Power Up Your Brain (26 page)

PHYSICAL EXERCISE TO UNLOCK
YOUR BRAIN’S POTENTIAL

Like calorie reduction and fasting, physical exercise also turns on the genetic machinery to make BDNF.

Scientific research relating exercise as an enhancement for BDNF production dates only to the late 1990s when researchers attempted to identify the link between exercise and improved brain function in laboratory animals. They found that when BDNF was blocked, exercise alone had almost no effect on brain performance.

More recently, human studies have confirmed that aerobic exercise imparts a powerful advantage in terms of brain function. In a recent Australian study reported in the
Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA)
, adults at risk for Alzheimer’s who engaged in a modest physical activity program for six months—150 minutes of exercise weekly—demonstrated much greater brain functionality than a similar population that was not involved in the exercise program. The exercise group, even after 18 months, showed improvements in delayed recall of a word list, a memory function, contrasted with the sedentary group’s decline on this evaluation. The active group also demonstrated dramatic advantages in verbal fluency and dementia scales. Interestingly, the authors of the study reported that exercise alone decreased the probability of dementia by 260 percent compared with the most commonly prescribed Alzheimer’s drug in America.
⁷

In another
JAMA
report, researchers again demonstrated a much higher level of cognitive function in older women who exercised compared with more sedentary individuals. The researchers concluded, “In this large, prospective study of older women, higher levels of long-term regular physical activity were strongly associated with higher levels of cognitive function and less cognitive decline.”
⁸

The same issue of
JAMA
also carried an article titled “Walking and Dementia in Physically Capable Elderly Men” that concluded physical activity improved brain protection in men as well.
⁹

LIFESTYLE CHOICES

The dietary practices of fasting and calorie reduction, coupled with regular aerobic exercise, are powerful epigenetic factors that modify the expression of your DNA. Choosing to incorporate these lifestyle decisions into your personal plan for well-being means that you are directly influencing the activity of genes that code for improved antioxidant protection, detoxification, and reduced inflammation as well as the production of BDNF. These lifestyle choices have paved the way for enlightenment for thousands of years.

CHAPTER 13

SHAMANIC
EXERCISES

In addition to the physical program of calorie reduction and exercise, the Power Up Your Brain Program includes eight exercises that will help you redefine your life and advance you along your path to enlightenment. These exercises are now part of the curriculum of the Healing the Light Body School. These are a blend of the shamanic and the scientific, with the shamanic being the base and science providing supporting evidence. Following are the eight exercises in the Power Up Your Brain Program.

1. Creating Sacred Space is a prayer that contains an invocation to the four directions, Mother Earth, and Father Sky; we recommend that you perform this exercise prior to and after all of the other exercises.

2. Quieting Your HPA Axis will help you relax the parts of your body and brain that produce damaging stress hormones.

3. Reselecting Your Genetic Destiny is a meditation through which you can alter the course of your life, beginning with the genes you acquired from your mother and father.

4. Sky Gazing is an ancient exercise that will calm your mind and turn on higher cortical functions.

5. Radical Forgiveness allows you to forgive yourself and others who, you may feel, hurt you in some way.

6. Drawing Life from Your Dreams involves two exercises: one will help you recall your dreams better, and the second will teach you how to dream lucidly and direct your dreams.

7. We Are Our Stories is an exercise in which you write your life story then change it to provide you with a more positive outlook on life.

8. The Shaman’s Bath is a practice that cleanses your Luminous Energy Field. Once a week you soak in a hot bath of healing and energizing substances prior to going to bed.

These shamanic exercises are explained in depth here; the next chapter outlines the entire Power Up Your Brain Program, which incorporates the exercises into a structured practice also involving neuronutrients, fasting, and physical exercise.

CREATING SACRED SPACE

People in the West think of sacred spaces as designated holy places—churches or temples, or perhaps a beautiful spot in nature. But the shaman understands that he or she can create a sacred space anywhere and at any time by focusing attention and summoning the power of the four cardinal directions and Mother Earth and Father Sun.

In doing so, the sage is able to come into relationship with the four shamanic organizing principles of the world: South as the place of the serpent; West as the place of the jaguar; North as the place of the hummingbird; and East as the place of the eagle. The sages believe that these animal archetypes are more than symbols; they are primordial energies with qualities and powers of their own.

Each of these animals can be seen as representing one of the four fundamental forces of nature, described by physics as the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and the weak nuclear force. Biologists also recognize that all of the poetry of life is written with an alphabet containing only four letters: the four letters, or base pairs, of DNA. The only difference between the shamanistic view and the physics view and the biological view is that the sages believed they could summon and interact with these forces of nature, effectively communing with the biosphere. For this reason, shamans always begin their meditations and ceremonies by creating sacred space. Even if you do not use the words in the prayer below, turn to each of the four directions and
feel
a connection to each of the animal archetypes. Help your educated, logical brain understand that these are ancient personifications of the forces of nature. As you give yourself permission to connect with the four cardinal directions and heaven and earth, imagine the luminous web that connects you with nature and all of life.

Sacred space is holy and safe. You might imagine it as a shimmering cupola above the room you are in. This is a palpable space where you can lower the defenses of your older brain, a place where you can rise above its predatory consciousness. You might notice that others feel the calm and beauty of this space, too, as it defuses conflict and makes conversation easy and significant.

Creating Sacred Space is an experiment in the power of intention that enables you to summon the healing faculties of nature and come into right relationship with all the forces of creation.

Exercise: Invocation to Create Sacred Space

The opening of sacred space consists of an invocation, calling on the four cardinal directions of South, West, North, and East, and on Mother Earth and Father Sky. An invocation such as this is used by shamans around the world to connect with the living energies of the biosphere. Use this invocation until your own prayer reveals itself to you.

When you have finished your opening invocation, be sure to close the sacred space, as suggested below. This is the one we teach our students at the Healing the Light Body School.

Opening the Sacred Space

Face South and say softly:
To the winds of the South, Great Serpent,
Teach us to shed the past the way you shed your skin,
To walk softly on the Earth.

Face West and say softly:
To the winds of the West, Mother Jaguar,
Teach us the way of peace, to live impeccably.
Show us the way beyond death.

Face North and say softly:
To the winds of the North, Hummingbird, Ancient Ones,
We honor you who have come before us
And you who will come after us, our children’s children.

Face East and say softly:
To the winds of the East, Great Eagle,
Show us the mountains we only dare to dream of.
Teach us to fly wing to wing with the Great Spirit.

Touch the ground where you stand and say softly:
Mother Earth,
We’ve gathered for the healing of all of your children.
The Stone People, the Plant People,
The four-legged, the two-legged, the ones that crawl on the Earth,
The ones that fly and swim through the waters,
All our relations.

Reach to the heavens and say softly:
Father Sun, Grandmother Moon, to the Star Nations.
Great Spirit, you who are the unnameable One.
Thank you for allowing us to sing the Song of Life.

Closing the Sacred Space

Repeat the invocation for opening the sacred space in the same order—briefly addressing the South, West, North, East, then Mother Earth and Father Sky.

Thank the archetypes—Serpent, Jaguar, Hummingbird, and Eagle—for being with you and release their energies to the four corners of the earth.

QUIETING YOUR HPA AXIS

The body has two defense systems: one to detect and respond to perceived threats in the external environment, and the other to detect and respond to internal threats. The first is the fight-or-flight response. The second is the immune system.

As we discussed earlier, the fight-or-flight response works through the HPA axis. When there are no perceived external threats, the HPA axis is at rest and all the body’s resources are dedicated to the renewal of its systems and the growth of new cells. When the body perceives an external threat, such as the sudden roar of a lion or the blare of an automobile horn, the HPA axis kicks in and signals the release of cortisol and adrenaline, which constrict blood vessels in the digestive tract and redirect blood flow away from the internal organs to the extremities, preparing us to fight or flee. These hormones also constrict blood vessels in the prefrontal cortex, where our logic and reasoning centers are located, and redirect blood to the old brain, where reflex, instinctive action originates. As a result, our thinking becomes muddled and we operate like a cornered animal.

This is an ancient survival mechanism that continues to serve us well. The problem is that the old brain does not differentiate between perceived danger and actual danger. In our modern Western world, while we are not faced with many roaring lions, we are, instead, caught in frustrating traffic jams and toxic emotional assaults at the office or at home. Television supplies a constant feed of violence, and we remain in a hypervigilant state, our amygdala keeping us in high alert. Day-to-day life in the 21st century keeps us awash in a torrent of stress hormones, the most damaging of which, at least from the brain’s perspective, is cortisol. In chronically stressed patients as well as depressed individuals, both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex are physically shriveled and shrunken—they were experiencing much more rapid breakdown of the brain than the their nonstressed counterparts.

The shamanic practice of quieting your HPA axis is a form of shamanic meditation, and can be likened to a form of relaxation employed in a recent study to determine if meditation could slow down cellular aging. This study examined the length of telomeres, which are the protective end caps of chromosomes and a representative measure of cellular aging, in two groups of mothers. One group was experiencing high levels of stress due to coping with a chronically ill child, while the other women had healthy children and experienced only low or what might be considered normal levels of stress.
¹

The authors discovered that the mothers who had been caring for their chronically ill children had shorter telomeres, which is an indication that these women had a more advanced degree of cellular aging as well as having DNA at higher risk for damage. The stressed mothers were aging much more rapidly than the mothers whose lives were less emotionally challenging.

The stressed mothers also showed low levels of telomerase, which are enzymes that restore and repair the length of frayed telomeres. Low telomerase is indicative of decreased protection of DNA and is associated with all the stress-related diseases as well as with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity. The authors concluded, “We propose that some forms of meditation may have salutary effects on telomere length by reducing cognitive stress and stress arousal and increasing positive states of mind.”