama

Benefits of inner ease/inner peace

1. Create flow in your day by helping to regulate the balance and cooperation between our heart, mind and emotions.
2. Attune your mental and emotional nature to the most reasonable and effective way for responding to situations in your life.
3. Helps prevent and eliminate much personal stress and promote faster recovery from stressful occurrences.
4. Very helpful and effective if used as a “prep” before engaging in potentially stressful situations.
5. Creates much easier navigation through challenges and resistances at their onset.
6. Enables using the heart’s intelligence in all interactions.

Find your inner peace/inner ease in whatever method you choose that works best for you. It is our fervent wish at HeartMath Institute that every individual, group and organization succeed in this. We believe the peace and ease we experience within is our greatest hope for peace without.

If you would like to practice the Inner-Ease Technique, here is a link with complete information about it and much more: The State of Ease booklet.

What are your experiences as you practice Inner Ease? Do you feel more peaceful? I would love to hear your comments.

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Merriam-Webster calls "ease" the state of being comfortable; freedom from pain or discomfort; freedom from care; freedom from labor or difficulty, etc.

Most people, if asked, likely would say as much, and those meanings certainly are not incompatible with HeartMath's interpretation, but "ease" is much more than a static place free from care, discomfort or difficulty. We don't, for example, dissolve our troubles by simply repressing our minds and feelings in the name of trying to take it easy for awhile.

HeartMath teaches that ease, or the state of ease can serve each of us as a refuge — a refuge for action in our hearts and minds. In ease, instead of reacting in the same old ways to the stresses and challenges of our harried world, we can take a little time to connect with the qualities of our hearts — love, care and compassion — and our hearts' wisdom.

Ease is not a place where your challenges will simply dissolve, observes HeartMath founder Doc Childre in his booklet, The State of Ease.

"Yet it creates an extra time window, allowing deeper discernment for competent choices — conscious choices that can help prevent and resolve many unnecessary challenges and unwanted predicaments," Childre said. "The state of inner ease helps us attune our mental and emotional nature to the most reasonable and effective way for responding to each situation that life brings us — challenging, normal or creative."

Inner-Ease^™ Technique^†

A quick and easy-to-learn way to add ease to your life is by practicing the Inner-Ease^™ Technique. It takes only a short amount of time.

1. If you are stressed, acknowledge your feelings  as soon as you sense that you are out of sync or engaged in common stressors such as feelings of frustration, impatience, anxiety, overload, anger, being judgmental, mental gridlock, etc.
2. Take a short time-out and do Heart-Focused Breathing:
   • Breathe a little slower than you normally would.
   • Imagine you are breathing through your heart or chest area.
3. This has been shown to help create coherent wave patterns in your heart rhythm and help establish balance and calm in your mental and emotional nature while activating the affirming power of your heart.
4. During Heart-Focused Breathing, imagine with each breath that you are drawing in a feeling of inner ease and infusing your mental and emotional nature with balance and self-care from your heart.
5. When stressful feelings have calmed, affirm with a heartfelt commitment that you want to anchor and maintain a state of ease as you re-engage in your projects, challenges or daily interactions.

† From The State of Ease, by Doc Childre.

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HeartMath believes the most sincere and effective form of communication is connected communication, in which the heart is engaged. Most of us communicate with any number of individuals every day. Often, though we exchange words and gestures or make eye contact, or we telephone, e-mail or use other means, our interactions can frequently lack the heart warmth of authentic communication.

Often, we make only surface-level connections because of the rushed world in which we live. Time constraints, and having to focus in so many directions can diminish our presence in communications and interactions. Whatever the reasons, all of them have a common theme: a lack of ease. When we don’t operate from a place of ease, rather than being authentic, our interactions can be mechanical and low on care.

When we approach life from a place of ease, we are more present and resilient in all situations. Higher choices and discernments are more attainable and sustainable, and our connections with others are deeper and more genuine. Inner-ease means slowing down the mind and emotions so that our heart’s care is included in our interactions. When we are not in the state of inner-ease, the heart connection with others often begins to fade, and if it persists, the nervous system’s vulnerability to impatience and irritants increases along with dread – dread of that meeting, that person or that situation. This process can drain our system and form attitudes that create a continuous stress deficit.

Connected communications are restricted at times because of silent, unresolved friction or irritation between parties. This can cause the tendency not to communicate our true feelings at times, thus creating even greater emotional disconnect and separation.

Unresolved friction between individuals, even when everyone declares they are fine, creates awkward and disjointed communications, which shuts off the heart, blocks synergy and stifles relationships. As we practice relating to life and to others from a place of inner ease, we can prevent and adjust many of these habitual outplays.

Ease is an inner attitude that doesn’t require us to slow to the speed of molasses for it to be effective and beneficial. Some situations, however call for slowing down our internal and external systems to be effective in creating flow rather than turbulence. When your system is running too fast, consciously breathe for a couple of minutes and progressively slow yourself down to the state of inner-ease. This helps to align your mind and emotions with your heart feelings, which increases effective connection with others, your projects and within yourself.

Connected communication is not about always being bubbly and gushy in our interactions. It simply means striving for authentic interactions in which you speak, listen and act from the heart, thus making a genuine connection.

We all know how it feels to be on the downside of communications that are not heart connected. The memory of this feeling can inspire us to add more heart and care in our communications and attitudes. Whether we merely glance at someone or engage in an extended conversation, we typically know when we’ve made a genuine connection because it leaves us with a feeling of wholeness and self-respect.

Read The State of Ease booklet and learn the steps of the Inner-Ease Technique by clicking here.

• Practice the steps of HeartMath’s Inner-Ease^™ Technique to create energetic alignment before communicating with individuals or groups.
• When you are a listener, breathe ease and radiate care to create a stronger connection. This will help you take in the essence of what you are hearing, rather than allowing yourself to be pulled into some drama or prejudgment before the person is finished speaking. If judgments do surface, imagine enfolding them into your heart.
• When you are a speaker, speak from the inner-ease mode. Be genuine and express your authentic feelings.

Practicing connected communication is well worth the outcome and energy saved.

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