Category Archives: mind

The Five Tibetans plus one

Posted on by
3

My training to become a massage therapist includes training my own body. We practice and are graded on our own biomechanics when delivering massage. After just a few weeks (and considering there are students who are right out of high school and from very conventional backgrounds), the teachers are beginning to convey that massage therapists transmit their own health and well-being through their hands — the energetic connection.

Just this past week, my class’ primary practical massage teacher, Cindy Anderson, introduced us to the Five Tibetans.

I’ve encountered this series of exercises before, years ago. Cindy says we will be doing them regularly and that past students often thank her for teaching them — and tell of practicing them on mountaintops and other unusual places!

Curious Mind here googled “Five Tibetans” to learn more (especially to learn that they may not always be taught well on videos), and then headed over to Wikipedia to read about them.

Highlights: The Five Tibetan Rites are reputed to be at least 2,500 years old. The origins are unknown. They predate modern yoga (asana). Some of the exercises bear some similarity to certain asanas, so perhaps they influenced yogasana. Who knows?

They are done in order as a vinyasa (flowing sequence) and are said to stimulate the chakras. Many other claims have been made as well — they are a fountain of youth, reversing the aging process, and such. I think you can safely say they build strength, flexibility, and balance, and they will give you more energy.

You start by doing a small number of repetitions — 1, 3, or 7, depending on your comfort and ability level, but no more to start. You add repetitions slowly until you can do 21 of each. Add repetitions so slowly that you do not feel sore the next day. Never do more than 21. (Although apparently some yoga geeks do 108 of each! Make up a rule that works for you, is what I say.)

The Wikipedia description is good, including that you stand erect and take two deep breath cycles between each. Cindy has us exhale through rounded lips with eyes open wide.

There’s a whole blog about them: The Five Tibetans — Expert Advice, Support, and Information. It offers free downloads of the original English description of the exercises, posters of the exercises and warm-ups (should you need them), and a PDF showing 7 undulations to relieve office tension that will be helpful to readers with desk jobs who are concerned about their health.

The blog is connected to a website that offers DVDs showing you how to do the exercises and even Five Tibetans teacher training.

However, if you just want to see them, here’s a pretty good animated description.

If you do them for the first time from reading this blog, and if you don’t already have a regular yoga practice, please please please do each one very slowly and mindfully, tuning into what’s happening in your body, and never go beyond what’s comfortable for you. Be very gentle, especially with your neck and back.  Be mindful and err on the side of caution!

If you are not in shape, please download the warm-up exercises mentioned above and do them first.

Right now, I think of them as an alternative to a morning sun salutation — and that’s just where I’m coming from now. Both sun salutations and the Five Tibetans build strength and flexibility. They work the major muscles and joints of the body. They are fun to do, as well, at least for me. I’ll mix them in with my daily sun salutations, and perhaps later I’ll write a post about what I like about each practice.

The sixth Tibetan rite is a breathing practice. It is not usually taught in the US (our culture tends to frown on celibacy) but is recommended only for those living a monastic or committed celibate life. Wikipedia included a brief description and a link here. You do this exercise only to transfer the energy of the sexual urge up into the spiritual centers of the body.

Sonic pleasures from Austin, Texas, USA: Loping Buzzard and Libby Kirkpatrick

Posted on by
1

I’ve gotten comments and/or blog subscriptions from South Africa, Australia, England, and elsewhere overseas, and what overseas readers (and perhaps some in the U.S.) may not know is that my hometown of Austin, Texas, is well-known for music.

A national television show, Austin City Limits, is filmed here, and the city plays host to the Austin City Limits Music Festival each fall and the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in the spring. Austin’s official slogan is “Live Music Capital of the World.”

It’s a musicians’ town, and the music here is eclectic. I’m using this blog post to recommend a couple of CDs by local musicians. They are very different, but each one wakes you up in its own way and keeps on giving by offering enough variety and depth to keep it fresh on repeated listenings.

~~

When I first heard The Buzzard Has Landed by Loping Buzzard, the Biblical quote “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord” came to mind, and I wanted to laugh with joy. Loping Buzzard’s business card has two descriptors: didjeridu and noisician.

 This is a collection of audio projects completed from 2005 to 2010 with a vast number of didjeridus along with gopichand, berimbau, danmo, cajon, cuica, bilma, a variety of flutes, drums, homemake noise makers, and electronics. The styles range form impromptu drum circles to pure musique concrete to Dada pop to horror to comedy to surreal.

I don’t even know what some of those instruments are, but they must be fun, judging by the sound. It’s not traditional music, but it is artful sound, interesting to the ear (to my ear, anyway).

I think of this as “wake up” music, not something you would listen to when you need soothing, but fantastic for times when you need some sonic inspiration. (Okay, I mostly listen to music in my car. It’s fantastic during traffic gridlock!)

When I listen to this CD, I imagine the joy Loping Buzzard must have experienced when he was creating this music, and I feel it too.

I notice more each time I listen.

You can get The Buzzard Has Landed as a digital download or a CD from CD Baby ($9.99, and they make it fun, too), and as mp3 files from Amazon.com ($8.99). It’s available on iTunes too.

~~

My other recommendation, a different kind of wake-up music, is Heroine by singer-songwriter Libby Kirkpatrick, who’s lived in Austin for 10 years and has recently relocated to Boston.

Every song but one is an original, and that exception is her cover of Alice by Tom Waits. I certainly understood her homage to TW as recognition by one original, unique, lyrical songwriter of another, a master, and Libby is well on her way to mastery. She’s someone to follow.

I feel the joy here too. With lyrics connecting the Big Bang to the sound of a woman yelling (Heroine), warning her girlfriend away from some appealing but no-good Lothario (Devil Inside), singing about the black hole inside us all (Neverland), mentioning her personal star (you have one too, I know you do), and so much more, Libby has a way with words and tunes that is just plain heart and soul satisfying. Full of lyrical delight, Heroine goes into your ears, gets under your skin, enters your heart, and wakes you up.

The transition to motherhood is a journey of heroism for every woman ~ necessity being the mother of invention! These songs are the slow release of the ‘maiden self’ and the build up to the realization of ‘mother’ in layers; song by song there is a story told of the subsequent degrees of letting go.

Yes. It’s about self-realization and letting go. Repeatedly I detected a mature Buddhist philosophy about life underlying Libby’s lyrics — Big Mind, Big Heart, topped with loads of fun.

If you enjoy well-written, fresh lyrics, soulful depth, and artful arrangements (it’s rare to hear the level of creativity in the arrangements on a CD by a local/regional artist), you’ll enjoy this. I notice more each time I listen.

You can buy Heroine at CD Baby, iTunes, and Amazon.com, as well as from Heart Music.

Your meditation cushion is your body

Posted on by
Reply

I’m sharing a link to an Elephant Journal article, an interview with meditation master Reggie Ray. It’s part 1 of 3, and after reading this, I will be looking for the rest of it.

This section of the interview particularly caught my attention. See if it catches yours.

When I found out that I was going to do this interview with you, I sat down and listened to some other interviews you had done. On your website I found an interview entitled, “The Body As The Guru.” In it you were talking about the spiritual path and daily life.  The host of the show said, “We have to take our practice off of the cushion,” which I have heard a thousand times. But your response was a new one on me. You said, “Or we have to redefine what it means to sit on a cushion.” You didn’t really go into what you meant in that interview… So, I am asking you to do elaborate on it now.

Reggie Ray: When we’re sitting on the cushion we are actually extending our awareness into our bodies. We are in a way present within the totality of our being, which on the surface is a somatic being. The information we need for our life arises within us, it becomes clear.

If you get up off the cushion and there is a transition into something else, which might be a lot heavier or disembodied that means you are not present in your life. Your cushion is your body. That happens whether you are sitting on a zafu or you are in your daily life.

You mentioned the transition from the cushion to the front door, so to speak. Basically, one is meditation, but the other is not. Is it fair to say that if there is a transition taking place, not only is there something off about the way that you are being present in your daily life, but also in your sitting practice? Is it possible that in such situations meditation is contrived? Is the transition happening because we are trying to zone out on the cushion or create some sort of meditative trance? Or are we present in the body while we are on the cushion, and then migrating into our head as we walk out of the door?

Reggie Ray: That’s a good point. If you sit down to meditate with some idea about a state of mind you are trying to get to, or have memory of some pleasant experience from the past, then you’re not doing anything different than sitting in a meeting and trying to make a good presentation, trying to impress the people around you. Only in this case, you are trying to impress yourself. That is not meditation. Meditation is when you sit and let go of all your effort, and allow yourself to be present.

That’s what meditation is.

So, as you’ve mentioned, joining your practice with your daily life—9 to 5, wife or husband, kids, and work—from the vajrayana’s point of view, this is the ideal situation. These aspects of our daily life have a capacity to break through our defenses, push our buttons, and invite us to unfold. You’ve said that spirituality is the unfolding of human personality towards its perfection. I am assuming that by “perfection” you do not mean some static idea about perfection. So what exactly do you mean when you say “perfection?”

Reggie Ray: Actually, instead of the term perfection, I would rather say, “fulfillment” or “realization.” In the same way that an animal goes through it’s life-cycle—from being an embryo, all the way to death—at the moment of death the biological, and I would say, spiritual imperative of being a lion or a worm is fulfilled.

 

So with human beings, we could use the analogy of initiation in indigenous societies. In indigenous societies, at a certain point people go through an initiation, which introduces them to the fact that life is much bigger than what they might have thought when they were children or even during adolescence. Our natural human awareness is limitless. Everything in creation has a life-cycle, and when people are allowed to unfold—when they are allowed to follow the natural, biological, and genetically driven cycle of what it means to be human—our understanding and awareness becomes bigger and bigger. We have more appreciation for other people’s points of view, for the world beyond our world—the animal world, the plant world, and the universe. That is what I am talking about.

There is a natural tendency towards what Buddhist call “enlightenment,” but it can also be seen in the indigenous societies. That is really what we are talking about.

In Buddhism we call it buddha-nature, but buddha-nature isn’t simply an established state. It is a process of being in the river of spiritual maturation that goes on-&-on, never reaching a static point. Perfection, in this case, refers to fulfilling the journey of the human life. When are fully and completely with what it means to be human, we have let go of any attempt to pin ourselves down, solidify ourselves, or encrust ourselves at any stage. It is an unending, open process. When we have completely let go of any attempt to withdrawal from life or freeze ourselves, that’s what I mean by perfection.

Why massage, yoga, shaking medicine, and movement make you feel so good

Posted on by
Reply

One of the coolest things I’ve learned in my first two weeks of massage school, besides that I actually know something from my years of experiencing bodywork and that my hands love connecting with people, is about fascia.

If you don’t know, fascia is the name for a type of connective tissue, a thin membrane. It is labeled superficial when it is right under the skin and deep when it surrounds, binds, and separates muscle. It’s really all the same — these terms just differentiate the location.

The semi-transparent membrane on an uncooked chicken breast is fascia.

Here’s a new word: thixotropism, from the Greek for touch and turning. It refers to the fascia’s ability to change from one state to another. Fascia has two states: a thin fluid (sol) and a thicker gel. In its thin state, it is fluid, pliant, and elastic, offering a wider range of movement. In its gel state, it is tougher, more inflexible, and restricts movement.

When the body is out of alignment, such as when the head is jutting forward, the fascia supporting those straining neck muscles become more gel-like, stiffer, and supportive.

When you feel stiff, it’s because the fascia is in its gel state.

Through touch, exercise, and/or stretching, fascia “melts” from gel to sol and becomes looser, more flexible, and elastic. This allows the muscles to be manipulated in massage, increases joint range of motion, and frees the body from restrictions in movement.

When you move fluidly and freely in your body, your fascia are in the sol state. And of course, that feels fantastic.

This is at least one piece of the physiology of why it feels so good to get a massage, do yoga, warm up your muscles through work or exercise, and do the movements of TRE and shaking medicine.

They literally transform stiffness into fluidity.

Conversely, this is why it feels bad to sit for prolonged periods, and why we need to stretch after the stillness of sleeping.

If you want to feel free in your body, move, shake — and get massages.

A reader shares his TRE/shaking medicine experience

Posted on by
Reply

In case you don’t read the comments on this blog but are interested in the trauma releasing exercises and shaking medicine, I’m posting a long comment from a reader as a regular post in order to reach more people.

Thank you so much, Richard, for sharing your experience.

Thank you, David Berceli, for bringing the world TRE.

Thank you, Bradford Keeney, for writing and sharing so much about shaking medicine.

I love the fluid body.

Hey Mary –

Been doing TRE for a few months now (think I commented here before possibly), and have taken a free workshop with one of the London trainers. I also notice I can allow it to come on at will, even standing up – the TRE trainer likened it to a hosepipe, and you can inhibit/disinhibit the flow, e.g. as if you were putting your foot on/off it. The explanation given was that humans generally walk around in constant inhibit-mode, and once you’ve done TRE a few times you gain the flexibility to allow it through. It took me about 4-6 weeks of daily practice to get to that point personally.

Btw, in terms of progress… it’s been plateaus with spurts of growth. Some things have changed drastically, others havent changed yet. The tension in my body has changed, and “getting stressed” now feels different in terms of the intensity and location of the tension that arises in my body.

I notice it never quite goes “how I want”… always how it wants. Some parts just shake for weeks, over and over, the same pattern, then suddenly shift in one session. Sometimes I think some things shifted and it comes back to that location for more, and sometimes new muscles start going at it that had previously been holding.

From what I understand TRE is a wildly individual process; very much a function of your personal trauma, your personal locations of chronic tension, and what emotions are entangled up with all of that. For me it’s very much about the abdomen, chest, and anxiety. For some people it’s depression, anger, etc.

What I do know for sure is a) it’s the only thing that gets me “unstressed” daily on a physiological level (and I’ve tried a lot), and b) I’ve gradually become much more the person I want to be; the person I feel I truly am; since starting with TRE.

Hope you and others are finding similar benefits!
Thanks
Richard

I notice that Richard started out with the TRE exercises and has transitioned to shaking medicine. My distinction is when you can stand up and shake at will, TRE has become shaking medicine.

I have a strong hunch that the vast majority of people need to learn TRE first, to learn how to allow shaking to happen. Once your body learns to trust the trembling and lets it move into various parts besides the legs (and of course that will take different time periods for different people), try it with your legs flat. Try it standing up. Try it sitting.

I agree that it’s like a pipeline you can turn on and off at will.

Eloquently said, Richard, that you’ve become much more the person you want to be, the person you truly are. This is truly energy medicine.

What you need to know about standing desks

Posted on by
Reply

To counteract the ill effects of sedentary (from the Latin sedentārius: sitting) jobs, manufacturers are beginning to offer standing desks. Actually, they aren’t new. According to Wikipedia, standing desks were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in the homes of the rich.

Furthermore, some of the world’s most talented writers wrote/write while standing. We’re talking Hemingway, Nabokov, Lewis Carroll,  and Thomas Wolfe.

Novelist Philip Roth, a great living writer, stands at a lectern to write and paces while he thinks, claiming to walk half a mile for every page he writes.

Who knows? Maybe writing is the one thing they did differently that helped them manifest their genius. It certainly seems to be better for the brain than sitting (see my previous post mentioning that movement of the sacrum pumps cerebro-spinal fluid, which nourishes the brain).

Perhaps before making the switch, you’re wondering how many more calories you would burn by standing instead of sitting. Here’s a calculator where you enter your weight and hours worked to find out the extra calories burned in a workday at a standing desk versus sitting. I’d burn 221 more calories per day. That’s very significant. I could lose a few extra pounds and then eat a little more!

Hmm. Could desk jobs be the real reason for the obesity problem in our society?

Adapting to a standing desk may take a week or so. Your feet may hurt from standing all day. You may be extra tired at first. Some people who’ve made the switch swear by a cushioned mat, like this writer, who had an adjustable IKEA Jerker desk (unfortunately discontinued) and switched it to standing mode. She writes about adjusting to it, which took her three days, and later using a mat and a footrest.

Of course, the least expensive way to create a standing desk is to simply put boxes, crates, or shelves on top of your regular desk and arrange your computer on them. You can create different levels for your monitor and keyboard if you like.

Personally, I’d put my big monitor at eye level and place an external keyboard at elbow level or slightly lower.

IKEA sells the least expensive standing desk that I found online, the Fredrik workstation for $119, shown below. There’s a wider version for $149. Assembly is required, of course.

Then there are the IKEA hackers — people who repurpose IKEA products to make what they want. Here’s an inexpensive conversion using PVC pipe.

Here’s another hack, the wide standing desk.

This article shows a couple of adjustable-height desks that allow users to flip a switch to adjust the height. This sounds great, for $700+.

Finally, here is a website devoted to creating your own treadmill desk. If you already have a treadmill, apparently you can do this for as little as $39, a significant savings over buying the top-of-the-line Steelcase Walkstation at $4,399, shown below.

Graphic showing why prolonged sitting is unhealthy

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a graphic showing the health risks of prolonged sitting, which I’ve blogged about before:

Besides the reasons shown here and described in the NY Times article link, here are a couple of more reasons why prolonged sitting creates dis-ease and why movement is good for you:

  1. The lymphatic system aids the immune system in destroying pathogens and filtering waste, and it delivers nutrients, oxygen, and hormones to the cells. It has no central pump, like the circulatory system. Instead, the lymphatic system depends on muscular movement, breathing, and gravity to move lymph throughout the body. Frequent movement is critical to move lymph. 
  2. Walking moves the sacrum, which acts as a pump for cerebro-spinal fluid, the fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. Cerebro-spinal fluid nourishes, removes toxins, and cushions the brain and spinal cord. 

Next, tips if you have a job that requires sitting.

Meditation and creativity

Posted on by
2

A lot has been written about how the practice of meditation helps people become calmer and more centered. Here’s a link to an article about how it can help people become more creative.

…can intelligence and creativity really be as “neuroplastic” as memory and motor skills? Intelligence, much less creativity, has not been conclusively linked with any one area in the brain. The closest analogues are the so-called executive functions, brain systems involved in planning, integrating of sensory information, and abstract thinking, that are thought to be concentrated in the prefrontal cortex. There is, says Aronson, a way to improve executive functioning, and it’s the very same practice prescribed by Alexander: mindfulness meditation.

I particularly liked the description of creativity:

It involves the ability to make unexpected connections, to move fluidly among concepts, to consolidate past memories, ideas, or impressions and arrive at new insights.

Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher: quotes from Joko Beck

Posted on by
Reply

Charlotte Joko Beck died yesterday, very peacefully, at the age of 94. She was a Zen teacher who made a major impact on American Buddhism.

Here’s a quote from an article that puts her work into perspective (no longer available online):

The Ordinary Mind School was among the first Zen communities to consciously engage the emotional life and the shadows of the human mind as Zen practice. The late Charlotte Joko Beck and her dharma heirs  adapted elements of the vipassana tradition — a relentless inquiry into the contours of the human mind—as unambiguous Zen discipline.

Here are some quotes from her:

With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.

Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering;
holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream;
each moment, life as it is, the only teacher;
being just this moment, compassion’s way.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

One idea that really hampers us is to believe that people get ‘enlightened,’ and then they’re that way forever and ever. We may have our moments, and if we get sick and have lots of things happening, we may fall back. But a person who practices consistently over years and years is more that way, more of the time, all the time. And that’s enough. There is no such thing as getting it.

Wisdom is to see that there is nothing to search for. If you live with a difficult person, that’s nirvana. Perfect. If you’re miserable, that’s it. And I’m not saying to be passive, not to take action; then you would be trying to hold nirvana as a fixed state. It’s never fixed, but always changing. There is no implication of ‘doing nothing.’ But deeds done that are born of this understanding are free of anger and judgment. No expectation, just pure and compassionate action.

Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling. This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests. We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds. That’s all there is.

Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.

So a relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy – it often doesn’t – but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find.

Practice can be stated very simply. It is moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others. That seems so simple — except when we substitute for real practice some idea that we should be different or better than we are, or that our lives should be different from the way they are. When we substitute our ideas about what should be (such notions as “I should not be angry or confused or unwilling”) for our life as it truly is, then we’re off base and our practice is barren.

We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.

We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life.

Meditation is not about some state, it is about the meditator.

Zen practice isn’t about a special place or a special peace, or something other than being with our life just as it is. It’s one of the hardest things for people to get: that my very difficulties in this very moment are the perfection… When we are attached to the way we think we should be or the way we think anyone else should be, we can have very little appreciation of life as it is…whether or not we commit physical suicide, if our attachment to our dream remains unquestioned and untouched, we are killing ourselves, because our true life goes by almost unnoticed.

My experience with brainwave optimization

Posted on by
8

Last week I did brainwave optimization, aka brain training, at NeuroBeginnings.  I did the baseline assessment in May and wrote about it here. It’s an astounding new technology with huge potential to alleviate suffering and help people’s brains function optimally without spending a minor (or major) fortune on health care.

Gigi Turner, owner of NeuroBeginnings, likes to schedule the training to start within two weeks of the initial assessment, but we had to work around finishing my 3M contract, which was hard to pin down. You need a full week as free of demands as possible so you can integrate the brain training. It’s a wonderful activity for a vacation (or stay-cation if you live in Austin). 

By the way, Gigi is hard-working, personable, and adorable. She’s easy to relate to, and you know she’s working for your best interests. She’s a woman after my own heart, fascinated with the brain and its workings, making the world a better place one brain at a time.

I did two sessions per day, Monday through Friday, one at 9 am and another at 12:30 pm, each lasting about an hour and forty-five minutes.

Between the morning and afternoon sessions, I hung out at the Zilker Botanical Gardens or walked along Barton Creek. It felt great to move after being still, and being outdoors in scenic nature was refreshing. I’d get lunch at the Daily Juice or Whole Foods, something light and very healthy.

During each session, I sat in a special recliner and either watched a computer monitor or just relaxed doing nothing. Gigi attached electrodes to my head and moved them to various places — frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes.

There were several exercises I did in every session: sitting and watching a bar move to a lower position,  reclining with the lights off and relaxing deeply, imagining/remembering an activity that uses all the senses, and visualizing a guided meditation.

During all the exercises, I heard musical notes playing. Gigi said you actually want them to stay in the background and not think about it too much. They are random notes, not playing a tune, not rhythmic, not even music — just random notes. There are a variety of musical sounds. You might hear the random notes played on a guitar, xylophone, steel drum, bells, or piano.

I am a thinker. I have a very active mind, and I’m gaining facility in switching from that active, inquiring, analytical state to more relaxed states.

I noticed that I liked it when a lot of notes played fairly densely, and I didn’t like it when one note played over and over, or when there was a long silence. I wanted the “music” to be pleasing to my ears.

A couple of times I would recognize a fragment of a song in a string of 3 or 4 notes and smile to myself. I noticed that if I was getting one note repeatedly, I could move my eyes, and the sound would shift. That’s an NLP trick!

The sounds reflect current brainwave activity, allowing the brain to “see” itself, as Lee Gerdes says in his book, Limitless You. You do occasionally view your brain activity on the monitor, but mostly the brain is hearing itself, and the more in harmony and cohesive the brain gets, the more the sounds reflect that.

You don’t have to do anything. The brain adjusts itself. At least, that’s how I think it works.

Watching the bar was hardest for me. I tried too hard, and it strained my eyes (I wear contacts and need to blink often — did you know your brainwaves change when you close your eyes, even to blink?). I stopped drinking green tea in the morning and brought eyedrops, attempting to make this exercise easier to accomplish.

I finally started getting the hang of it on Friday when I imagined that the sound of the air conditioning was a waterfall that was very nearby. When my attention was split between listening to the “waterfall” and gazing beneath the bar (rather than staring intently at it), I made progress.

I believe that exercise was about my “thinking” mind — aka bringing down my beta waves.

I went into brain training wanting to get rid of any remaining dysfunctional patterns from my childhood trauma and years of PTSD. Most of the changes took place in the frontal and occipital lobes — the center for executive functioning and the visual cortex, respectively. After my last session, Gigi gave me printouts showing how my brainwaves in those lobes had changed over the week of training. She got my left and right hemispheres more in sync in those lobes.

I loved the relaxation exercises. It turns out I’m very good at going into alpha! As I got used to the process, I got pretty good at dropping into theta and good at noticing the difference between alpha and theta. (Theta is where deep healing occurs.) I dropped into delta (sleep) a few times, especially after lunch, at first, but as the week progressed, I was able to stay awake in theta for longer periods.

I really loved the task of imagining I was entering a house, walking upstairs, and entering three rooms. Each day I created different rooms. Here are some juicy ones:

  • A room full of guides — lamas, teachers, angels, masters, buddhas and boddhisattvas, yogis, healers, shamans, seers — who included me and gave me gifts, laying their hands on me.
  • A room of possibilities that I’d like to manifest — travel, prosperity, success, joy, gifts and talents and skills, love, creativity, equanimity, health, goodness.
  • A room containing my fears and obstacles, with wonderful resources to address each one.
  • A room of gratitude for past, present, and future.
  • A room where I gave my gifts and resources to those who needed them.
  • A room of beginner’s mind.
  • A room for my future sage elder self.
  • A room of intuition.

Also, the Jean Houston guided meditation of cleansing the senses works well here. Having NLP training was useful!

During the five days of training, I didn’t experience any sudden or drastic changes in brain functioning, but each day I felt a little bit sharper, more present, more centered.

I learned that my brain operations were actually in pretty good shape to start with, and with a few tweaks it will operate even better. The changes will continue to manifest over a period of months after the training.

To get the most from it, the instructions are that for at least the next three weeks, I need to avoid alcohol and recreational drugs, exercise/walk daily, eat a lot of protein, and drink plenty of water.

It would be helpful to practice awareness through progressive relaxation, visualization while listening to a CD Gigi gave me (I liked the sound of a stream during some of the sessions, which has become an anchor), and doing breathwork.

I also need to postpone appointments for other therapeutic modalities until three weeks have passed, so I’ll need to make some phone calls on Monday.

If you’re interested, I recommend calling NeuroBeginnings for a baseline assessment. Her number is 512-699-6593. The baseline assessment currently costs $160. The entire cost, at present, is $1,635, if I remember correctly. Compared to doctor visits and medication, brain training could actually save you time, money, and side effects. 

I’m going to wait at least three months before going back for a tune-up unless something drastic happens, and then I hope to try one of their new gamma wave protocols.

I look forward to noticing improvements in my brain’s functioning and sharing them with you!