How to be a Good Kinesiology Practitioner – Speech of Carla Hannaford, Ph.D., at the Japan World Kinesiology Conference, in Kyoto
Original English and translated versions published with permission from:
Carla Hannaford, Ph.D.
Kenichi Ishimaru, President of Japan Kinesiology Institute
Background: Biologist, author and educator Carla Hannaford, Ph.D., in her speech in the afternoon of 11th October, 2011 in Kyoto Japan, talked about howopening up our senses andbeing present and coherent are the keys to be a good kinesiology practitioner. She also referred a number of times to Amy Choi’s speech and balance demonstration in the morning of the same day, “Listening with my Authentic Self”, where she used her whole body to listen, move, and intuitively guide a Japanese woman into a dance in order to facilitate the client’s wish to speak out what she wanted and be the true master in her life.
“This morning, when Amy was talking, and showed the beautiful figure of the moon, it brought to mind a poem. The poem was written by a 16th century female Japanese poet here in Japan. It’s translated like this:
Watching the Moon in midnight
Alone in the middle of the sky
I saw myself completely
I knew myself completely
Whole – no part left out.
Isn’t that amazing? So, what is this wholeness that we are? The Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind came out with very strong statements about the work that we all do in kinesiology. This is what they said: “Realizing that the mind is anchored to the body’s actions and surroundings gives us a better understanding of our behavior, our social and cognitive lives…The body is our only real tether or connection to the world… All the knowledge that we acquire we get through our senses.” And one of those main senses is proprioception – what we are feeling from our muscles. They say, “higher cognitive processes are grounded in bodily experience … the brain’s low level sensory/motor circuits do not just feed into cognition – they are cognition.”
It’s interesting what Amy was doing this morning as she hooked into all of her cognitive senses in her connection with the woman she demonstrated with. We know now the way we learn to be human is by mirroring. We do what other people do in order to understand them and to know them. You know, children don’t do what we say, but what we do, to become human like us. Mirroring occurs all through our lives, and they found some really interesting things. They looked at people that had Botox injections ¡VBotox injections make the muscles of the face very stiff, so that the people who have Botox injections cannot feel emotion or understand the emotions of others. We don’t realize how powerful our body’s expressions are. Whenever you truly experience another person by being with that person totally, your muscles are actually moving in sync with theirs so you can understand what’s going on with them. There has been a recent big study with intermediate students – these are that hormonal group between about 12 and 15 years of age. The research shows that they cannot read another person’s body’s languages or facial expressions – because they’re texting, they’re not looking at the person. The other group that cannot read facial expression are autistic people. So Amy was doing something interesting this morning. She was using her whole body to be absolutely in alignment, in coherence with her client, and then expressing that through her body.
Our children do this all the time. We’re tired…right? We’ve worked all day, we take them to the grocery store to get groceries, and they do something really obnoxious, right? Now I am talking about one, two, maybe three year olds. What are they doing? All they’re doing are mirroring our emotions. We’re tired, we’re upset, we’re just getting food and attempting to hold it together… and what do they do? They have to put our frustration, stress of tiredness into in their body to understand it – that’s what they are doing – they are not trying to be obnoxious! They are really clear mirrors of us, those little ones. So, it’s that mirroring, that also makes us good practitioners.
Amy was saying that she got a message that she is psychic – she is! We all have that potential. It means, being present, coherent! So who are we? If you look around here, you think of yourself as separate from everybody else, right? You’re in this physical existence – particle existence. You’re in an atomic universe. This is Sir William Rutherford’s model of the atom. But it’s not very accurate though, this model of the atom. If the nucleus is an apple about the size of my hand, where would the first orbital with the first electron be? What do we think? Quite far away? It will be 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from here – almost a little over half way to Hawaii from here. So, there is all these space in between. We are 99.9999% space, but it is not empty at all.
The electrons and protons are electrical. The space is magnetic, and that’s where the most energy is. So, if you take your fingers and put your finger tips together (index fingers pointing at each other), what you’re feeling is that energy in the space between those particles. When we take the atom apart to its basic nature, we find that we are VIPs – we are vibrational interference patterns. (振動干涉模式)
…we perceive it as matter but it’s not matter! It’s vibration and it’s a lot of energy. This was what Amy was hooking into this morning.
This is a chart of the electro-magnetic fields. The very slowest vibrational waves are sound, and we’re looking at the fact that sound forms the template for our body. Einstein says, “matter is nothing more than energy vibrating at a frequency slow enough that we perceive it with our senses. These slow waves are also brain waves: Delta ¡Vstate of sleep; Theta ¡Vthe dream sleep state; Alpha and lower Beta is mainly where we think, where we come up with new ideas, creativity. Here is an interesting thing – just opposite to Alpha is the Schumann resonance that goes around the world. It’s this field between the earth and the Ionisphere that you people know as Yin and Yang. The earth is spinning and as it spins, it produces more negative ions, a negative vibration that is in the soil or running water. That’s why we like so much to be in nature – just feel the earth under our feet where it’s real negative ions. The sun sends its light (rays) to earth, that bounce back to the Ionisphere. These waves are positively charged – and we feel that charge with winds, or a change of weather. So we have these two charged particles, and then every second, there are thousands of lightening strikes around the world that change this into the Schumann resonance which is this about 7.4 cycles per second (Hertz) – the same resonance as our alpha brain waves, and the same resonance in the cells of our body.
Upper Beta brain waves is where we take action, real action, to survive. It is where we see hyperactivity, intense pain and fear, and reaction.
The fastest brain waves are Gamma waves that we see in the monks that have been with the Dali Lama and had been meditating for years. It’s a very fast wave length, and is the state of absolute coherence where they are able to see the whole picture. They don’t get caught up in a mess. They just see the big picture that we will be talking about; and this is where we go as practitioners when we are really coherent.
Above the gamma wave length is human speech, human hearing, and electricity. We’ve been listening to electricity even before we were born, so we can actually match the pitch of the electricity around us. Above that are radio waves where we can turn on television, and instantly get pictures out of the air… it’s all around us. Then microwaves. Everyone here has a cell phone…newer than mine…hewh…hewh…right here in the room and you use microwave towers to send messages. Then infrared…heat…and there is this little tiny, really tiny wave form above infrared that is visible light. It seems that’s the only thing we believe… seeing is believing. And the fastest waves are ultra violet, X-rays and Gamma Rays.
So, how many senses do we have? Five? Six? According to Rivlin and Gravelle of Princeton University, there are at least 19 senses that we know of receptor sites for. There are probably hundreds, we just haven’t figured them out. Children are very aware – picking up all that is going on around them, until we limit their view of the world with our reality. We all have these senses. To show how inaccurate our vision is, do you see something there? (Carla shows an image of a little boy kissing a dog) These (pointing to the lips) are really sensitive, these are good senses, that we figure out our vision through. How many of you see a little boy and a dog? Raise your hand. It’s an illusion! It’s only colour on a sheet of paper… Here’s the statistics – only 4% of our vision goes through our eyes. The other 96% we make up in our brain, and that becomes our reality. So, we lose a full understanding of our world in the process.
Childern are very aware. Dr. Dee Coulter in Boulder, Colorado, did an interesting study. She put two-year-old children in a circular playground where they were playing with each other… the parents were sitting around the edge of the playground on benches. Beyond the playground was a 100 m soccer field. At the end of the soccer field was a road where they brought a car and let out a dog that had been in a family with the children, and the children kept playing while this dog bounced across this field. Then, they had a nanny who loved children walk across the field, and the children kept playing. And then they had a man, who had killed children and molested many, get out of the car. Instantly, the children left playing and went to their parents. They couldn’t see him or hear him, but they could pick him up. When they had the tsunami in Malaysia, the elephants and the other animals, the day before the tsunami… went up the mountains. We have the ability to pick that up sensorily, but we block that out because of what we think is reality. Where are we cognitively picking up our world? Through our senses and motor functions.
My Ph.D. is in neuro-physiology – function of the brain. In the 1990s, it was the decade of the brain. The brain was it! What’s interesting is that people living on the eastern side of the world knew that that wasn’t the case. When we look at traditional Chinese medicine, way back 5000 years ago, they saw, the brain was not really important. Its function was to just cool the body. What was important and still is – is the heart. Even the Egyptians got rid of the brain and only put the heart in the mummies. The heart is really important. In 1962, Dr. Amour from Princeton University wrote a really long article in Scientific American, saying that the heart controls the brain. We didn’t believe it. Now, we know some interesting things about the heart – that it is controlling the brain. The heart has the largest field electromagnetic field of our body. When we check this with a SQUID (Super Conducting Quantum Interference Device), the field coming off the heart extends as least 5 meters away from our body – at least. So, we’re sitting in each other’s heart fields. Dr. William Tiller calls the heart a step-down transducer, picking up the vibrational fields from our environment. It steps the information down so that we can understand them, cognitively, through our bodies… just like what Amy was doing today. When we are really present, and really aware, we also know, like the children who picked up the incoherence of this man 100 meters away. Dogs do this also. When we’re afraid, dogs also know.
The heart steps down all this information, but we have in our brain, spam filters. If something is not within our sense of reality – from our culture, from our family, from whatever… we block it out… it’s not there. Here are all these energies around us, and we don’t see them, because we don’t believe them. When I worked in Africa, up in the mountains of Lesotho, they do not see people as separate – they see light and colour in the people. We have that ability too, but we blocked it, because it’s not in our reality. But children are picking it up, until we say, “no, there aren’t fairies.” No, there is not anything under your bed… and they block and block and block.
What I love about our work, is that it’s opening our sense to those fields. Opening our realities so that we see a larger reality. How many of you saw a larger reality this morning with Amy? …Something that you can do. But you’re going to have to step pass judgment. Judgment is simply what you believe culturally. “Oh! We don’t do that… sort of stuff.” So, let’s look at your reality from here. We’re going to go back to quantum physics. Look at a very interesting experiment called the double-slit experiment. Scientists took particles of light (photons), and they shot them at a sheet that had two slits on it with a screen behind, expecting to see dots on the screen – two lines of dots. That’s not what they got. They had one beam of light, they shot at this double slit, expecting to get just bullet holes. What they got on the screen instead was just waves of vibration. “What? This is really weird!” And they did it over and over again. Finally, they set up a camera to observe what was happening. When they observed it, they got bullet holes. When they weren’t observing it, they got these smeared out waves of vibration. What we discovered was the observer effect of our reality – how we determine our reality. What we believe, what is our intention determines our reality and what we bring into form in our world. The Buddhists for thousands of years said, there is formlessness, then desire, then form¡Vjust what current science is saying… I love it. They knew back then.
This magnetic space is called reciprocal space. So we have reciprocal space and take desire (in our case goals, and intention) to bring reciprocal space (energy) into matter or form. (Carla talking to the Japanese woman who raised her hand and came out for the demonstration with Amy in the morning) When you raised your hand this morning, you set an intention, right? You were willing to move past your present reality to speak your truth… that’s what we’re doing with our balance. But in order to do that, we have to do what Amy did today… we have to be coherent. Now, what was Amy doing? What were these children doing? What are they picking up from this man that had killed children? Whenever we’re stressed, whenever we’re upset, whenever we have anxiety, whenever we have frustration, we have an incoherent heart rate variability pattern on an electro-cardiogram. When we have fun, when we are enjoying life deeply, living peacefully, we have a very coherent pattern.
Now, let’s just look at how it affects the heart, and the brain. When we are having a great time in our lives, living deeply, authentically, we have a really coherent heart rate variability pattern. A message goes from the heart to the brain, and tells the Amygdala, everything is great. Life is good. It also goes from the heart to the Thalamus, and it says, “opens up”, and the Thalamus is where we get all our sensory information except smell. It’s like a flower. The children take everything in, but so can we. And it goes to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain and sets up a coherent pattern. So, all that sensory information comes in, and we remember it, and we learn, like children. It also affects our hormones. Amy has noticed that she now has regular menstrual cycles… balanced hormones.
But what happens when we’re under stress? A message goes from the heart to the Amygdala and it says “stress”. And we immediately go into adrenalin and cortisol production – for survival. It also goes to the Thalamus, and closes it down so any sensory information coming in that does not have to do with your direct survival we are not going to remember or learn.
(Carla demonstrated how thinking positively in a group won’t work and Hook Ups will work by muscle checking.) This is what happened. We have a huge heart field. When a person is coherent, they will affect anyone within at least a 2 meter radius to come into coherence. In a PET (Position Emission Tomography) scan of a normal brain you see that all areas are lit up – especially the frontal lobes that allow creativity, connection, love, altruism…. When you are under stress, the neo-cortex will shut down by 75-85%. All you need to do then is to survive – you do need to think.
So, Uniko, when she is under stress, her frontal lobes are shut down. When we do Hook-ups, we’re forcing the brain to go into integrated brain pattern. When we’re integrated, we become coherent, and everybody around us will become coherent. Now, why didn’t thinking positively work? At Princeton University, they found that when we think, we leave the present. It makes it very hard for the heart to come to coherence. So, how does this relate to what Amy was doing this morning? She was doing something very interesting – it’s called active listening. Now, there is a Chinese symbol for that “聽”. Active listening incorporates hearing, real hearing, with YOU being very present with YOUR EYEs, with undivided attention, and this is the important part – from the HEART. So, how do we do that? How do we stay coherent? Czikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago called it “being in the flow”, “being in the moment”. Just being present. When Amy started working with Uniko, she was absolutely focused, present, nowhere else.
This is a funny research, I love this. Science have discovered that men think about 70% less than women. So when I asked Ahti (Carla’s husband), “What are you thinking?” He says: “Nothing.” It’s true. Women do a lot more multi-tasking than men. I think we need to learn so much from our men, folk, just quit thinking so much – just be. What are we dealing with right now in our culture? Here’s the Nelson Mobile Company research with teenage cellphone users. This was a study done by Mark Bauerlain. He found that teenagers in 2010 with cellphones are receiving 2,272 text messages a month, doing an average of 9 hours of social networking each week… and then missing facial expressions, postures, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other non verbal behavior that tell us what people are feeling and thinking. This is in his book The Dummest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeapordizes Our Future. This ties into a study that was done December of last year(2011), where they found that children are texting and watching TV for almost 11 hours a day which makes them very reflexive, meaning that they are in their survival brain. So they may be able to work on an assembly line, but they are not able to think deeply and come up with solutions that will assist humanity and our planet.
So, how does this relate to us as practitioners, being good practitioners? What I really love about this work, is that in all the years that I’ve worked with it – I started in 1986 – I’ve never had two balances identical. I’ve learnt something every interesting. When people come to me for a balance, it’s always MY issue, and that the teacher has arrived to teach me. What we know from quantum physics is that we are ALL PERFECT. Not only that, we are MASTERS. The observer effect with the double slit experiment shows that we determine our reality. Everybody is on this planet… this great playground, to grow. We draw to us the physical experiences in our lives to grow by. If everything were perfect in our lives, it would be absolutely boring and we wouldn’t learn anything. So we, as kinesiologists, have taken on this work, because, we have some work to do, and the teachers come to us.
In one of the places that I work, there are children that are special ed. – children that have difficulties learning. They asked me to be a counselor for the special ed. children…kindergarten, young, young children up to about age ten. I am not a counselor I am a biologist! The Ph.D. counselor said to me: “come and watch me, because I know what I am doing”. I went and sat in his office and these cute little kids came in and he said, “You’ve been bad. You go back and be good!” I thought this was crazy. Thank goodness, that Friday, we had an in-service for all the counselors in Honolulu. The keynote speaker was the warden for the maximum-security male prison. I’ll never forget what he told us. He said that when one of those men walks through his door, he says to himself, “What has this man come to teach me? What is the dance we’re to do together?” Nobody is broken. I’m going to show you something because I know this is a whole room of helpers. (Carla muscle checked participant Yunta) “Yunta, I am here to help you.” (Yunta’s muscles unlocked, and his arm went down), “Oh, no! How did that feel for you?” (Yunta said:) “I bit awkward.” “Yeah! How’s this instead? : Yunta, I am here to know who you are.” (Then his arms stayed up during muscle check) Nobody needs help. Nobody on this planet needs help unless they ask.
As practitioners, can you see every person that you work with as your teacher, as your way of opening up your reality to all possibilities? To have it be an adventure? When I do a balance with someone, it is so amazing to me because of the light that arises in them and they become absolutely authentic. So, Amy was doing some very important things. She was absolutely present, she was in her body, she was opened up, opening to pick up whatever was there for her learning also and she did one other thing. She perturbated Uniko. Uniko said that she didn’t feel like she could really communicate – she couldn’t say what she wanted to say, and Amy said: “Speak! Speak it!” What she was doing was simply supporting what Uniko wanted. In chaos theory, we call this perturbating the system. Amy absolutely listened. This is what Uniko wanted, to be a master in her life. She wanted to be able to talk and to speak her being. So, that was Amy’s job – to support her to be the master. Isn’t it great? So simple. We don’t have to do much. I love this work. I never know what it’s going to do, I never know, and it’s not my business. It’s the masters that appear in my life. This work is for nobody else but me.
I hope this gives you some better ideas.
Nobody is a victim. This is really hard. We know about the tsumami and the earthquake… and from what we understand, these people are living their growth and their lessons. They are all great masters and we are all connected. There is no distance between us.
Aloha.”
For more information, refer to these two books by Carla Hannaford:
Awakening the Child Heart, Handbook for Global Parenting
Playing In the Unified Field, Raising and Becoming Conscious, Creative Human Beings
Interview with Carla: “Playing In the Unified Field – Raising & Becoming Conscious, Creative Human Beings”
Youtube:
https://www.brainbodycentre.com/index_topic.php?charset=eng&did=209723&didpath=/7513/209070/209723
Youku:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDI2NDk1MjAw.html
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDI2NDk3NDI0.html
