Brain Work
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What is Brainwork?
Brainwork is a practice that requires a certain level of commitment. It’s based on an original six-step protocol that creates an inner quiet and safety that enables you to source difficult memories and information from the black box of your unconscious mind. The protocol becomes a platform for a more penetrating and expansive awareness that relies on directed mental energy, will (or intention), and imagination to eliminate multi-level tension patterns, and find balance through inspiration (breathing), intuition, and insight.
The protocol is something that you can carry with you and use anytime with immediate, observable results. It will improve the quality of any other practice, like meditation, yoga, running, acting, singing, any therapy (including physical), energy healing, or public speaking.
Or you can experience it on a session-by-session basis to uncover and resolve avoidance patterns that cause physical, mental, and emotional blockages and free up energy so that your mind is calmer and quieter, and your body is more integrated, relaxed, energized and accessible.
After being guided through the six-step protocol people tend to comment on the level of clarity, expansion, and ease that they feel as we (re)map the internal systems in the body and brain. The body has to be calm for the mind to be quiet as physical tension (pain, stress, trauma) keeps the mind busy, distracted, always seeking, never quiet.
In subsequent hour-long sessions we do a shortened version of the protocol. This sets up a heighten inner awareness and sense of safety (required for learning) that awakens your subconscious so that memories, protective habits, stressors, fear and pain can be cleared, flashes of insight accessed, and energy neutralized, reclaimed and repurposed. You need not disclose personal information to benefit from the work, but there is a reward for voicing your concerns. Speaking the unspoken frees up stored, mis-qualified energy, particularly in the throat.
My goal is to help you to realize the extraordinary untapped power behind the tools of attention, intention and imagination so that you can practice using them on a daily basis to quiet your mind, calm your nervous system, extract relevant insights from your unconscious, and rebuild and rebalance your body and brain according to your original blueprint and higher purpose.
Here are the basics:
The Tools: Attention (energy follows attention), Intention or Will Power, and Imagination (not fantasy).
Six-Step Protocol:
1) breathing
2) access and see from the back of the brain (ask for answers)
3) centering, core energy with Pyramid in dynamic tension w/ the ego
4) energetic heart placement (and pericardium)
5) personal space (extend to fingertips)
6) gut (fire in the belly)
How do you breathe? I watched over a dozen How to Breathe videos on YouTube and all of them were somewhat helpful, but also largely incomplete.
There are instructive videos on alternate nostril breathing, counting the breaths, and exercises for energy or anxiety. All good. I teach something different.
Let’s follow the breath through the respiratory pathway. Most videos start with: breathe into your lungs, skipping awareness of the nose, sinuses, windpipe, posture and neck and shoulders, and 3D vision from the back of the brain.
When I first noticed my breathing in Alexander Technique class my habit was to breathe into the middle of my chest and skip over everything else. Lucky for me, they taught me to develop and fine-tune the power of my attention. But it wasn’t till years later when I discovered how to dismantle my chronic thinking and place my attention in the back of my brain that I was able to see myself clearly and in three dimensions, which gave me the ability to assess and effectively address the condition and functioning of my incomplete and distorted brain and body map.
Most people, based on my observations, are breathing two-dimensionally. The simple reason for that is all anyone ever hears about is chest or belly breathing. (The less simple reason has to do with how we use our attention. We’re always projecting outward from our eyes, never inward, three-dimensionally, from the visual cortex.) Most people, to begin with, aren’t aware that they need to breathe into the sides of the ribs, up to the armpits, and into the back so that you feel movement in the muscles around the ribcage. (Tighten the stomach muscles and breathe so that you can feel the effects of your lungs expanding in all directions.)
Where are your lungs and do you have a kinetic awareness and experience of how they function and what their physical and subtler effects are on the body and mind?
When I ask people, “Do you know where your lungs are?” they say, “Yes.” But if I ask people, “Do you know exactly where your lungs are?” they say, “Yes. Maybe. You better tell me.” Answer for yourself and then go look it up on YouTube.
Now that you know where your lungs are, compare the left lung to the right lung. Is one lung emptier, heavier, darker, duller, more collapsed, more drained than the other? If so, focus on the troubled lung and breathe into it until it feels better and balances with the other. This is the proof of concept. If you can tell, let’s say, that the left lung is depleted, I would ask you to over-focus on it and breathe into it exclusively. Then, in your mind see it lighting up, imagine breathing in light, fill it top to bottom and front to back, and side to side. Take slow, long, steady breaths. Take as many as you need until you feel your lungs are balanced.
Test question: what are the effects of not knowing how your lungs respond on a daily basis to the vagaries of life?
Acknowledging this change proves that mentally directing your attention, having an intention, and visualizing preferences are powerful tools that can correct imbalances in your physical body.
Robert Bradley graduated from The American Center for the Alexander Technique in 1998. He has a private practice in NYC and Long Island. Contact or call 631-275-6954 to schedule an introductory session.
I’ve been working with the people at You Can Thrive to address stressors and gain some semblance of inner and outward control of their bodies and life in general.
This is a “How to…”
I have to begin by saying that this, to me, can be boring to read: they’re instructions. But instructions, once applied, become a challenge. It will become interesting once the instructions are realized, felt, and built on. They’re meant to bring about a deeper awareness so that stress and tension, that have been layered in over a lifetime, can be revealed and released. If your brain and body are organized and integrated, where can pain and illness enter in?
Another problem is that you can read and process this information in the frontal (thinking) lobes of your brain and think that you understand it. But unless you experience it you can’t truly innerstand it. In order to innerstand something, direct your focus inward and describe what you feel or sense or intuit. Then respond with correctives. It helps to have a protocol to rely on.
This was my defining revelation from which all subsequent insights arose: I directed my attention to explore the inside of my brain, directing it up, down, front, back, and side to side, and lit it up, i.e., I became conscious of inner space, my sensory feelers fed data to my imagination to reproduce an image of the inside of my brain so that I might correct any distortions. I described the conditions therein to myself, found imbalances, disturbances, and blockages, then I mined the area for content: memories, descriptions, feelings, any kind of feedback, and then I set about to correct the imbalances, compensations, disturbances, and disconnections using the untapped powers of attention, intention, and imagination: the keys to the castle.
Sometimes, the simple act of paying attention to some part of the brain or body can change the feeling-quality of it. Other times you have to address it with probing questions, and then listen/feel for the subtle cues or insights before a shift occurs.
If you look at brain anatomy, you’ll discover that it’s sectioned off. Different parts of the brain have different functions. The Basics: the frontal lobes are the problem solver, the thinker, (here’s a problem, think about this: if you spend all your waking days in the frontal lobes, you’ll always have problems), the parietal lobes integrate sensory information, the temporal lobes process language and store auditory memory, the occipital lobes process and store visual information, the limbic system deals with emotions, memory and arousal and the brainstem regulates certain involuntary actions of the body, including heartbeat and breathing. The cerebellum fine-tunes motor controls.
By extracting my attention from the frontal lobes and placing it in the occipital lobes and lighting them up, energizing them I was able to access them more and more easily, which led to making subtle qualitative differences throughout my brain and body. Plus, I was able to slow and eventually stop the barrage of flat, linear, two-dimensional thinking I subjected myself to, and suffered under. (There are more powerful tools than thinking.)
My premise is that if you establish a three-dimensional perspective by seeing in-depth from the back of the brain you open a door to the unseen or hidden power within. With this power, you can bring order and integration to your mind and body and you can reach higher states of consciousness, explore your sub or un-conscious, bring light to dark, reduce the negative effects from the past and become present and able to meet the future more readily, once pain and suffering are diminished. (Note: you can’t argue with the previous two sentences because they won’t submit to your prior reasoning. It will only submit to experience over time. Thank you.) (Also, it’s necessarily an incomplete description of my work.)
Let’s start with breathing: if you compare the right lung to the left lung as you inhale, you might find that you’re breathing more into one lung than the other. And if you were to visualize and overfocus on the weaker lung after a few breaths you would strengthen that lung and bring it back into balance with the other lung. This demonstrates the power of your attention to improve conditions inside the body and brain. By setting an intention, bringing attention to bear, and imagining the current state or quality of the body and brain parts you can discover how well they’re functioning and enhance their condition in coordination with the whole. (Note: this is not the end, it’s the beginning.)
Now, try this: close your eyes (not yet) and direct your attention to the Visual Cortex in the back of the brain, light it up, and compare it to the frontal lobes. (Now, close your eyes.) Generally, people say that the back of the brain is quiet compared to the front which feels busy (any description is valid: some people see colors, representative images, feel pressure; a heaviness, or absence, etc.) (Note: to fine-tune your visual cortex imagine it in quadrants; left, right, upper, lower, and like your lungs, see if they’re balanced.)
If using your tools, you can situate your attention in the back of the brain you can observe the front of the brain where thoughts arise and you can edit your thoughts, quiet them, or cancel them altogether. (You can also access a non-thinking intelligence from the visual cortex, among other things.)
Most people have never heard of such a thing: placing your attention in the back of the brain and lighting it up, sensing its current state, and ranging through the brain and body on an energy level to relieve stress, tension, and anxiety by bringing order and integration to this untended to inner brain and body scape. Therefore, it’s important to practice, strengthen and apply your innate tools and replace deadening habit, rote responses, ego protection, and projection, with an energized presence, deeper awareness, and more accurate perceptions and insights regarding your daily experience.
Think of what you could do if you were trained to master these tools. It’s my intention to teach you this skill in order to “move mountains”, or whatever’s blocking the flow, so that you can live according to your own purposes, without habitual thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and the weight of the past hanging over you, weighing you down, causing you to suffer.
Brainwork, on one level, concerns itself with action plans. It’s a series of verbal instructions engaging your attention, intention, and imagination. The primary action plan is the six-step protocol. There are many offshoots to the protocol so that you can build on it, extensively, if need be. There are also many separate practices having to do with brainwaves, turning your head, eye movements, being on stage, voice, balancing brain hemispheres, patience, brain batteries, the reticular alarm system, foot placement, posture, anxiety, family life, masculine and feminine energies, the solar plexus, almost anything. If there’s a problem I haven’t addressed, we will explore and invent a way to get inside of it, understand it better, innerstand it, express it, and find relief.
The protocols components are meant to create a feeling of safety and control. The reason for control is to feel competent, skilled, and safe. Safety means we’re not in survival mode. We’re not stuck in patterned responses coming from the lower brain, but have access to the higher brain functions that allow for creative responses. If we feel safe, we’re open to learning something new and meeting the moment with a sense of readiness. If we don’t feel safe, we tend to go into protective mode, shut down, numb, run an old pattern, and, over time, we find ourselves in a deepening rut.
There’s no real choice (or freedom) in habitual actions. They’re meant to save time and effort so that you don’t have to spend energy on making new decisions all the time. But they’re really energy or freedom killers. Rote movements and behaviors over time dull the senses and bore the mind and tire and eventually wear out the body. Children are hardwired to explore and choose the new thing over the known thing. Adults tend to opt for the safety of the familiar. But this strategy doesn’t age well.
The tools of Brainwork are meant to reveal and interrupt habit patterns that limit your range and enjoyment of your brain and body in motion and stillness, and in space and time by reducing negative thoughts and emotions, tensions, and defensive reactivity. The creative energy is in the gap, in the synapse, in the space between the stimulus and the response. It’s in the Unknown. The Unknown is the source of Darkness and Fear, but also the source of the New. Brainwork trains you to focus your attention, or light, on the dark and eliminate fear and confusion. It identifies presence as the ability to balance on the knife’s edge between the past (the old) and the future (the new). It gives you a place and a way to stand and face the future.