If you’ve ever been in love, it’s highly likely that someone who knows you well may have remarked on the permanent grin on your face, your daydream stares, the docile gaze, or maybe said something like “OMG, you’re glowing!” or “You look radiant!” or “Love looks good on you!” So what is this mysterious glow that we telegraph to the world when we’re feeling and sending love?
The Science of Light and Love
A scientifically controlled case study on light photon emission conducted by German researchers at the University of Kassel in Witzenhausen has revealed something extraordinary about the human heart. The chest and heart area of a person generally emits only 20 photons of light per second. However, when a person practices simple heart-centered meditation while sending love and light to another person in genuine need, something remarkable happens: they emit an amazing 100,000 photons per second within the visible to ultraviolet range.
This represents a five-thousand-fold increase in photonic light emission – enough light to potentially be visible to the naked eye. Scientists estimate that 1,000 photons per second entering the eye are sufficient to create a visible sensation, making it past the lens and inner eye fluid to be picked up by the photoreceptors at the back of the eye. This may explain why we literally see people “glowing” when they’re in love.
But here’s what makes this discovery even more profound: this amplification doesn’t happen simply from feeling good or meditating in isolation. Two key elements are required. First, the person must be in a state of heart-centered meditation or coherence. Second, there must be a genuine heartfelt connection – a recipient with a real need to receive healing or light, and the intention to serve that person from a place of compassion and love. When these elements align, the light being sent out becomes sustained rather than sporadic.
What Is Coherence?
In physics, coherence describes a state where waves are perfectly aligned and synchronized, like a laser beam versus scattered light. When we bring this concept to our own being, coherence means that all our energy – our heart, mind, body, and intention – is moving in the same direction, creating a powerful, focused state rather than dispersed, fragmented energy.
The HeartMath Institute has demonstrated that emotions like gratitude, appreciation, compassion, and love are among the most effective ways to bring ourselves into a heart-coherent state. When we achieve this coherence, we access greater potential within ourselves. We move from a state of internal noise and static to one of harmony and laser-like focus, the heart and the brain come into a synchronized coherent state to focus our attention in a unified way.
Research from HeartMath has also shown something remarkable about the power of coherence between people: a person in a state of coherence can affect another person’s state of coherence through intention, causing it to increase at an appointed time when the two people are in frequency resonance. This is true whether both people are in physical proximity or at a distance – what quantum physicists call non-local connection.
Love as Giving
Ancient wisdom traditions have long understood something profound about the nature of love. The Kabbalistic teachings and certain Gnostic Gospels, including the Gospel of Philip (62), teach that “love is giving, faith is receiving.” This isn’t just poetry – it’s a fundamental truth about the energetic nature of love.
Love is an outward-reaching energy, not something we passively wait to receive. It’s about what we can give, about genuine service to others from a place of heartfelt care and compassion. When we approach love this way – as an active force of giving and service – we naturally move into a state of coherence that amplifies our capacity to generate and transmit light.
The Quantum Level: Beyond Space and Time
At the quantum level, something even more extraordinary becomes possible. When we understand ourselves as quantum beings, we realize that we are fundamentally connected at the deepest level of reality. Through this quantum connection, when we achieve a coherent state, we can send love and light non-locally – across space and time – to those we care about.
They don’t need to be in the room with us. Through quantum entanglement and the non-local, non-temporal nature of consciousness, a strong loving relationship creates a bridge that transcends physical distance. This isn’t mysticism; it’s an application of quantum principles to our lived experience of love and connection.
Imagine not only amplifying the photonic light emanating from your heart, but achieving coherence within. Picture yourself emanating light and love-energy from your entire being in a sustained, focused way. This is the potential that lies dormant within each of us – the capacity to become, quite literally, a being of light.
Beginning with Gratitude
If you want to love your life and experience more good in it, the journey begins with gratitude. While different people may have varying associations with what “love” means, gratitude and appreciation are more universal. They serve as a gateway emotion that brings us into heart coherence and opens us to greater love – love for our relationships, for our lives, and for ourselves.
Immerse yourself in the love that you experience in life. Know that when you wrap yourself in love, you not only feel it on the inside, but you amplify and radiate it out to the world and to others you direct your love toward. You can contribute positive, loving energy to the collective consciousness, which in turn positively affects the lives of countless others.
Awakening to Your Quantum Nature
We truly are beings of light. The question is: will we awaken to this potential within us? Will we remember who we are at the quantum level and learn to consciously direct the extraordinary power that resides in every cell and atom of our being?
Fall in love with your life. Begin by appreciating and feeling gratitude for the things you have, the people you love, the breath of life in your body. From this foundation of gratitude, cultivate the coherence that allows you to become a sustained source of light and love – not just for yourself, but for all those whose lives you touch, whether they’re standing beside you or halfway around the world.
In a state of coherence, connected to the quantum field, you become a living bridge between the physical and the transcendent, between separation and unity, between darkness and light. This is not just the physics of love – it is love as a fundamental force of creation, healing, and transformation.
And it begins with a single heartbeat, aligned in gratitude, reaching out in service, glowing with the light of love.
SOURCES:
Bair, P. “Visible Light Radiated from the Heart with Heart Rhythm Meditation” (Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine Journal Archives, 2005) LINK
McCraty, Atkinson, Tomasino & Bradley — The Coherent Heart (2009) LINK
“The Grateful Heart: The Psychophysiology of Appreciation” (McCraty & Childre, chapter in The Psychology of Gratitude, 2004)
The Effects of Emotions on Short-Term Power Spectrum Analysis of Heart Rate Variability (McCraty et al., 1995 / Am J Cardiol) LINK
Cardiac Coherence: A New, Noninvasive Measure… (1996). LINK
HeartMath has published and posted work claiming heart-rhythm synchronization between people under certain conditions. Their “Energetic Communication” material and research library describe instances where close pairs (living/working together, strong relationships) show synchronization of heart-rhythm patterns — but they emphasize it’s not common during ordinary waking states and tends to appear under specific conditions (close relationship, intention, training). heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/energetic-communication/
heartmath.org/research/research-library/dissertations/attaining-heart-coherence-improves-health-and-affects-others-coherence-levels/
