CONSULTING YOUR INNER WISDOM: PART 2

 Last October I wrote a post on listening to your inner wisdom (Oct. 1, 2010

http://postsfromtheunconscious.blogspot.com/2010/10/consult-your-inner-wisdom-it-has-all.html)

The post was based on experiences from my practice with a visualization technique that seemed helpful to people and furthered the ends of the psychotherapy treatment.  It often helped us cut through confusion, obfuscation, denial, and conditioned thinking and got us quickly to the heart of whatever matter we were wrestling with.

This work was especially helpful with and for individuals who relied heavily on “dissociation”  a coping mechanism we all resort to at times, but is particularly important for individuals who have experienced childhood trauma.  I have experimented with the inner wisdom technique with others whose “traumas” were less obvious or less extreme or even non-existent and found it useful in a lot of situations.  Inner wisdom is wise and I think universal.

I’m revisiting this issue, after reading an article by Martha Beck in this month’s Oprah Magazine,  (yes, Oprah) on a very similar topic which reminded me of some other issues related to implementing this practice which might be useful to comment on.

The existence of “inner wisdom” is based on the assumption that there is something in all of us that, unimpeded, will right us when we wobble.  Maybe “inner gyroscope” is more accurate.  A gyroscope will always get us back in balance if we just let it.

I think of inner wisdom as right-brained, body-based, nor necessarily verbal.  It’s that still small “voice” within which may not be a “voice” at all, but arrive in the form of images, kinesthetic sensation, or even sound. 

I sat with a client once on the same morning I had received some awful news about a dear friend.  I tried to set this aside and set to work with this client.  I thought I had. Very quickly, I got drawn into a confusing, chaotic, tumultuous session.  It wasn’t until she reported “hearing”  a loud bang that we began to get some clarity.  The bang, it turned out, was the dreadful memory of the sound of a car hitting and killing her best friend, an event that she had witnessed decades past.   Her “inner wisdom” was telling her something very similar was happening to me.  And it was.

We live in an extremely left-brained culture.  By this I mean we value words, logic, socially conditioned values.  We more often make choices based on “shoulds,” “oughts,” the evaluations of others, negative judgments.   We don’t let the gyroscope do its work.

We also live in a culture brimful of distraction. 

To “hear” your inner voice you have to get quiet, you have to learn to cultivate and tolerate silence.  The blackberry, iphone, NPR, gmail, twitter, facebook all have to go away for a little while everyday.  Processing experience comes more naturally when you are walking in the woods, taking rhythmic breaths in the pool, doing yoga without the radio on (my personal downfall).

Taking note of our dreams, by keeping a log of them,  sitting with them for at least a few minutes every day, increases clarity. There very well may be meaningful cues that are coming through our dreams that can be guiding us.  A patient reports that as she was sifting through old journals she found notes of a dream that almost exactly predicted the location and manner of detection of a malignancy in her breast, a malignancy that would be discovered many years later.

Meditating on a regular basis also increases the accessibility to cues, often within the body, that are signaling us as to which moves are prudent, and which imprudent.

Sometimes I have the experience of feeling upset without really know why.  I know my nervous system is buzzing, my body is sending signals of distress, but I haven’t a clue as to what this is about.  I have to get quiet to have any chance of getting a handle on what is really going on.  More than likely,  sitting quietly, patiently (for it may take awhile) with the question of what is it that is upsetting me,  what is calling for my attention, will yield some clarity.   The upset doesn’t disappear, but its power does diminish and I am less likely to be reactive to it, reactive in a way that will neither benefit me nor those around me.

Cultivating this inner voice yields great benefits.  I think we all instinctively know this.  I wonder what keeps us from actively listening.

LEFT BRAIN/ RIGHT BRAIN

I was listening to NPR one afternoon. Judith Shulevitz was talking about her book, The Sabbath World: Glimpse of a Different Order of Time. The book is described as both a scholarly exploration of Sabbath practices and an exploration of her own recently acquired practice of Sabbath observance. It was interesting.

There was one thought that she expressed that I both recognized and found paradoxical. To paraphrase: “ I love synagogue, the Sabbath observance, but I don’t believe in Gd.” I have heard many variations of this sentiment expressed. I really don’t get it. I don’t understand what “I don’t believe in Gd” means in this context. What is happening to people who attend synagogue, enjoy prayer, or the observance of prescribed practices, like the observance of Sabbath? What do they mean it has nothing to do with Gd?

A few years back I saw a short clip on the web of a lecture given by Jill Bolte Taylor http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html)

Dr, Taylor was a neuroanatomist, a researcher of the brain at Harvard who suffered a devastating stroke on the left side of her brain at age 37. Her story is about both her recovery and what she learned about “right brain consciousness” as a result of her stroke. I was so moved and fascinated by the lecture that I bought and read her book when it came out several months later and followed her on the talk show circuit, whenever I could.

Dr. Taylor suffered a “slow bleed” into the left hemisphere of her brain, the location of her stroke. For a while she experienced only what could be apprehended from the right hemisphere. Undistracted by the linear, verbal, linguistic, rational, logical and autobiographical left hemisphere, she had access to a unique experience of consciousness.

The right hemisphere of our brains are affective, non-verbal, non-linear. There is no time, only the present moment. There are no boundaries, all is one and one is all. As Dr. Taylor describes it, the right brain experience is close to “nirvana,” or the state of ecstatic oneness, that meditative adepts have been able to achieve.

The right brain seems to house the organ of spiritual receptivity. That is what this brain scientist experienced and came to believe in fervently.
We are two-brained. And we forget this. We think of the logical left brain as being the true mind, and the right brain, which is online much earlier in our development (and maybe is the last to go), as being somehow less valid, less reliable, less real.

As the left hemisphere was blinking on and off at the moment of the stroke, Dr. T. found herself unable to focus on calling for help, dialing or even reading the phone, forming or understanding words. Remarkably she did not die. More remarkably she has almost completely recovered. But most remarkably she has had the experience, and is able to convey the experience, of having full access to right-brained consciousness:living in a space that was truly spiritual.

So this is what I think is happening with Judith Shulevitz and the rest of us wrestling with being drawn to something that we do not “believe” in. I believe that Sabbath observance, prayer, meditation practice, yoga give us a glimpse of right-brained consciousness. If you do not have the ill fortune of a left hemispheric stroke it is not a simple thing to “feel” your right brain. The chatter of the left drowns out the timelessness and serenity of the right. We all have to work really, really hard to get access to that other form of consciousness. Music may get us there, poetry, meditation, prayer, and ritual are some popular routes. For Judith Shulevitz it may be Sabbath observance. But I’m just guessing.

Belief is a function of left brain work, that which is logical,
rational, linguistic. “Is there a GD” is a left brained question.” And there is no left brain answer. If “answer” is a relevant word, and I’m not sure it is, we need to turn to the other side.