Fast forward your brain
December 2008
By Luis S R Vas
More and more scientific evidence is emerging on the amazing potential of the mind and how you can tap it. Here are few techniques to help your brain function at its best
Everyone has heard of the amazing uses the brain can be put to. Nevertheless, when it comes to doing it ourselves, most of us are hard put to find efficient techniques that we can use to produce worthwhile results.
Below are a few techniques, reputed to give spectacular results.
Joy Touch
The Joy Touch is a technique devised by Pete A Sanders Jr based in Sedona, Arizona, USA. All you have to do is imagine a line from the centre of the forehead to the centre of the brain, and then visualise brushing this region gently. “You can be happy, healthy and satisfied every day of your life with this simple mental exercise,” says a top expert. The easy-to-learn technique is effective, available to everyone, and totally cost-free, reports Susan Jimison of Weekly World News, “Using the six simple steps described by brain researcher Pete Sanders, you can trigger the joy centre in your brain. Thereby, you can magically relieve stress, banish pain, cure depression, boost energy, improve sleep, eliminate worries, soothe anger, anxiety or fear, combat pain from headaches and other common ailments, reduce high blood pressure, control weight, combat dependency on alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs.”
“Just a few minutes of mental relaxation and visualisation, can leave you feeling upbeat, peaceful, and full of energy,” says Sanders, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who runs his own company. “It’s a simple biofeedback technique that can help you quit smoking, lose weight, or sleep like a baby. This incredible technique can do everything that expensive drugs can do – and it does not cost a cent. I’m outraged more hasn’t been done with it. Scientists and doctors have known for years that stimulating a specific area of the brain – the septum pellucidum – can have amazingly beneficial effects. It creates a mellow, energised feeling, best described as an inner smile. Activating it also clears the repetitive cycles of worry, hurt, anger, and fear that can be created in other parts of the brain.”
The steps Sanders recommends are:
• First, learn to locate your joy centre. Close your eyes, sweep your fingers up, and tap the forehead an inch or two below the hairline. Now imagine a little sparkle of light travelling two-thirds of the way into your brain from that spot. This area is the brain’s joy centre
• Now, relax. Breathe slowly and deeply, as you do just before falling asleep. This will help your body eliminate stresses that interfere with biofeedback
• Use visualisation to travel to your joy centre. Picture a cool breeze or a stream flowing from that spot on your forehead into the septum pellucidum. Don’t concentrate too hard, just let your imagination move gently to the right place inside your head
• Search for the strongest effect. You are looking for that spot in your brain that, when touched by your imagination, delivers an ‘Ahhhh’ feeling, a sense of an inner smile. When you hit the joy centre, you will get a sense of relief and well-being. In your thoughts, vary the level of your imaginary probe. Fine-tune it until you locate the right area
• ‘Stroke’ your joy centre. Send pulses of energy into your brain. After a few pulses, you should feel relief from pain, anxiety, and frustration. You will feel peace and contentment
• Practise, practise, practise. This is a biofeedback process, and you will not be able to do it perfectly right at the beginning. Use the technique a few times every day and within weeks you will experience joy, good health, and the love life about which you have always dreamt
Click your amygdalae
If you want to pack double the wallop of the Joy Touch, you can do so by clicking your amygdalae.
Neil Slade, its originator, writes: “Find the centre between outer corner of the eye and the ear hole by putting your thumb in your ear and your middle finger tip against the corner of you eye and letting your index finger flop loosely between the two. Where your index finger is hanging is roughly the centre you need.
Imagine going into the skull an inch straight in from there. Imagine (visually) two almond-sized objects, or two grey jelly beans, one on each side of the brain. They are angled so one end is facing up towards the frontal cortex just behind the forehead. (Front end is called the anterior amygdala. Amygdala is Greek for almond, pronounced a-mig-dala, emphasis on mig.)
isualise stimulating the amygdala’s front/top/upper end pointing towards the frontal cortex of the brain with something white, bright and light. This can be imagining a white feather tickling it. Or a golden laser beam shooting into your brain from somewhere out there. Or your forefinger held against the centre between your ear and corner of your eye, temple area, shooting out a stream of light through the skin and an inch into the brain and the top, front of the amygdala.”
Repeated practice should lead to increased neural pathways in the frontal cortex and more self-actualisation, increased creativity and emotional intelligence, more powerful dreams, better concentration and focus, more general operating at higher consciousness levels, also more frequent paranormal experiences of synchronicity, etc.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) for stress
ack Schwarz, author and researcher, first developed this exercise in the late ’50s to help students reduce stress and for relief of Post Traumatic Stress. It increases body-mind harmony and/or non-REM sleep. Jack based it on the Tibetan Eye Chart.
• Visualise a huge disc or sun at slightly above the horizon
• Breathe in the diaphragmatic alpha rhythm, inhale 8, hold in 8, exhale 8, and hold out 4
• Direct your focus on 11 o’clock, slowly move eyes clockwise around the clock without stopping at the reference hours. Do three complete rotations
• Focus straight ahead at the horizon and note changes in feelings, body sensations
• Now direct your focus on 1 o’clock. Slowly move eyes counter clockwise to 12 to 11 – 9 – 7 – 5 – 3 and return to 1 o’clock without stopping at reference hours, continuing around counter clockwise at least 10 – 12 times
• Focus again straight ahead at the horizon and note changes in feelings, and body sensations
• Repeat as many times as you feel necessary for any inner pacing and visualisation
Dealing with pain
Here is a technique helpful in dealing with pain. There are two ways to work with pain
• Send the pain love and approval. Do this all day long
• Say ‘yes’ to the pain. This is the opposite of resisting it which we tend to do for obvious reasons. When we accept the pain, the body goes to work on fixing the problem
Cure for depression
What is a depressed person’s posture like? Depressed people often walk around with their eyes down. (They are accessing in a kinesthetic mode and/or talking to themselves about all the things that make them feel depressed.) They drop their shoulders. They take weak, shallow breaths. They do all the things that put their body in a depressed physiology. Are they deciding to be depressed? They certainly are. Depression is a result, and it requires very specific body images to create it.
If you do things like these to your body, you are going to feel depressed. However, if you were to change the way you use your body by putting your shoulders back, breathing deeply, using your voice in a different way, or moving your body with a different tempo, it’s hard to feel depressed.
The University of California, Berkeley, researched on this recently. They had clinically depressed people come for four weeks, stand in front of a mirror, and grin from ear to ear for no good reason for 20 minutes, seven days a week. Their grins were so wide that they created a wrinkle on the side of their eyes. Interestingly, they kicked their shoulders back while doing it and breathed fully. Although many muttered, “Dumb idea!” not a single person was able to remain depressed. Indeed, at the end of the period, many of them had no need of medications.
Dr Fred Alan Wolf, a physicist known as Dr Quantum, has devised an even more efficient and rapid technique: “Let’s say that right now you’re sitting and you are saying, ‘Oh, I’m so depressed. I feel so bad. I feel terrible.’
“I tell people, just do one simple thing. It’s very simple. Ask yourself this question: ‘Who is feeling depressed?’ But don’t answer the question. Just posing the question without answering it changes the chemistry inside the body, and just by asking, you can begin to lift yourself from that depression.
“You have to keep doing it for a while because it is not like automatic pilot. It is not like, throwing a switch. You have to keep doing it, and after a while you begin to realise that the person who is saying ‘I am depressed’ is not you.”
I can testify that it works not only for depression but also for any unpleasant emotion.
Fearless living
Here is a technique from Guy Finley: For the next 10 or 20 seconds, consciously let go of the tension in your shoulders. Take a nice deep breath. Deliberately disconnect yourself from your own thoughts, watch them fall from your mind like autumn leaves. Now, open yourself to everything around you and feel renewed through your own awareness of life’s infinite possibilities!
Doesn’t it feel good? Notice how aware you become. Notice how sharp your mind is. Notice how sensitive you are to everything around and within you. Can you see the power and the promise in this state of higher consciousness?
Use this secret technique every day as often as you can remember. Watch your friends and loved ones marvel as you attract the brighter, happier life you have always known was possible.
Luis S R Vas has authored over a score of books during his decades’ long career in feature writing, publishing and corporate communications.
Contact: vasluis@hotmail.com
Quote:
Deliberately disconnect yourself from your own thoughts, watch them fall from your mind like autumn leaves.
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