Nurturing Conscious and Creative Human Beings – Insight from Brain Gym® 101 held in South-Western China
Amy Choi, Hong Kong, China, Oct. 20, 2015
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert Einstein.
The first five-day Brain Gym® 101 in south-western China and the two-day casework consultation came to a satisfying end yesterday. Most participants of this course had no previous knowledge of Kinesiology. For most of them, it was the first time they came into contact with movement-based learning techniques, the ways to improve learning effectiveness and balance body and mind through body structure.
This time, all the students I taught were new. It was a fresh experience for me to observe and notice their body posture, movement traits, thought, emotion and language patterns etc.. This occasion also enabled me to better understand the advantages of Brain Gym® to people and its importance in nurturing conscious and creative human beings of the modern society.
According to the “dynamic brain patterns” described by Brain Gym® founder Paul E. Dennison, Ph.D., and my experience in using Kinesiology, teaching and doing casework consultation as a Brain Gym® instructor/consultant, the evolution of human body and brain has been influenced by the following modes:
Reptilian survival brain mode – movement and behaviour tend to be reflexive, moving abruptly without the brain’s control. Even when one is awake, the body tends to make unconscious movement. When stressed, one would become stuck and rigid, and would participate or not participate involuntarily. Brain Gym® balances can integrate the survival reflexive mode, enabling people to have conscious choice and replace trying too hard with spontaneous movement.
Emotional mammalian brain mode – movement and behaviour tend to be driven by emotion and feelings such as joy, anger, anxiety, thought, grief, fear, fright etc.. Brain Gym® balances can integrate unintegrated emotion and rational thinking, enabling people to maintain a balance between emotion and reason.
Thinking human brain mode – language, movement and behaviour of the logic brain hemisphere tend to be linear, logical, and with time dimension. It is good at making analysis and comparison, but would try too hard, get too anxious to express and become too aggressive when stressed. Language, movement and behaviour of the gestalt brain hemisphere tend to be integral, spatial. It is good at making association but cannot relate details of learning to the known contextual framework when stressed, and so would be unable to start, would give up easily, feel depressed, lose the ability to learn new things. Brain Gym® balances can connect the functions of the logic and gestalt hemispheres to enable one to use both sets of functions and have access to time and space dimensions at the same time, supporting learning with context.
Pre-frontal new human mode – there is consciousness in language, movement and behaviour throughout the sensory input and motor output modes. It is good at noticing, planning, making decision; it is good at playing, participating. Balancing through Kinesiology enables people to increase noticing ability, becoming more acute in what they see, hear and feel (sensory input), and more conscious in their behaviour and movement (motor output). Only under this new human mode, can people make conscious choice in an integrated manner, and store new movement patterns in the cerebellum area of the survival brain, enabling subconscious context to be increasingly reinforced and rich. Pre-frontal noticing as a thinking mode is an essential component in creativity and creative power; integrated brain and coordinated body are also the important fundamental elements in accessing intuition and inspiration.
Brain Gym® has turned a new leave in south-western China. I believe these techniques would continue to benefit not only Chinese people but all human beings in the world.
