The summer of 1993 was both sweltering and deadly in Washington, DC. At the time, the city had one of the highest crime rates in the country and was experiencing the kind of temperatures that send even the most ardent of heat seekers into air-conditioned cool. Despite the heat and the violence, four thousand people chose to descend on the city to sit in silence and meditate with one intent in mind: to lower the crime rate by focusing their mental energy on spreading peace and safety to others.
It worked. At the height of the two-month experiment, violent crimes in DC dropped by 23 percent.54 Prior to the study, led by the quantum physicist John Hagelin, Washington, DC’s, police chief had told reporters that only twenty inches of snow during the summer would cause as noticeable a fall in crime.55
What happened that summer wasn’t a one-off incident. Decades of research provide evidence that when groups of people focus their attention on promoting peace, harmony, health, or well-being, they achieve their intended outcome in quantifiable ways. Another notable study found that during the Israel-Lebanon war in 1983, deaths dropped by 76 percent as a result of a heart-centered daily group meditation.56 Everyday stress like crime, traffic accidents, and fires also decreased in the surrounding area.
The “field effects of consciousness,” as Hagelin termed it, go beyond meditation: Any practice that creates physiological safety in our nervous system and coherence between our heart and brain can impact the overall well-being of others. More surprisingly, when we band together to focus our mental energy on specific feelings, intentions, or outcomes, it can spread those feelings, intentions, or outcomes to people around the world, not just to those in our town, city, or even country. This is known as nonlocal consciousness.
Some of the strongest research into nonlocal consciousness has been conducted with prayer or other intention-setting practices. Cardiologists at Duke University found that when people of various faiths from around the world prayed for 150 cardiac patients by name, those patients fared 50 to 100 percent better than those who didn’t receive any prayer, even though the patients and those who were praying for them were separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles.57 Another study of nearly a thousand cardiac patients reached similar results, showing that those who were prayed for nonlocally had healthier outcomes than those who weren’t.58 As researchers point out, their results don’t prove that God exists or that He/She/They answer prayers but that collective consciousness is extremely powerful.59
Though the term has various meanings, I define collective consciousness as the combined state of energy in a group of people, whether that group is our family, circle of friends, work office, sports team, university, company, corporation, town, city, or country. There is also global consciousness, or the mass energetic state of everyone on Earth who is alive at any given time.
Our collective consciousness can be calm, collaborative, productive, and harmonious—or stressed, agitated, fearful, and chaotic. If you’ve ever thought that everyone you encountered one day seemed a little on edge or that the energy of your office, community, or even the entire planet was off, you were likely feeling the effects of the collective or global consciousness.
What determines collective consciousness? We all do, based on how physiologically safe we each individually feel in our nervous system and whether we’re in a coherent state. This is because everyone’s individual safety and heart coherence affect those of everyone else in our group and around the world, as if we are all playing one giant game of dominos.
With 8 billion hearts and nervous systems communicating with one another all the time, unseen signals are constantly boomeranging around the world, faster and more effectively than any wireless network. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we all affect one another in a continual feedback loop.
For more proof of our collective and global consciousness, it’s interesting to look at research conducted by the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). This international collaboration of scientists analyzed the effects of hundreds of events, including the death of Princess Diana and the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, that have activated a worldwide emotional reaction or outpouring. Over the past few decades, the GCP has found that these globally impactful events alter the output of random number generators—quantum-based devices often used in research—in a statistically significant way that cannot be explained by chance. This has led the scientists to conclude that it is our collective energy shifts the outputs.60 Though the GCP has been criticized by some for being biased, the project has analyzed the quantum output of more than five hundred worldwide events to date, enabling its scientists to argue that their results cannot be misinterpreted.61
There’s no denying that we as human beings are interconnected in a state of collective or global consciousness. We’re all made of the same natural elements, share the same space here on Earth, and pass nervous system energy back and forth to one another every second of every day. We may spend most of our attention and energy interacting with those in our immediate environments, but we’re also connected to wider groups, networks, systems, and humanity as a whole. And because we’re connected, we as individuals can begin to use the peaceful state of our own body to impact the bodies of those around us.
In chapter 8, we learned about co-regulation and some of the ways in which we can use the safety of our nervous system to help our loved ones feel safe and open to connecting with us on a deeper level. Now we’re going to explore how we can use co-regulation to communicate safety not only to those in our immediate proximity but also to those in our groups and communities and even people we don’t directly interact with or even know. What I’m referring to is a phenomenon known as social coherence, which occurs when our state of heart coherence spreads to others in our wider groups, networks, and systems.
On the simplest level, social coherence occurs because kindness is contagious—literally. When we embody core heart feelings like compassion, appreciation, acceptance, tolerance, patience, forgiveness, and love, we radiate these feelings through seen behavior, including our words, actions, vocal tone, and facial expressions, in addition to unseen signals, like the energy we emit from our nervous system and heart. This spread of social coherence is a form of entrainment, which occurs when cooperative rhythms are generated between individuals. Anytime we interact with others, whether they’re near or far, our individual system will actively coordinate with their energetic communications. This energetic entrainment joins the “me” of us as individuals into a “we” in a relationship with another.
This synchronization of human energetic communication has been documented by a phenomenon known as emotional contagion. You already read about the meditation studies at the beginning of the chapter, that illustrate the widespread impact that a small percentage of peaceful individuals can cause. Emotional contagion is the spread of emotions between and among individuals. Emotions spread because we subconsciously mimic the behaviors of others, as our brain activates mirror neurons, cells that fire when we witness another person’s actions.62 Mirror neurons help us attune to or feel the emotional state of the other person, which can spread emotional energy and deepen our bond with them.63
Lots of research has been conducted on emotional contagion, in part because businesses and corporations have used the findings to influence consumer decisions and purchases, as well as employee satisfaction and loyalty.64 By eliciting certain emotions through ads and marketing, businesses have learned how to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. Though this can understandably be viewed as cause for concern, the research can help us comprehend why our individual safety matters so much to the collective consciousness.
A massive study of Facebook users found that when researchers manipulated their news feed to present more negative content, users created more negative posts and vice versa, generating more positive posts after seeing more positive content.65 Another well-known study shows that people are more likely to be generous when they see other people acting generously and more likely to be stingy when seeing others do the same. Those who see generous behavior are also friendlier, more empathetic, and more supportive of strangers.66
The empowering message for us is that when we show up in a state of safe coherence, whether we’re directly interacting with others or not, we have the power to spread social coherence to many other people, including those outside our immediate circles.
When we embody heart coherence, we help make our groups more harmonious, productive, effective, and ultimately successful. We’re better able to pursue our unique skills, talents, and gifts and can more easily enter our flow state, increasing our personal productivity, creativity, and problem-solving ability. Being in our own flow state can even activate the same brain regions in those around us, helping them more easily get into their own flow.67
When we’re incoherent, on the other hand, we’re more likely to stay locked in stressful cycles, rife with competition, conflict, and inefficient functioning, according to research.68 Only when we feel safe and social are we able to tolerate others’ differences, and, as a result, feel less competitive and stressed. When we can see things from a more distanced perspective, we’re better able to consider the group’s best interests and negotiate for the greater good rather than being more focused on our individual desires or interests. Research on individual safety and heart coherence even shows that one person alone can reduce conflict among families, offices, organizations, sports teams, and larger entities.69 And, the more synchronization in brain waves between a speaker and students in a school setting, the more effective the communication is, with higher levels of class engagement and improved social dynamics.
Sharing a sense of communal safety enables individuals to be more present to the current moment, which can open up new opportunities in their relationships to break repeated cycles. When we are fully in the moment, we are more likely to engage our creativity and imagination, allowing us to see and honor the creativity in those around us. Our safety and energy encourages others to share their unique skills, talents, and gifts with the group. This enables the group to then have multiple perspectives to consider when coming up with new and more innovative solutions to problems. In other words, social coherence enables everyone in the group to find their flow and specialize in what they do best, benefiting the group as a whole. Companies, hospitals, sports teams, and military units that have worked to develop social coherence have lower rates of physical and mental stress and/or improved communication, satisfaction, productivity, and problem-solving among their members, according to research.70
I’ve experienced the effects of social coherence in many of my own communities, including with the creation of The Holistic Psychologist. After I began my healing journey, I started to seek more authentic relationships with those with whom I shared interests or goals and could be myself. Understanding the importance of being myself in my relationships, I created the @the.holistic.psychologist Instagram account and started using the hashtag #selfhealers as a way to connect with other like-minded people who were on a similar healing journey. My hope was that, over time, I could create a socially coherent community in which collective safety would make the process of healing more accessible for everyone; to truly heal, we need to feel safe enough to express and share ourselves without focusing on our differences from others or fearing judgment by them.
Soon after launching the account and hashtag, people from around the world began to communicate, connect, and join with me, honoring our individual differences and journeys. Sensitive to the reality that many people don’t have the resources to access the services they need, I made it one of my missions to ensure that the information and tools we shared on the free platform were available to all.
After the account had been live for several months, I started to receive more and more requests from followers to create a safe space outside the social media account. Inspired by these messages, I created Self Healers Circle, a private community where members can share compassionate communication and self-exploration, both of which are essential to healing and social coherence. I’m continuously humbled when I hear the impact that this safe and supportive communal environment has had on member’s individual healing journeys.
In addition to its benefits within our chosen communities, social coherence can change the dynamics of unorganized groups like the atmosphere we experience at restaurants, theaters, parties, and other social or public events or spaces. Let me give you an example.
You recently attended a group event with some colleagues but arrived a little later than most. When you walked into the room, you could feel that the collective energy was strained and uneasy; people didn’t know one another, and the conversation seemed tentative. Because you felt particularly safe, coherent, and joyful that evening, you embodied your heart-coherent self: you smiled at everyone, channeled compassion and gratitude to those in the room, and were genuinely interested in hearing about other’s experiences and stories. Shortly after you arrived, the dynamics of the event started to shift; others began to smile and speak more openly to those next to them. Their body language became more relaxed, and the room started to lighten with laughter and more fluid conversation.
Here’s another example. Imagine a busy restaurant where a server shows up in a safe, grounded state. This socially coherent server holds compassion for any irritated or demanding patrons and can more authentically connect with those around them. They don’t complain to other servers about how terrible their tables are, which prevents the other waitstaff from looking for similar or confirming experiences elsewhere. The safe server emits unseen signals of coherence, helping regulate others in the room. Patrons and staff who show up stressed, irritated, or upset may start to soften and smile. Soon after, the energy of the restaurant shifts to be friendlier and more harmonious. Feeling this energetic shift himself, the server continues to benefit from the aftereffects of his initiated compassion. We can all do this, too, whenever we choose to embody a more compassionate response in our own daily interactions.
This harmonious, socially coherent state has allowed humans to evolve and thrive as a species. Banding together in collaborative ways enables some of us to meet our fundamental needs for food, shelter, child care, and health care while others pursue art, music, technology, and other interests that bring them and others joy or make it easier for us to live longer or more fulfilling lives.
Creating sustained social coherence requires more than making sure we’re not dysregulated at an individual level; we also need to be able to extend compassion, empathy, and even support to others. When we embody compassion we send regulating signals to those around us so that they’re better able to feel safe, coherent, and more connected to the group. We’re better able to empathize, or to be present with others in their emotional world by listening attentively as they share their experiences instead of becoming distracted by our thoughts or feelings about what is being shared. And we’re able to ask questions to better understand the other person’s perspective before making assumptions or disregarding their viewpoint.
As we develop social coherence, we’re also better able to notice the times when we feel unsafe or combative, giving us the opportunity to calm and ground ourselves by taking space away from the group or reaching out to a trusted loved one for help or support to co-regulate. Once we return to a more open state, we can practice collaboration by honoring one another’s differences while focusing on the group’s shared goals. We’re able to be curious about one another, even if we’re at odds over certain issues, and find ways to move forward while retaining our own sense of individual safety. With social coherence, we can stay an I even as we connect with others as a we.
To increase social coherence, it’s helpful to notice or seek out others who allow us to feel safe and at ease. On the other hand, if we notice we struggle to feel comfortable or at ease around certain people, we can communicate our need to take space and choose to re-engage with them when we feel ready and able—not when we don’t have the internal resources to needed to navigate the interaction. Though it’s not possible to avoid all stressful or upsetting interactions or experiences, social coherence increases our ability to tolerate stress and other activating emotions. And when we cultivate a community where all members feel safe and at ease we can all develop deeper, more authentic connections. Finding and rooting yourself in just one community where you feel a sense of belonging or social coherence can help you build and sustain the safety you need to extend coherence to your wider world.