Self Help Techniques: Brain Gym

"My body has wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough." - Noel Coward

Health consciousness has escalated to a billion dollar industry while the toll on the body plunges to new stress deficits. The rise in medical treatments due to stress related illness is unprecedented. Awareness brings new stress pressure. Pressured by time to de-stress and balance the body, yet feeling guilty or bad if you do not. You spin, bounce, twist, stretch, while remembering to chant, deep breath and still have time to rush to that energy treatment. With body in starvation mode existing on rice cakes and tofu, you search frantically for foods that meet the new fad diet criteria, free from fat, carbs, protein, calories, not to mention flavor. Then there's that constant barrage of warnings that just what you are eating is killing you. You scurry to detoxify from the arsenic, metal, lead, PCB, chemicals and hormones by drowning in high priced water. With little return for your efforts, some turn stress to trauma by cutting, tucking and sucking any body part that refuses to cooperate. This ongoing battle with the body distracts you from the true enemy.

"You may not be what you think you are, but what you think, you are." - Jim Clark

Brain Sabotage

The true enemy is closer than you think, it is what you think. It is what your brain has been up to. Left unchecked, your thinking spreads a stress virus through the brain and body, corrupting your well intended exercise program. While your body sweats and frets, your brain is up to blame and regret. Misery has a theme sound. Some variation of deprivation. "I hate my body. I can't stand aging. Change is so hard. Nothing ever works. I'll never look or be enough. If only. Yes, but. You should. Why?" Like a spoiled brat, your brain left unattended flashes back to the misery archives and wallows in regrets, mistakes, injustices, resentments, grudges, criticism and blame. For a novel twist, your brain jumps to the future striving, hopelessness, powerlessness, confusion, and and feelings of being overwhelmed and unworthiness. Your body is exhausted from your brain's running rampant... the treadmill pales in comparison.

"Consciousness is what you pay attention to." - Neuroscientist Karl Pribram

Stress is your perception. Stress causes the hippocampus to get short-circuited, resulting in the memory not being coded in words or symbols. The memory is stored as somatic sensations, behavioral re-enactments, nightmares, flashbacks that can exaggerate with each replay. The brain and body actually split, disassociate, fragment, and repress. Even low levels of chronic stress cause the amygdala, the brain command center that responds to perceived fear, to prompt the autonomic nervous system to release excess cortisol hormone. This flight or fight body response over time, raises blood pressure, weakens the immune system, tenses the muscles, shrinks the hippocampus affecting memory, and severs the neuron connection in the brain and body communication pathway.

When this standoff continues over time, the brain body responds with limited information in destructive reaction. In an extreme case in the 1994 California earthquake, a woman in her mid thirties was jolted from bed. Frightened, she ran to protect her child. Her husband found her in the child's room face down on the floor dead. Death caused by fear. On a daily basis, perceived stress, rooted in fear, destroys the critical body resources, the circuits blow, disrupts communication and balance, and leaves disease and death in the aftermath. The brain body refuse to cooperate. No wonder stress interventions, medical or natural have to be repeated and render less than optimal results.

At the other extreme, my paraplegic client innately understood. I asked her how she dealt with her father falling asleep for mere seconds when he careened into a ditch six years ago, leaving her paralyzed. "It never crossed my mind to blame him." It was a marvel to observe the teenager left armless from a shark attack while surfing. It appeared to launch her spirit of determination to new heights. Though severely limited, she surfs again. Half empty or half full? A stumbling block or an opportunity? It's your choice. Get to know your brain body.

Blame it on the chicken or the egg? Or the terrorist at large, or the one at work, or home, or your own brain and body. Blame is an exercise in futility. Left unchecked, your misery thoughts create pathways in your brain that form deep mental ruts that make it difficult to reorganize information and see it from a different perspective. What you brain perceives, it begins to believe, true or not.

Your body symptoms hold encrypted messages. Research tells us that 80% of the brain is in the organs of the body. The Chinese knew this for thousands of years and gave us the Acupuncture Meridian System to interpret body imbalances and bring harmony by establishing brain and body communication. Every body bulge, wrinkle, crack or pain contains messages. They tell you what your brain body is up to and exactly how to bring balance through meeting each need.

Brain Body Talk Your brain body is like a kid who throws a fit if ignored but cooperates when you are willing to exercise your ability to listen. Basic needs of each organ are below: