Self-Regulating Emotions and Making Peace Investible. Member Spotlight: Sheva Carr
Sheva Carr is the founding CEO Fyera® and Heart Ambassadors® and the architect of HeartMath’s HeartMastery® Program as well as the founding Executive Director of the Fyera Foundation and Sunflower SunPower Kids. She speaks with people globally on how to access heart intelligence, and on how to receive the benefits of the heart’s impact on consciousness, health, performance, creativity, and social change. As the Co-Vice President and Representative of the United Nations Peace Messenger Organization Pathways to Peace, Sheva connected with MBBI at the Commission on the Status of Women in 2012.
Building a Business Plan for Peace and Heart Ambassadors
The Business Plan for Peace is an acclaimed book by Dr. Scilla Elworthy, and now a yearlong online course co-taught by Sheva and Scilla together through Sheva’s Heart Ambassadors Program that you could register for here. The Business Plan for Peace consists of 25 proven ways to invest in peace successfully. If you’d like to watch a conversation with Scilla, Sheva, Greg Braden, and Prabha MBBI’s own Executive Director, on the Business Plan for Peace you may do so here! The statistics show that $2 billion dollars of investment over ten years is the cost of preventing war, whereas $1.7 trillion (or $1700 Billion) dollars per year is spent on war and military machinery.
The HeartAmbassador Program is spearheaded by Sheva as the training and capacity building community that supports individuals as well as organizations to become powerfully effective agents of change in their homes, communities and the world. Its programs involve both inner and outer, real-world work. They foster self-regulation based on peer-reviewed researched tools and techniques, along with project incubation in harmony with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals from the UN.
Also, at the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on the Sustainable Development Goals this summer, Sheva, and Scilla will be running a workshop on the Business Plan for Peace and the inner self-regulation skills from HeartMath® taught at Heart Ambassadors in collaboration with UNITAR. SDG 16, which focuses on peace, is the least invested SDG of the 17 even though the other SDGs depend upon it for their success and it was the goal around which the UN was founded. The conflict resolution self-regulation skills of Heart Ambassadors alongside the methodology of the Business Plan for Peace can help make sustainable peacebuilding a more concrete value proposition and therefore much more appealing to impact investors.
Heart Ambassadors is an official training company for the Federation of International Civil Servants (FICSA), which focuses on conflict resolution, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution for global mediators. Sheva and her husband Robert co-taught eleven ‘Lunch N Learns’ for the United Nations Staff through FICSA. You may explore those webinars by visiting www.youaretheun.org.
The Neuroscience of Peacebuilding
Sheva began her peacebuilding career in Nicaragua working with street children. Her visit to Nicaragua occurred during its civil war and upon her return to North America, she was exhibiting physical and emotional symptoms that were difficult for physicians to diagnose. Years later, as a young med student and a volunteer at the HeartMath Institute, she learned she had undiagnosed PTSD from living in the war zone. Using HeartMath’s tools, that Sheva now champions, her symptoms disappeared.
Our hearts are a key portal to self-regulating, and the intelligence for that is connected to our emotions.
The 40+ tools developed in evidenced-based research at HeartMath facilitate access to our heart intelligence, combining the fields of physiology, peace, and neuroscience to track and regulate heart rhythm patterns. This detailed awareness of one’s own heartbeat leads to more self-capable individuals in times of trauma or charged dynamics, empowering them to keep their neurological pathways to higher brain centers open. By fusing neuroscience into peacebuilding, mediators are better able to overcome their own PTSD-like symptoms in order to be more effective mediators, avoiding the perils of secondary trauma and bringing more innovative and creative perspectives to intracted situations. This is known as emotional self-regulation. Sheva has a special welcome letter about this translated into many other languages to be given to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and refugees!
She observed equally efficient and empowering results in her patients when they applied the HeartMath tools. This inspired her to reach as many people as possible with the practical yet powerful potential of applied heart intelligence, and out of that passion and compassion was born HeartMastery. Furthermore, her impactful trip to Nicaragua led to the creation of the Fyera Foundation to help teach these tools to soldiers undergoing traumatic experiences and to aid the children of Nicaragua.
Sheva is also working on a project to end sex trafficking worldwide through Operation Big Sister. Delightfully, the MBBI-Los Angeles Regional Group hosted an Operation Big Sister Awareness Raising Event! If you would like to host an event in your home or community you can sign up to do so here! Furthermore, July 30th is the United Nations World Day for Ending Trafficking in Persons – a great time to raise awareness about what each of us can do to contribute to efforts to end “the greatest human rights violation in the history of humanity.”
Join the Movement to Revolutionize Peacebuilding
Sheva also mentors teens from Palestine and Israel in peace dialogues through Creativity for Peace and is collaborating with Peace One Day to create a mass meditation event on the International Day of Peace on September 21st. Today, June 21, begins the three-month countdown to the International Day of Peace. To find out how you can participate in the Peace Day events, you can subscribe to Sheva’s newsletter here and/or register for a complimentary 30-minute consultation here to learn more and talk with Sheva’s team about how you can collaborate with Sheva.
On Monday, September 9, 2019, Sheva and Scilla will be presenting a webinar on how to Become a Powerful Ambassador for Peace Without Losing Your Courage through MBBI’s Monthly Webinars. In this webinar, you will learn about the most up to date, proven, real-world frameworks, tools, practices, and support for building peace locally and globally. Register here!
Article by Ben Lutz, MBBI Writer
- Fyera and Heart Ambassadors are registered trademarks of Sheva Carr
- HeartMastery is a registered trademark of HeartMath LLC
- HeartMath is a registered trademark of Quantum Intech Inc