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Since the birth of this column several years ago I’ve mentioned this question a number of times. I came upon it many years ago in a piece written by the poet, Alice Walker. Its potency, elegance and simplicity resonated deeply with me. She suggested that every policymaker or decision maker in the world simply ask this basic question when confronted with any decision of consequence. In other words: Is it best for the children for a Wall Street Bank to leverage itself 40-1 in the pursuit of out-sized financial gain for a few upper echelon executives? Is it best for the children to brainwash them to wrap themselves in explosives and walk with a detonator into a crowded market? Is it best for the children to deforest the Amazon rain forest at an increasingly accelerated rate? Is it best for the children to attend public schools where the stress of excessive competition for grades, and things like bullying and ostracism almost inevitably results in significant brain disorganization?
Midwives versus Doctors
Here’s a recent study that was a surprise to me, but will not come as much of a shock to most midwives: Doctors don’t like them. Don Creevy, the Stanford doctor who delivered my daughter, Amanda – was an active advocate and vocal supporter of midwives. It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Midwives are not the enemy. So is it best for the children for doctors and midwives not to be able to get along? Especially in a country with our shameful infant-mortality rate – tied with Poland and Slovakia for 34th place? What if they began dialoging to explore and create possibilities for supporting and enhancing each others’ work? Right now these two groups do not appear to be answering The Big Brain Question “Yes” for one another very convincingly. Might answering it “Yes” be better for America’s children?
A story by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker suggests so. Salaried medical teams working in Grand Junction, Colorado, provide significantly better care at less than one third the cost than in McAllen, Texas, where the bulk of the doctors have turned their medical practices into private profit centers. The most expensive piece of medical equipment in McAllen, turns out to be a doctor’s pen.
The Big Brain Question Revisited
In the past few months it has been driven home to me over and over again just how much of the struggle, suffering and heartbreak in the world is the result of people simply not having had the Big Brain Question answered with an unequivocal “Yes” for themselves, either as children, or later on as adults. Almost every conflict in the world, locally or globally, seems rooted in this failing. The Catch-22 is that if we haven’t had this question answered “Yes” ourselves, then we have very likely not developed the neural resources needed to understand the power that answering this question affirmatively actually has. One unfortunate result is that it leaves us unable to answer it “Yes” for others. The Big Brain Question – “Are you there for me?”- has untold individual and cultural implications.
In an oversimplified but useful explanation, it seems to work like this: Having people around us that we can unequivocally count on – especially early on with parents who “get us” – works to help us build the resonance circuitry and the neural connections necessary for learning to effectively manage stress and anxiety. Well-managed stress and anxiety allows for more and better neural growth and connectivity, particularly in the all-important pre-frontal areas. Since the brain does not have toxic stress chemicals constantly killing off recurring attempts at pre-frontal development – not needing to produce them for the life-preserving, stress-addressing limbic areas – greater integrative growth and connectivity results. (I don’t think it’s an accident that in his early years Buddha was a sheltered, protected prince, and Christ was born to a Holy Mother). 
Pre-frontal growth and connectivity permits significantly greater emotional self-regulation, improved immune systems and makes more resources available for so-called executive functioning and creative thinking. The result: less stress in the family; less unmanageable fear. Less stress and less fear equals more comfort with innovative risk-taking, or what Berkeley anthropologist Terrence Deacon calls “relaxed selection.” It’s the natural progression of Darwinian natural selection – survival of the fittest is supplanted by survival of the calmest. Is it best for the children to have people in their lives they can unquestionably count on, especially during the times of “growing pains,” the trying times? Absolutely and unequivocally.
What Two Can Easily Do
It’s not an accident that people who have significant relationships with other living beings tend to live longer and enjoy better health than those who don’t. They tend to be there for one another, their “resonance circuits” helping to soothe and calm in savage times. Even cranky curmudgeons living with other people live longer than those living alone. And curmudgeons with pets live better lives than those without them. It could be argued that his relationship with birds helped keep Robert Stroud (The Birdman of Alcatraz) alive for 73 years during a time when the average lifespan was considerably less. Prisons don’t tend to be low-stress environments. The noise level alone is mind-numbing. (Interestingly Stroud died shortly after he no longer had access to his birds and his wife and mother were denied visiting privileges).
And so, answering the Big Brain Question “Yes” for ourselves and one another in times both good and bad, in my mind is very possibly the absolute best thing for the children. How might you increasingly answer it “Yes” for the children in your own life, young and old alike?
by Jennifer Buergermeister
As if we didn’t already know how amazing we are – juggling chores, parenting, meal-planning, and managing careers – did you know that ancient Hindu philosophy claims the female essence created the entire universe? No wonder we often feel tired as if there just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done. Inevitably, we are Shakti.
Shakti is a Sanskrit word the means “sacred force” or “empowerment.” It is often referred to as The Divine Feminine, responsible for creation and change. If you want something changed, put a woman in charge. The innate creative power of Shakti is our own life-force, full of pulsating potential. Shakti is the force that empowers our body-mind, and inspires all of our experiences and perceptions. She is the flow of energy and information driving our thoughts, behaviors, desires, feelings, and experiences and she provides the raw materials for building our essential humanity.
Shakti Loves Shiva
We experience Shakti as the pulsating, vibrating, throbbing power of manifestation in the material world. Shakti is the feminine attribute to the balance of being (shakti) from no-thing (shiva). She is the ultimate creative force of the universe. As women realize this power, we move away from limitation and move toward the awakening of a higher consciousness. As human beings expressing this latent energy, often released in large spurts of creativity, we often experience depletion and exhaustion. Essentially, we’ve become low on Shiva, or male counterbalance energy necessary for healthy balance.
We can have a lot of energy inside us flowing as Shakti and yet feel physically exhausted. When we channel Shakti as an open conduit, it can be a challenge to maintain the physical body’s energy – creativity sometimes will not let us rest. Since Shakti is also the force that liberates us from individual limitation and takes us to higher levels of awareness, we need to learn to skillfully manage it physically. At higher levels of awareness we see truth and objective reason through subjective feeling of our higher Selves, as well as through our micro-Cell-ves, as biologist Candace Pert showed us in her book, Molecules of Emotion. Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies unite through Shakti.
Our work then, is to Tame the Shakti by restoring and maintaining balance because without awareness of this energy over-expenditure, we can seriously deplete the physical body. Creative people need a lot of rest, often more than 7-8 hours per night! However, we do not always insure we get it. I learned this all too well through personal experience.
Psychic Grief
Immediately after my husband passed in 2001, I lost 30 pounds. I was unable to sleep or eat. In the process, I became open to creative psychic experiences, or perhaps more accurately, psychic experiences became open to me. The pain of grief was unbearable at times. I had not known that such pain existed until I suffered the loss of my husband. Strange things were beginning to happen. The lightness of being seems to open us up to extraordinary experiences.
For example, during my grieving one day I was reading the book, Many Lives, Many Masters, written by Dr. Brian Weiss. My dog, Henry was sleeping at the foot of the couch when I heard a clicking sound. The motion detector in the hallway was blinking mysteriously. This was strange since nothing was moving to trigger it. Perhaps it was running low on batteries. I realized, no, it was hardwired to the electric panel. Unable to determine the cause, I returned to my book.
A few moments later the clicking began again, this time faster and louder. Henry glanced up so I peered in the direction of his gaze and witnessed the most amazing thing. It was a vortex. It shimmied to and fro, dancing in front of me and Henry. The motion detector was going wild. My jaw dropped, and I stood up. Amazed, yet completely fearless, I walked toward it. As I approached, I noticed tiny blinking lights inside which formed a spiral galaxy spinning at chest-height. I could clearly see the vortex.
I was sure it was my husband who came back to say hello. God, how I missed him! I stepped inside the vortex and my life changed forever. I felt a love and awe so great and more intensely sweet than I ever could have ever imagined. It felt like an ocean breeze filled with tingling negative ions that only a perfect spring day could bring. I felt calm – a peacefulness beyond words. I knew that everything was okay and that I would endure this “crazy” time in my life. I have often felt that these grieving experiences have re-patterned and reprogrammed me in such a way that I see a much bigger picture: the holographic nature of life and splendor. Am I still dreaming? How can you sleep after an experience with the seemingly supernatural?
Feeling the awe and the energy of the vortex has taught me trust. These feelings were important to the awakening of my heart, a cosmic force that compels us to love and to serve. Shakti awakened in me and since, I have been driven beyond any other to share the knowledge of breath and spirit.
Sometimes, I have to unplug, which isn’t always easy. Last week I turned everything off so that I could go to bed early. Learning to enjoy the silence of being is important – the no-thing, which led me to a prophetic dream about an old friend. Though I hadn’t seen her in six years, I dreamed of her and predicted I would see her the very next day, and I did!
It is imperative for all of us to rest, exercise, and spend time in nature. Taming the Shakti requires balancing with Shiva, holding steady, and moving with grace from the heart, not driven by anxiety or craze from the mind. As I have emerged from my grieving process, I have grown into a conduit of Shakti energy. One important thing for me is to pace myself. I would create 24/7 if I didn’t make my routine more conducive to rest.
If you are one of the millions of women who go, go, go, and then wonder why you are so tired all of the time, it might be time to step back, get a grip on your creative force – gently tug the reigns a little, “whooaaaa,” and spend quiet, self-care time Taming your Shakti.
With over 20 million YouTube viewings and still counting, there’s a good chance many of you who receive this column every Sunday have already been exposed to Seattle resident, Matt Harding. He’s the young guy doing the goofy dance with different people all over the globe. Well, Matt has written an essay gleaned from his dervish-like travels for the program, This I Believe on National Public Radio. It’s about the need for all of us, adult and child alike, to grow and change our brains in very specific ways. I’ve decided to feature Matt’s essay as the centerpiece of this week’s column. You can read or listen to it by clicking here:
Where in the World is Matt’s Brain?
Enjoy.
Lots of things affect us as kids, things that we rarely realize the full impact of. I’ve mentioned one such thing in previous columns: The Unthought Known. Recently though, some interesting neuroscience research points out something that I’m sure impacted my sisters and me that we didn’t realize was so hugely beneficial at the time: our mother loved classical music. It lives in memory mostly as an embarrassment – ours was the only apartment in the housing projects blaring the musical creations of Brahms, Mozart and Tchaikovsky.
Mozart Off the Chart
While the research supporting The Mozart Effect has been called into question by a number of respected scientists – mostly for being a poorly designed study – neuroscientists have since shown that listening to music actually does turn out to change the brain in positive ways. For example, Glenn Schellenberg, at the University of Toronto, has demonstrated that listening to music over the long term appears to increase the density of neural connections in the primary auditory cortex. Harvard neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug and his colleagues have shown that the tissue that connects the two halves of the brain (corpus callosum) contain a much greater number of connecting fibers in musicians versus nonmusicians, especially for musicians who began their training early. As a general rule, more connections make for more processing power.
Professor and record producer, Daniel J. Levitin runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. In his fascinating book, This is Your Brain in Music, Levitin provides numerous accounts of how music actually works to increase the size of our cerebellums and increases the concentration of gray matter in the brain (Gray matter is believed to be primarily responsible for information processing, while white matter is primarily responsible for information transmission). As another general rule, when it comes to organized human brains, bigger equals better.
Music therapy, too, has been shown to be effective treatment for many psychological and physical challenges. For many years I used music to help me deal with my own grief and loss – Jackson Browne’s national grief anthem, For a Dancer, for example. As a direct consequence of this research, for many of the classes I teach, I try to make music an integral part of the curriculum.
Unchained Melodies
All of this though, is but a lead-in to some very interesting research recently published in, of all places, the Department of Homeland Security! What brain scientists have been able to do is take down the notes and write the unique musical score generated by individual human brains – we all have our own individual neural sonata constantly playing inside our heads! Here’s an excerpt from the research article:
If the brain “composes” the music, the first job of scientists is to take down the notes. Each recording is converted into two unique musical compositions designed to trigger the body’s natural responses, for example, by improving productivity while at work, or helping adjust to constantly changing work hours. The compositions are clinically shown to promote one of two mental states in each individual: relaxation – for reduced stress and improved sleep; and alertness – for improved concentration and decision-making.
Each 2–6 minute track is a composition performed on a single instrument, usually a piano. The relaxation track may sound like a “melodic, subdued Chopin sonata,” while the alertness track may have “more of a Mozart sound,” according to Burns. (It seems there’s a classical genius—or maybe two genii—in all of us.) Listen to an example of an instrumental alert track.
After their brain waves are set to music, each person is given a specific listening schedule, such as once an hour for four hours each day, personalized to their work environment and needs. After an extended length of time, people may be able to listen to the music more sporadically. If used properly, the music can boost productivity and energy levels, or trigger a body’s natural responses to stress. A selected group of firefighters will be the first emergency responders taking part in the project.
I don’t think it’s an accident that our individual brains produce something akin to classical music. And I have little doubt but that our own singular melodies could turn out to be a tremendous boon to overstressed and overworked parents, teachers, clergy, policeman and firefighters. Not to mention bankers, politicians and Wall Street finance ministers. Rock on with your bad neuro-solo selves!
