I have worked with HeartMath in various capacities since 1996- close to 28 years- and am currently a Co-Director of our Organizational Division and HeartMastery Program, in addition to my roles within my own organizations. I don’t know exactly when I began to envision bringing HeartMath’s science and simple-to-use paradigm shifting tools to heads of state and the geopolitical process. I imagine it was within weeks of seeing myself heal from long standing complex PTSD and experiencing the power of the heart to transform not only my life, but my patients’ lives, and the total world around me. As I wrote at the time, practicing HeartMath took my life from “black and white living to technicolor Oz.” By the early 2000s I had vision boards with images of bringing HeartMath to the United Nations (at the time I had no idea how to make that happen) and when practicing the tools I would radiate heart to global leaders and decision makers that their movements might be defined by the higher operating system of heart and cortical brain intelligence, rather than limbic defensiveness, fear and stress. By 2012 I had attended my first UN Conference through UN Peace Messenger Organization Pathways To Peace, whose founder Avon Mattison had taken one of my HeartMath classes. I have a framed thank you letter in my office from President Obama, for consulting to his office of public engagement. Toward the end of the decade, I had presented HeartMath at the United Nations High Level Political Forum and had had the privilege of meeting privately overseas with multiple heads of state and high level political officials.

It was through those exquisite experiences that I decided bringing HeartMath to high level political leaders was a luminous dream, not the real one. It was not wining and dining with people in suits handcuffed by lobbies of all kinds that mattered to me as much as remaking the world in a way that it could genuinely work better for all life. This led me to let go of that dream, to change my focus and work toward bringing HeartMath tools and science to the grass roots where daily decisions determine how life thrives or fails to survive. I lived (and still live) through the thought experiment “What if we bring heart intelligence, love and care to our most intractable world issues? Hunger, water, war, trafficking, climate crises, species extinction, education, gender based and other forms violence, disasters, and so much more?” That lived question blossomed into The Fyera Foundation and HeartAmbassadors’ 12 domains of projects in over 30 countries and 5 continents, nurtured by hundreds of volunteers. It also led to our deeply fulfilling collaboration with the Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma, as she is known for short) charity “Embracing the World.” 

When Amma was appointed by the President of India as the Chair of the C20, which was the location hosting the G20 in 2023, I was invited by Embracing the World to apply as a consultant because of our past collaborations. To give a little context, the C20 is one of more than a dozen consulting bodies to the G20, the annual gathering of heads of state and foreign ministers from the top 20 economic superpower countries in the world. One of those economies is The European Union, so 46 countries make up the G20. In their yearly gathering, the G20 Heads of State issue a declaration of policies and commitments they are willing to both initiate and prioritize in principle, as well as from their pocketbooks. The C20 is the Civil Society consulting branch of the G20, which spends 10 months leading up to the leaders’ gathering making recommendations and writing policy proposals to be accepted or rejected in the final weeding and seeding process at the September Summit of world leaders. 

When our application to consult to the C20 was accepted, I gathered with my community of HeartAmbassadors in our members call and played a game, a game I invite you to play with us now. If we were given audience with the 46 leaders of the wealthiest countries in the world, what would we want them to know? What would we advise them to do with their resources? 

I then invited anyone from our community of HeartAmbassadors, my board, our partners at places like the Red Cross, and the HeartMath executive team to join us in our sometimes nightly (and wee hour of the morning) afterwork meetings to write our answers to those questions. Everyone who participated volunteered all of their time and passion. No one was paid. We were heart guided and heart led. At every meeting we did HeartMath tools together, sending love to the people, planet, plants and animals we care so much about, intending that our focus and effort would radiate to the world for the well-being of all being. When we hit impasses or uncertainty, we used our HeartMath tools to remove or climb boulders toward the next summit. The core team that spontaneously showed up for midnight mural-making of visions for a new world all turned out to be HeartMath Certified Trainers. They included me, my Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sandra Solano, My Chief Nursing Officer Lisa Marie Gorman, My COO Melinda Dewey, our Northern European Director Nienke Van Bezooijen, our cherished member and Red Cross Volunteer David Dante, our liaison to the United Nations Commons Cluster Kirstin Kurtz, my husband and co-director with me of HeartMath’s Organizational Division Robert Browning, on a couple of occasions Jeff Goelitz the Director of Education for the HeartMath Institute, the incredible members of my nonprofit board of directors, Linda MacIntyre the Chief Nurse of The Red Cross, and others who popped in and out to add energetic support. It is worth noting that the collaborative energy of our meetings was unto itself something new and somewhat sparkling. Hard to put words to, I might call it egoless service in which all of us were 100% committed to our intended outcome for the world and 100% surrendered to how it might appear in form and what part we might individually play. The closest thing I’ve seen to it in the is “Total Football” in Europe, in which soccer players don’t have ‘positions’- anyone can play anyone’s part, and everyone is dribbling for the same outcome. All are willing to pass the glory of scoring to anyone else on the team at any moment because in the truest, seamless sense we only experience one of us here. It was a single heartbeat fed by the unison of many different cells pumping in a syncytium of synchronized love and creation which unto itself, had no other outcome occurred, was the thrill of a lifetime for us as a team. 

Early in the process, our youth member Phoenix Rose Gauthier (17) reached out asking if she could attend the conference in person. At my prompting she wrote a stunning grant for funding, which my board approved, and we sent her and her mother Kansas Carradine (also a HeartMath Certified Trainer, HeartAmbassador and now our G20 Project Manager) as in-person delegates to India. The steadfast heart presence Kansas and Phoenix held in their physical attendance at the working group meetings provided pacemaker cells to the heart of the process, ensuring all the language that we were writing and sending in virtually could be understood and integrated meaningfully. We truly could not have accomplished what we did without the remarkable presence of Kansas and Phoenix, and our other in person delegates who championed the heart, Leidy Caballero and Patricia Lim (a HeartMath trainer from Brazil who was also in India of her own motivation!). In addition to sending our own delegates to represent our input on the ground in India, in the spirit of SDG 17 (partnerships) and SDG 10 (reducing inequalities) we sponsored several other organizations from developing nations to attend who could not have otherwise.

In 10 months, with 6 in-person delegates sent to India including a youth, we produced over 250 pages of policy recommendations, problem solving justifications, white papers, population and economic impact statements, and multiple poster and panel presentations and webinars. We consulted to the following working groups:

• Education and Digital Transformation
• Technology and Security
• Sustainable Communities (for Environmental Protection and Climate Change)
• Gender Equity 
• Disability, Equity and Justice 
• Integrative Health 

The most surprising discovery we made through our writing process is that we now have scientific evidence showing that self-regulating your heart rhythms reduces implicit bias and discrimination, which is obviously extremely valuable to those working in the domain of diversity, equity and inclusion, and to equalizing our world.

As the lore goes, the entire bible can be summed up in one sentence, “Love thy neighbor as thyself. Everything else is commentary.” If we were to create a similar essential oil for these thousands of human powered hours of work and love we invested in the G20, it would be “Cultivate a global humanity that experiences and treats all life on earth as one interconnected family, interdependent and thriving through mutual respect, honor, love and the power of the heart.” Tactically speaking to achieve that at the policy level our recommendations could be summarized as “Prioritize heart intelligence and the capacity for emotional self-regulation skills at the same level as reading, writing and ‘rithmatic in global education and employment.” To give you a sense of how well received our input was, in the Gender Equity Thematic Book alone, out of 94 pages of recommendations from over 1700 organizations, 7 pages of the book consisted of content we wrote. In all our input we emphasized the importance of selecting emotional literacy skills that are evidenced based and include Heart Rate Variability (HRV) self-regulation as a foundation, based on the proven efficacy of these tools and the science behind them for individual, social and global outcomes.

The C20 is one consultation branch to the G20 – there are more than a dozen listed on page 32 of the Leaders Declaration acknowledgements, some belonging to civil society and many others from industry and government.  And the C20 alone had thousands of pages of input and thousands of consulting organizations contributing. Imagine that all this effort gets distilled into only 34 pages of commitments the G20 leaders are willing to make. We knew the chances of our input making it to the final document were slim to none; our perseverance and commitment was fed by the feeling that the contribution we were making was more in the energy field than in the final result. However, that did not stop us as a team from visualizing together the popping open of a bottle of champagne upon seeing our influence in the final declaration!

Imagine our awe and wonder then, when, in mid-September, we read this as the first policy under the Education Commitments in the 2023 Leaders Declaration:

For those who teach HeartMath professionally, this single policy can open unprecedented doors and funding and avenues of access for you! Never before now has socio-emotional skill building been placed on par at the global policy level with literacy and numeracy!

“It is amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t need credit.”

-Ronald Reagan 

This, and other policies like it which express our value of honoring all life through emotional and heart intelligence in the domains of integrative health and environmental protection, might well have made it into the Leaders Declaration without the committed hours and expertise and raw audacity of me and my team. And I think that is actually the best news of all in this whole story. We were water droplets in a tsunami wave, a small part in a larger movement of many who are seeking solutions based in compassion, love, and heart. The Theme of this year’s G20 was “One Earth. One Family. One Future.” After the gathering of the Education Working Group, a newsletter announced “C20 Summit on Education Focuses on a Culture of the Heart.” My little team of HeartMath trainers and I are not driving the change, we are riding it. The heart’s time has come, a world based on love is knocking on our door. And each one of us can answer the call and let it in. Hallelujah! 

When I was asked to write this summary for the HeartMath Institute, there was a question they presented which surprised and delighted me. 

 “How tired were you and your team?”
I laughed when I read it, because it made me realize that it was the first time in my life when I I didn’t feel tired at all! My tiredness is often a feeling of being underutilized by life when it seems to need us the most. During this consultancy, I felt more energized than ever before, and my team reported the same. We were in the perpetual recharging station of the heart that happens when one’s skills and abilities line up with one’s passion and love and soul and the needs of the world. Apparently, there are limitless energy reserves there! And we needed those reserves- our writing process needed to be extremely nimble as many of us were in North America and the meetings were all happening in India. We would get deadlines issued while we were asleep and sometimes have only hours or a day or two to deliver on them. All of us work more than full time at our jobs, but somehow, we managed to fit it all in. It was heart magic, and a manifestation of what Goethe wrote when he said 

What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it,
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—
Begin it, and the work will be completed!

And later cited by William Hutchinson Murray

“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no one could have dreamed would have come their way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

I know that the work of heart never manifests without meeting our own inner growth process. The night the application to consult to the G20 was sent to me by my colleague at Embracing the World via Whattsapp, I held my beloved and deathly ill cat in my arms debating whether to take him to the 24 hour emergency vet. It was a moment of pause- my initial reaction “I cannot deal with this whattsapp right now, I have a life to save!” But then I remembered what my first cat taught me through HeartMath’s Cut Thru technique when he was dying of cancer, “Don’t care so much about one life that you forget to care about all life.” As my husband drove the car to the veterinary ER, I wrote the G20 consultancy application and responded to the whattsapp in the passenger seat. And the rest, as they say, is history ☺ My cat is now thriving and living well. Hopefully, thanks to following my heart with HeartMath tools that helped me manage my stress that night so we could make this contribution to the G20, it will add to a momentum where one day all life on our planet will thrive and live well, as well. 

As I hold myself, and my HeartAmbassadors members and organizational HeartMath Certified Trainer community in the tenderness of our insecurities, our sense of insufficiency at global issues and despair, our uncertainty of how to proceed or to make the best difference we can and let our love have impact, I often think of Yeats’ quote ,“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” 

I think turning the tables on that quote was part of the game we played – what if we took our love, our skill our knowledge and threw our passionate intensity and conviction at it just because we can? What have we got to lose? Except maybe a couple of nights of sleep! All made up for by the sheer joy and hope in the process! 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

About the author:

Sheva Carr is the architect and director of HeartMath’s HeartMastery Program, a Co-Director of HeartMath’s Organizational Division, and the founder of The Fyera Foundation and HeartAmbassadors organizations which work to bring heart-based interventions and science, with HeartMath at the foreground, to the front lines of work on global issues of sustainable development like violent conflict, poverty, clean water access, human trafficking, and more. To learn more or to apply to study or collaborate with them write to [email protected] or [email protected] 

To read our full heart-based contributions to the G20 visit www.fyera.org and look under Projects, G20/C20 Consultancy.