Healers of Ann Arbor: HeartMath™ with Rachel Egherman

By Laura K. Cowan Photographs by Fresh Coast Photography

With the past year or two of constant stress, many people are looking for a simple way to relax on an ongoing basis. This reminded me of a previous experience with HeartMath™, and so I connected with Rachel Egherman of The Celebrated Heart, formerly of Head-To-Toe Therapies. In all my healing journey, I’ve never come across anything quite so simple and effective for calming and checking in with the heart space as HeartMath™. I wanted to learn more about the process and how you might evaluate if the self-care technique might be helpful to you.

“HeartMath™ is heart-focused breathing, or breathing through the heart space,” Rachel Egherman said of the gentle form of self-care that helps you check in with your body, your heart space, and feel supported. “This is something you can do yourself in the grocery store line. It’s a way to quickly self-regulate.”

Egherman has been a reflexologist and HeartMath™ coach for a number of years, working out of her former clinic Head-To-Toe Therapies with business partner Judy Ramsey. After closing the clinic to focus on other work during the pandemic, Egherman says she took some time off before doing more one-on-one HeartMath™ coaching and starting a group session on Zoom. She’s passionate about not just physical healing but the emotional wellbeing of her clients, and it shows in the way she speaks gently and checks in with how her clients are doing.

According to Egherman, HeartMath™ is not therapy or meditation, but “a blend of science and simplicity” for self-regulation and relaxation. It can also be combined with healing modalities such as reflexology to help people process emotions stored in the body as tension. 

I sat down with Egherman to talk about the benefits of this unique form of self-care, and how you might judge if it’s something you want to try. I love HeartMath™ because it’s something you can learn in just a few sessions and then carry forward in daily life. I’ve done several HeartMath™ sessions with Egherman in the past at her clinic, and left feeling centered and peaceful. Processing issues that came up during the session was much easier to handle than it sometimes can be during the healing process. 

Laura Cowan: Tell me about HeartMath™ and how it works. 

Rachel Egherman: The typical process for a one-on-one goes like this: First, I try to find out what your goal is. Where are you at right now? I work with people across the spectrum from those who have no self-care routine to advanced yogis, so I’m trying to find out where you need support, whether that’s physical or emotional. For example, if you’re struggling with an autoimmune disorder, we might want to start with the physical. 

Then, we look at techniques to tap into your heart space. There is a foundation of breathing to let go of stress or the negative effects of stress.

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Finally, we have worksheets designed to help you recognize what depletes you and what renews you.

Laura Cowan: How long do people typically work with you?

Rachel Egherman: I work with people for about four-six sessions, it’s not a long-term relationship. [HeartMath™] is super simple and profound. Don’t be fooled by how deceptively simple it is, though. I give you the tools to move forward, and I help you identify some sticking points.

Egherman asked me to sit in on one of her virtual group sessions. Here is the way she ran us through an exercise she calls “the soft pause,” which can help us support ourselves or others through a stressful experience: 

People are reconnecting as the pandemic starts to calm, reaching out, seemingly out  of nowhere. Everyone has a story that has been super challenging this past year. As we reconnect, we allow people to share their stories, and we can tap into our breathing as they speak so we’re not absorbing all this grief and stress. We also consider how we’re sharing our stories. Every time you share your story, depending on how you’re sharing it, your body releases all that stress and cortisol again. Your body doesn’t know the difference between this and the actual event reoccurring…. Be careful not to get too involved in telling your whole story over and over. We can be a source of listening and holding love for people, share heart-focused breathing, or a prayer with others who get amped up when sharing their story. The important thing is to offer it as an invitation, not push it on someone.

For the pause practice, Egherman told us to relax, to let our shoulders drop, bring attention to the heart space. We came into an easy breath that’s a little deeper than normal. We noticed the flow of our breath in and out of the heart. We then made a connection with everyone on the call, connecting through all of our heart spaces. 

As we sat with the focus on our heart space and allowing connection with other people on the call, Egherman talked us through some strategies for relaxing through stress. She talked about how many of us have dealt with feelings of urgency and not being able to do enough in the world recently. It can help to connect with an energy of softness and patience. This is the soft pause. 

We started in the heart space, feeling a conscious but easy softness in the chest. We sat with this for a few minutes.

Then, Egherman helped us visualize feeling the softness radiating through every cell in our bodies. We spent a few minutes just allowing this softness to spread.

In this space, we can connect with the matrix of all that is and ask to receive the support we need. We sat as a group, allowing our minds to follow where that process might lead. 

At the end of the session, we came back to our breathing and felt our own individual hearts. This is important during exercises where you’re feeling other people’s energy—to return to your own energy and be aware of your own body as distinct from others before close. It helps you return to normal daily life to first ground and be aware of your present body again. 

Before we closed the session, Egherman asked: “What do you want to anchor in? What does your reservoir of soft heart energy look like? How do you connect to softness?” She recommended that we could use the energy as we converse with people who might be stressed, sharing what happened to them during the pandemic. We can imagine ourselves being in a soft reservoir of water or opening our hands to create softness within us. She told us that when you share that, the other person has access to that support as well. It seems similar to how a good friend holding space for you in a crisis can create the room for sharing what you’ve been going through, except the support feels broader, almost universal. 

We closed the session with people sharing how they felt during the HeartMath™ session, and what had changed. The nice thing about HeartMath is that it can be tailored to your situation. If you’re struggling with anxiety or a health problem, the process both focuses on the area that needs extra support and avoids over-straining your already stressed body. You can use HeartMath to process grief, or to help your body relax through a time of extra stress. 

I hope that this gives you one more option to consider if you need extra support as we emerge from this collective time of stress and grief. Many blessings. 

Rachel Egherman is a certified HeartMath™ coach, mentor, and reflexologist. You can find more information about Rachel Egherman’s offerings at celebratedheart.com. Free resources on HeartMath can be found at heartmath.org.