Emmy crossed over on Tuesday morning. She spent the previous three days laying on her side on a blanket in the living room. She couldn’t lay on her stomach. She couldn’t eat. She could only take water from a dropper.
Emmybear: 6-9-2013 to 5-8-2024
She was a beloved member of the family for 11 years. That’s a long life for a Bernese Mountain Dog, but it’s way too short as far as I’m concerned. She didn’t seem to be in pain during those three days, though her spontaneous sleep-yelping and leg twitches gave me great pause.
Emmy was the last of the Bernateers. She and Olliebear came as a pair of 8-week-old pups. Abby joined the crew a year later. I still have sweet memories of the three of them romping through the woods – off-leash and loving it. When it would occasionally snow here on Whidbey Island, all three of them would head for the open field next door – snow brought out their Swiss heritage.
Emmy’s last days were more difficult than I realized. I struggled over and over again trying to distinguish between what was my discomfort and what was hers. My own uncertainty and confusion led me to the recurring realization that the stress of her life ending was mostly making my brain and body not operate wisely. Ultimately, we chose to let her vet make the decision about ending her life. By the time we got her to him, the right decision was apparent in her eyes – her life as an Emmybear was at an end.
A Miracle
We thought Emmy was going to be transitioning back in January. She couldn’t walk and had spent two days listlessly laying on her side. We went and located a site on our property and dug a 4 foot hole. Then, on a creative whim I suggested we try her on some Prednisone. Ollie’d left it behind. It had proven to be a miracle drug for him. It also turned out to be for Emmy as well. Almost instantly she seemed to recover fully. Sigh. Relief.
What’s been most troubling to me throughout this process has been an awareness of how the cost of care and after-care was adversely factoring into every decision we made, consciously and unconsciously. How much is euthanasia? How much for cremation? Which urn to choose? Finally, I asked myself – if money was of no concern, what decisions would I make? The answers became crystal clear fast.
Today, several days later, I’m okay with knowing in my heart that in my ignorance, confusion and uncertainty, I did the best I could. Nevertheless, Emmy’s gone and I miss her. Hopefully, she has managed to join up with Olliebear and Abbybear somewhere. Here on planet earth I’m doing my best to make that happen. We’ve been saving Abby’s ashes until a suitable home for them showed up. And now one has: She’ll be buried alongside Emmy right around the corner from Ollie at the crossroads of the Conifer Connection and the Tranquility Loop in our local wooded hiking park. The 3 Bernateers will be together again for what’s left of my life. I feel great solace.
One of the benefits of spending nearly a decade working undercover as the maintenance man at an academically respected Think Tank, is that I got to spend low-stress, unstructured time up close and interpersonally around some pretty smart people. Every day I got to see how they dressed, how they groomed (or failed to), what and how they regularly ate, how they arranged and operated inside their offices . . . in addition to learning that the “absent-minded professor” wasn’t just a stereotype – that it was an observable, confirmable reality – I took away three other memorable learnings.
Extreme Focus
People who aspire to and achieve anything notable in their lifetime tend not to be Jacks and Jills of all trades. They find something that puts a buzz in their brain and/or a thrill in their heart and they end up devoting a great deal of their life’s time and attention to it. They remind me very much of accomplished musicians like Jon Batiste or Jake Shimabukuro. Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel is one of my favorite examples. Eric spent 30 years at Columbia University in New York studying the California sea snail. But not something so general as the whole snail – something very specific – the handful of neurons that trigger gill and siphon withdrawal reflexes in Aplysia. That concentrated focus allowed Eric and his team to make groundbreaking discoveries about the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory formation (my takeaway from Eric’s prize-winning research – learning is more enjoyable, easier and engaging when it’s fun. And it’s most fun when it triggers our reward circuitry [To test this takeaway I’m going to be offering a free presentation sometime in the next several months. It will be learning an easy way to practice and become accomplished in something many wisdom teachers consider to be the foundation of every strong spiritual practice: Embodied Altruism. Most importantly intention is to have the learning be fun. Email me [floweringbrain@gmail.com] if you think you might be interested]).
In addition to focus, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick knows that along with it must come something else – Deliberate Practice: “Our evidence suggests that given favorable learning conditions for Deliberate Practice and given the learner invests effort in sufficient learning opportunities, indeed, anyone can learn anything (my italic) they want.”
(Definitely worth the time to read . . . and practice). From my perspective, the central challenge of Deliberate Practice is to creatively concoct ways to make hard things fun. That necessarily involves . . .
Patience and Persistence
Laureates and Geniuses have an abiding relationship with Keith Anders Erickson’s often misunderstood 10,000 Hour Rule. They instinctively know the rule isn’t about devoting your time to something you love and doing only the easy parts over and over. No. Most of those 10,000 hours have to be devoted to systematically doing the parts of the work that suck, that you aren’t good at, and finding creative, fun ways to get good at them – to make a game out of them; to have – maybe not a ball exactly – but some way that allows you to persist and keep moving forward.
Let’s go back a minute and pretend you’re Eric Kandel. You’re going to win a Nobel Prize for discovering how learning and memory work in the brain, way down at the level of brain cells and the connections they make. And you’re going to do it by studying visible neurons in the California Sea Snail (Aplysia Californica) . . . for 30 years! How do you manage to stick with it? A handful of neurons – day after day, week after week, decade after decade. How many different experiments can you do with a handful of neurons?
Well, guess what – you’re going to need patience and persistence. You’re going to learn how to learn from all kinds of things (Even a Stone Can Be a Teacher). You’re going to have to learn how to be curious, how to deal with feeling stuck, feeling stupid, feeling lost, feeling like a fraud, feeling like you’ve been wasting a significant amount of the time of your life. Hopefully though, at some point you’re going to learn how to take yourself and your work less seriously. You’re going to learn how to make a game out of life and work. You’re going to learn how to play. And . . . it’s once again going to become effortlessly embodied.
And I can pretty much guarantee you that you’re going to have to learn how to manage the stress-generating default brain networks that love to run doom-loop narratives any time we allow them to (For me, a cancer diagnosis during Covid gave me plenty of opportunities for practice!).
I.Q. < E.Q.
This formula came about during an “Equation Phase” I went through late last year with an Artificial Intelligence engine. I would come up with a phrase and ask A.I. to write an equation for it. Fun, right.
This phrase emerged from what I call my Think Tank Decade: “Intellectual Intelligence does not necessarily equal Emotional Intelligence.” In fact, the focus and persistent pursuit of intellectual brilliance almost always demands that some areas of human development must go under-developed. We have only so much body-mind-heart-brain real estate that can be devoted to learning and practicing anything. To excel in any ONE area is going to almost certainly result in other areas remaining less developed.
An example of this reality is often-cited research like this which compares the hand areas in the brains of musicians versus non-musicians. When you spend decades pressing piano keys or fingering fretboards, those areas show significantly more enriched density and connectivity. When you spend similar amounts of time researching, reading and writing about a narrow area of interest that primarily activates the left side of the brain, it’s reasonable to expect cells in that hemisphere will be more dense and robustly connected than cells in the right, where much research suggests emotions are predominantly processed.
So, those are my three takeaways. But the good news is . . . it’s rarely ever too late to begin addressing and developing those under-developed areas. And I have been a reliable witness to the results of that exalted practice. With all that in mind, here’s my fourth, bonus takeaway: Whatever you decide to pursue that increases brain power, along with it will very likely involve growing . . . a compassionate heart.
There’s an apocryphal story that Kathleen Singh tells in her book, Unbinding about Keith Jarrett, the famous jazz pianist. When he was 3 or 4 years old his parents decided to take him to a strict Russian piano teacher. The teacher instructed Keith to start by playing one piano key – middle C – for eight hours a day, for a week. 88 weeks later, that first lesson was complete. The way Keith heard each of those notes at the start of every week was much different than the way he heard them at the end of each week. Why? Because the nerve fibers in his auditory cortex and associated areas had become greatly enriched. But here’s the critical piece from my perspective. Growing those brain areas one note at a time had very little “noise”/ stress interfering with the growth of those networks. Low-stress learning was what Keith was actually practicing. Low-stress learning is not compromised by stress-elevating distractions. Properly structured, it’s all “Green Zone Learning.”
My Low-Stress Learner’s Journey
I’ve taken on that low-stress learning protocol many times over the course of my life. For example, I learned to build houses by working with semi-knowledgeable friends who were also learning on the job. We learned together. The first houses were pretty funky, but they got better and better one by one.
After a less-than-remarkable inner-city (New Haven, CT) high school career, I started college at Los Angeles Valley College, a junior college that was a great fit for me. From there I transferred to UCLA (a poor fit for me) and I dropped out after two semesters. When I subsequently moved to New York, I transferred to SUNY New Paltz, a small, upstate college where I mostly took courses I was interested and comfortable in – Innovative Studies, Psychology of the Courtroom, Bookbinding and Production. I actually managed to graduate with a BA a half year early (at age 30).
Post-Graduate Pursuits
After several more false post-graduate starts, I got a Master of Arts degree in Family Systems from the University of Bridgeport (just before the Moonies took it over). At the time, it was one of the more highly regarded family systems programs in the country.
Another short stint in a PhD program at UCLA gave way to me transferring to a small startup school in Silicon Valley studying “Transpersonal Psychology” – something I was already studying independently on my own. Why not structure my studies and get a doctorate along the way?
And for the last 20 years – for a whole host of different reasons – I’ve been immersed in neuroscience and traumatology – reading and writing about it for my own good and others as well. Through it all there’s been one common thread – safe, low-stress learning environments.
Low-Stress Learning Makes It Happen
Recently, I’ve begun crafting another low-stress learning environment. I happen to have a friend who’s been very successful in the stock market over 40 years or so. Early on in his career his early success invited money to manage from other people. Guess what that did to his stress levels? Recognizing the adverse impact of that added responsibility, he soon decided to return all their money and go back to managing only his own. Along the way, a mix of high-stress and low-stress learning ensued. Once he had enough money to last the rest of his life, it was mostly low-stress from there. Guess what. Now he has even more money.
So, for my own low-stress learning where the stock market is concerned, I’ve taken a page out of Keith Jarrett’s piano teacher’s book: I’m starting by trading 5 shares of various low-priced stocks (think low-stress) until I have made 100 profitable trades (the elimination of brokerage fees makes this possible). The amount of money I make with each profitable trade doesn’t matter. It’s the low-stress learning that is key. Once I hit the 100 trade goal, I’ll up it to 10 shares. Then 15. Then 20. By the time I get to 1000 shares, I expect that will be very low-stress by simple virtue of the amount of low-stress learning I’ve been able to accomplish along the way (think robust neural network-building). I’ll report back after I hit the first 100 profitable-trade goal. When might that be? That’s of no concern. “When”,” and “how much” are simply distractions that would only amp up the stress.
Feel free to design YOUR OWN Low-Stress learning journey. I’d love to know what it looks like and how it unfolds. Email me at: floweringbrain@gmail.com
So, two weeks ago I had my regularly scheduled throat cancer screening with Downtown Aaron Brown, MD, my radiology bro. I’ve had three years of exams now, starting initially at every three months. Now we’re at every six months; after the next one, we’ll stretch out to every 9 months – brain, mind, body, heart, soul and the Universe willing.
So, I pretty much know what to expect leading up to what invariably feels like . . . Judgment Day – I’ll either get a thumbs up or a thumbs down. English critic and poet, Samuel Johnson is famous for the quotation which roughly goes, “Nothing so focuses a man’s mind as the sure knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning.” What Johnson doesn’t pay homage to are all the things that a man slated to be hanged loses focus on as a result of feeling like he’s literally staring down the barrel of a gun.
Blocking All the Portals
Leading up to J-Day, gradually ALL my sense portals begin to become noticeably compromised. Constipation shows up and urination frequency increases. My taste buds decrease in their range and ability to experience all of the five tastes with any degree of discriminating pleasure. My sense of smell – never really all that great – becomes almost non-existent. Same with hearing, which can operate at a decent level one moment and then have my auditory nerve bundles seemingly stop operating completely (The term for this is Hysterical Deafness). My hands and feet become numb(er) and the sweat glands that constantly lubricate them essentially stop functioning. When I rub my thumb and fingers together it feels like there’s a piece of fine, smooth silk between them. As you might guess, I drop a lot of things and I struggle to get my touch phone screen to respond.
During this current lead-up, compromised vision surprised me the most. Doing anything that requires short term memory, demands I be extra mindful and attentive. Clicking links on the internet, writing blogs, sending emails, using kitchen implements, shop tools – anything that requires paying attention, during this pre-exam period, requires paying even more.
So, I was working on the small engine on our riding lawn mower. I took two bolts out and put them deliberately on the contrasting yellow mower seat. When it was time to put the bolts back, I went to get them, surprisingly, they were no longer on the seat. I spent the next half hour futilely looking for them. Finally, I asked my wife to help me find them. She promptly went and found them – hiding in plain site – on the yellow mower seat. This is called Hysterical Blindness. The whole lot of these conditions fall under the umbrella of Conversion Disorders.
Stress Conversion
I would posit that in actuality, these conditions are stress disorders. Here’s how I think they work. All these portals are openings that provide the brain access to the outside world. If we didn’t have them, nothing of the outside world could get in and nothing inside could get out. What connects these portals are wires that run from them up and over to different areas of the brain (auditory cortex, visual cortex, olfactory bulb, etc.).
What stress does is compromise signal transmission. So far, the research only identifies chronic stress as indirectly causal. I would argue ANY stress that triggers sufficient glutamate activation can compromise portal wiring. It does so by literally weakening the adhesion molecules (primarily Nectin-3) that keep the wiring connected and intact. When the network wiring can’t stay stuck together, it begins unraveling. Here’s what it looks like as conceived by neuroscientist Carmen Sandi in her Swiss lab:
All that said, here’s the good news: because of how “plastic” the brain is, once Dr. Downtown” gives me a thumbs-up reprieve, glutamate activation lowers, adhesion-weakening begins to subside, new wires begin to make new connections (probably begin to restore some of the old wiring as well) and increasing functionality begins to return me to a “new normal.”
The Secret to Life
And the new normal, for me at least, involves monitoring my constantly fluctuating stress levels and then doing my best to keep them operating in the Green.
But wait, there’s more, and it’s good news – much of these downstream effects can likely be addressed upstream – by advance-managing stress’s effects in one area of the brain in particular. A special prize goes to the first reader who guesses the correct area (Note: it’s my personal, informed hypothesis here). Thanks for playing.
“Soul-knowing is a fountainhead within you moving out. Drink from there!”
Years ago I transferred out of a well-regarded PhD program at UCLA in favor of attending and graduating from this small startup school. It was founded by two male college graduates, one from Stanford, one from Harvard, who believed they only got 1/2 their brain (the left) and little of their heart educated. Their school would be different – it would be designed and intended to educate the right brain and the heart as much as possible.
One of my students in those days was an impressive mother of four kids who also worked as a civil engineer. She specialized in the design and restoration of movable bridges – the kind that rise up or swivel round to allow waterway traffic flow. She also worked as a birth doula and . . . a death doula in her spare time. Since I was a builder, had just fathered a child of my own and had been researching, writing and teaching about death for many years, Jeanne and I hit it off. I eventually became first her mentor and then her colleague. She ended up researching and writing an award-winning thesis (measuring heart variability resonance in bedside sitters with the dying). She went on to talk about that research to various groups who received it and her with open kindness and appreciative applause. I personally witnessed a group of retired, curmudgeonly Stanford professors receiving her talk with surprising warmth and appreciation.
Joining Whole Brain to Whole Heart
After I got my right brain educated at Sofia, I spent the next ten years tuning up my left brain at a Stanford Think Tank hanging out with Nobel Laureates and MacArthur geniuses – as a cultural anthropologist disguised as the maintenance man. Kind of like my own strange version of Good Will Hunting, I suppose. I learned many things over those ten years (I’ll share three of the most significant takeaways from that decade in an upcoming post).
Currently, I am enrolled at another small startup school. It’s a school conceived and birthed with mostly female energy, primarily designed for adults who have gone through traditional education. The school grew out of Jeanne’s interest and experience with birth, death, somatic psychology and engineering. And, things that exist before, during and after those things. Things known and unknown. Things seen and unseen. Things sensed and not sensed. It’s a refreshing School of Unusual Life Learning (Although I’m not a fan of naming any learning organization a “school” since Ken Robinson informed 76 million people of the many ways that modern schools kill creativity – people judge you by the circles you travel in).
I’m currently finding SoULL to be anything but a creativity-killer. In fact, simultaneously, along with my recent enrollment as a student, I’m just about finished with first drafts of my fourth screenplay (The Muffin-Truckin’ Change Agency; The Levamine Conspiracy; Triumph of the Intransigents and The Winner); I’ve created and taught extremely well-received seminars on Social Safety Science (Polyvagal Theory) and Artificial Intelligence and I’ve researched and written first drafts of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of curriculum for a course in Embodied Altruism and . . . all while pretty much keeping up with my weekly blog-writing.
Rounding the Circle
It’s difficult to clearly and compellingly speak about numinous, expansive, healing, learning experiences. If you’re at all interested and resonate with such things, a startup School of Unusual Life Learning may indeed have some appeal. You can find out more by visiting: SoULL.
Oh, and did I mention enrollment comes with something truly unusual that no other school has ever offered me before: a money-back guarantee if I find the time invested wasn’t absolutely worth the tuition!
I was originally solicited to write this account by an academic journal who ultimately elected not to publish it for reasons not related to content or usefulness. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth a read, especially if you have any interest in . . . helping children heal.
Helping Children Heal
Mark Brady
“You often meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.” ~ William McFee
Way back in the day (1980) when transpersonal psychology was struggling to become fully birthed into the world, I found myself serendipitously transplanted (seemingly) from graduate studies at UCLA to a small Silicon Valley startup school – The California Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. I was part of an entering class similarly transplanted, and enrolled among us was the volunteer coordinator for a local nonprofit – Kara1a. Kara was a community-supported grief counseling agency. They sent volunteers to spend time with dying and grieving people. As a 33-year-old professional home builder, I was an unlikely volunteer candidate.
Nevertheless, two years later I found myself within Kara as one among a cohort of transpersonal “intransigent minorities.” Transpersonal intransigent minorities can be most easily described as people with . . . soul in the game – human illuminators with a passion for helping to relieve the suffering of others. The passion our little group of intransigents had within Kara turned out to be pretty focused and singular: helping kids move through grief, a worthy transpersonal pursuit.1b
And Then There Were Two
There was only one program serving kids suffering significant loss in the country at the time – The Dougy Center1c up in Portland, Oregon. Several people from our group contacted them and were invited to come up and observe and experience the work they did there. Those forward scouts brought the model back and we implemented it back in Palo Alto with very few changes.
Since we already had the meeting space (two large rooms donated by a local church), the first step was to describe the model to the community and get the steps down on paper. Ages suggested by the research literature (6-10 and 11-15)2a as developmentally most distinct would be the initial two cohorts. Meetings would last an hour and a half. A parent or guardian would have to accompany each child to our facility and meet separately in their own group led by two Kara grief counselors. The first 15 minutes would be a large group gathering of kids, counselors and parents for socializing, healthy snacks and drinks.
Following large group time, the parents would go off to a separate room together with their counselors for small group grief support; the kids would go off with their counselors to what was essentially a multi-media art studio.
Allan Shore, the UCLA developmental neuropsychiatry professor, and the transpersonal-leaning Oxford neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist both provide extensive evidence that early overwhelming or traumatic experiences primarily get stored in the right hemisphere of the brain (one theory is that much of the left hemisphere neural real estate is left available for later language development. It’s also important to remember that the brain is a distributed network across both hemispheres and into the body).3a,3b For that reason and others, our work with the kids was mostly non-verbal. It involved drawing, painting, mask-making, clay modeling, singing, sand tray collage and one other activity that turned out to be critical to their healing journey. Had our group had better access to the easy research resources available today, we likely would have added a number of other activities to the program. For example: sensory bins, blind tasting, scented PlayDoh, interactive, prosocial VR computer games, etc.
The Number One Preferred Activity
Each weekly meeting with the kids would begin with 8-10 kids together with two counselors sitting in a circle on the floor on pillows of various shapes and sizes. One of the counselors would ring a chime signaling time for quiet and paying attention. None of the kids carried cell phones, so they weren’t a distraction. After a minute or so, one of the counselors would open the meeting by briefly sharing three bits of information: 1. Who died and their relationship to the deceased; 2. When they died; and 3. What they died from (counselors in the children’s program had to have their own grief journey integrated). This initial offering was all the intentional, structured narrative around loss that was a part of every meeting. As we would go around the circle, a talking object would be passed, often brought in by the kids (by counselors encouraging parents to have it happen).
When sharing in the circle was complete, kids were now free to choose where and with which activity, alone or together with other kids, they wanted to engage. Art, mask-making and sand tray were popular. But by far, the most preferred activity was getting to spend time in the Steam Room.
The Steam Room was pretty much exactly what it sounds like – kids had the opportunity to let off steam, not verbally necessarily (although they were certainly free to talk – mostly they wanted to scream and shout), but physically. The Steam Room measured roughly 20’ by 24’ with soundproofed and padded walls, floor and door. It also had safety webbing over the screened, openable window. Think of a padded dojo or yoga studio where no one could hear the ruckus that was taking place inside (Where in the real world do such places exist? And made more significant by the fact that this was a church building!).
The room itself was provisioned with a variety of pillows of various sizes, foam batakas, soft rubber kick balls, yoga balls, and a heavy punching bag – the kind found in boxing gyms. Groups of three to four kids, along with a counselor were allowed to be in the room together for 15 minutes at a time. When the first group’s time was up, a second group of kids, together with the second counselor would have their 15 minutes in the room. A majority of the kids preferred and significantly benefitted from the time in the Steam Room each week.
Look to the Children
I took a great amount of learning away from the years spent with these kids. First and foremost, they sent me on a deep learning quest into the trauma and neuroscience literature.4,5,6,7 My learning in those areas over the last 20 years has been extensive, enduring and enlightening. Here are two great takeaways among untold numbers of them:
According to Columbia computational neurobiologist Daniel Wolpert, the human brain began evolving primarily to move the body.21 Life that can be nourished and grow without having to move, doesn’t have or need a brain. That need and the ability to move continues to evolve and remains with us to this day. Movement is critical for many neuro-somatic reasons, chief among them – metabolizing neuroendocrine stress hormones and other metabolic waste products.22a,22b
The second learning, from brain connectome researchers like former MIT Media Lab director and neotenist11 Joi Ito, seems to support the first: every cell in the mammalian brain is part of a network that eventually traces a route that terminates at a gland or a muscle. Human life is live-wired at the cellular level to move, connect and to grow into evermore integrated neural networks.
Grieving the Loss of Contingent Communication
Another interpersonal activity that stimulates neuroplasticity by growing new brain cells and new connections is serve-and-return communication (neurogenesis and synaptogenesis). In the attachment literature it’s known as contingent communication. UCLA neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel26 describes three critical elements that make for a successful contingent communication. First of all, we have to have someone actually be paying close attention to us – bearing nonjudgmental witness.
Next, they have to fully and accurately receive the message being communicated. So, for example, if a child in the program shows up in the group one week and they seem flat or distracted, for that child to be ignored or that difference in affect not to be acknowledged in some nonthreatening manner would not be contingent communication.
Third and finally, that recognition and acknowledgement must be provided in a timely and effective manner. For a counselor (or parent) to acknowledge a presenting behavior an hour, day or week after it takes place, again, that would be non-contingent. Dynamic feedback loops are like Miracle-Gro for the brain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucQQCa_kA0U).
Back-feeding Feedback Loops
The years of their lives that children spend with parents, pets, family and friends are years spent building and growing networks through contingently communicated feedback loops. And those networks need to be periodically stimulated – the more frequently they are, the better. But there’s an old adage in neuroscience which essentially describes what happens: “Use it or lose it.” Where functioning and survival are concerned, neural real estate is some of the most valuable neurobiological real estate there is. Limited skull container capacity places it in short supply. If networks are no longer sending electro-chemical signals, an organic process called apoptosis will begin to dismantle the cells and connections associated with that network. Just the reverse – enriched, robust, widespread connectivity can be found in long-term meditators and transpersonal practitioners.10,11
Let’s imagine a ten-year-old child loses his father through death or divorce. For 10 years daily contingent communication (think of it as relational learning) has been taking place between daughter and father. Precious neural network space has been taken up in the brain (and body) through this living family relationship. Then one day the father is no longer an interactive presence in the daughter’s life. Her cells are no longer firing in response to contingent interactions with dad. What begins to happen to the cells in that network? They begin to unravel and die, theoretically, in part to free up the skull space for new learning – for life, and learning, to go on.
Challenges for Community Counselors Working With Kids’ Grief
Much of the work of the children’s counselors was informally supporting, informing and assuring the parents that their children’s behavior was within the expectations of a normal grieving process. In addition, counselors were trained to be supportive and available to each other and to help each other identify, recognize and skillfully work with our own discomfort doing the work. One example remains vivid in memory:
The parents of twin 7-year-old girls had been going through a protracted and challenging divorce process. One weekend when the father had custody of the girls, he took one of them aside and angrily told her, “One day I’m going to commit suicide and it’s going to be your fault.” Then, less than a week later, he did.
In instances like this, critical and integral to the success of the Program was the availability of trained psychologists, pediatric social workers, pediatricians and psychiatrists, all voluntarily serving as consultants. Here are a few other issues parents and counselors ended up bringing to the program consultants:
While Kara counselors were somewhat trained in understanding developmental stages of childhood grief and associated behaviors, it was often difficult for us to know if and when sadness was within a normal range or indicated complicated grief. If it was the latter – frequently present if the loss was unexpected and/or traumatic – like from suicide, homicide or environmental disaster – then counselors were supported in getting extra consultations and parents were also offered additional community support.
(One training exercise that counselors found especially helpful when they found themselves emotionally activated or overwhelmed by the kids’ stories, art or play, was to simply “say what you see”, avoiding as much additional commentary or interpretation as possible. So, for example, if a child drew a picture of a heart, torn and broken down the middle, and printed “Mom” under it, a counselor might say, “You’ve drawn a heart that is broken with the word ‘Mom’ under it.” To our frequent surprise, just the simple act of identifying and acknowledging that personal expression would often positively, energetically alter the child’s behavior and affect).
In addition to complicated grief, occasionally children in the program would show telltale signs of physical or sexual abuse, such as erotic acting out, being sexually “playful”, suggestive drawings or sand tray depictions, or uncharacteristic aggressiveness with other kids. In those instances, reports were made to the consultants who were requested to contact and meet with the child and family member for follow-up evaluations.
One behavior in particular was deliberately paid regular attention to, and that was isolating or non-participating behavior by a child. In those instances a third counselor would be introduced in the general meeting and would become a part of the Children’s group, paying special attention to the needs of the identified child. The special attention would often work to begin to make it feel safe for the child to begin actively participating and nonverbally express what might be causing the isolating behavior.
Program Takeaways
As a general rule, children tend to have much greater neuroplasticity and resilience12 and antifragility13 than adults. One consequence of that is, by and large, the children in our program were able to process, work through, and integrate their losses weeks ahead of their parents. A surprising number of older kids who successfully completed the Children’s Program asked to be trained so they could be of assistance and help other subsequent groups of kids.
As previously mentioned, there were a number of things that potentially contributed to that. First is age – young brains generally process energy and information much more rapidly (learn) than adult brains.14
Next was the fact that few activities took place in our program that weren’t primarily working primarily with the right hemisphere of the brain. This is the side where research suggests overwhelming and disorganizing, emotionally charged memories and experiences get predominantly stored.15,16 Indirectly emphasizing and activating those networks with the express intention to integrate them coherently back into the larger neural network, seems to have played a significant role in the outcomes we obtained.
The supervised opportunity to freely move and express themselves physically in a safe, unstructured environment seems to be a significant difference in the length of time required for their grieving journey versus the journeys of their parents. This would appear to primarily be the result of the evolutionary development of brains to be able to expressly move the human body for a wide variety of reasons and purposes.17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24
One Significant Healing Variable
Kathleen Speeth, a licensed clinical psychologist, taught “Transpersonal Clinical Methods” at the California Institute of Transpersonal psychology when I attended. Much of her childhood was spent living in a G.I. Gurdjieff spiritual community. Gurdjieff was a Greek-Armenian “wisdom teacher” who had established a number of learning communities around the world. Dr. Speeth grew up in one such community and was greatly influenced by Gurdjieff’s transpersonal teachings. One day in our methods class she delivered a directive, apparently based upon Gurdjieff’s living/teaching/healing model: “If you want to avoid any conflicts of interest, ethical dilemmas or unconscious hidden agendas in your work, find a separate way to make a living and do your healing work for free.”25 (paraphrasing)
From its inception, all of KARA’s grief programs were community supported and available for free to those in need. While many people who received the services were most grateful, and could have afforded to pay for them, the fact that our services were offered non-transactionally sent an implicit message to the recipient: These are people with “unguarded, reliable faces”26a, people with “Soul in the Game” (to paraphrase N.N. Taleb)26b whom he identifies as: “people with skin in the game on behalf of others. Think of Buddha, Mohammed, Mother Teresa, or Desmond Tutu. It is my firm belief that this kind of relationship dynamic – where the living, breathing connection will not be transactionally terminated if a program participant is unable to pay to participate – is an important consideration. Such relationships can recreate the healing relational dynamic of a secure, nurturing, loving home.27 And when individuals, groups and organizations are predominantly safe, warm, welcoming and non-transactional, they answer The Big Brain Question – Are you there for me? – with a resounding “Yes.”28
References: (These days ALL references should be checked for accuracy).
1b. Boucouvalas, M. (1999). Following the movement: From transpersonal psychology to a multi-disciplinary transpersonal orientation. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 31 (1), 27-39.
2a. Fleer, M. (2006). The cultural construction of child development: Creating institutional and cultural intersubjectivity. International Journal of Early Years Education, 14(2), 127-140.
2b. Lanius, R. A., Vermetten, E., & Pain, C. (2001). Cerebral correlates of posttraumatic stress disorder: A meta-analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 158(12), 1959-1969. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.158.12.1959
3a. Schore, A. N. (1994). Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. _Hove: Hove & Sussex Publications.**
3c. Leigh, J., Smith, J., Bowen, S., & Larson, B. (1989). Spiritual modalities: Dance, music, visual arts. Journal of Religion and Health, 28(4), 311–322.
4. Schechter, D. S., Holmes, S. E., & Paz, R. (2007). Early childhood trauma: The neurobiology of loss and resilience. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 8(3), 225-237. doi:10.1007/s10578-007-0058-4
5.Van der Kolk, B., McFarlane, A., & Weisaeth, L. (1996). Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society. New York:Guilford Press.
8. Knudsen, E. I. (2004). Sensitive periods in the development of the brain and behavior. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 16(8), 1412-1425.
9. Kolb, B., & Gibb, R. (2011). Brain plasticity and behaviour in the developing brain. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 20(4), 265.
10. Goleman, D., & Davidson, R. J. (2017). Altered traits: Science reveals how meditation changes your mind, brain, and body. Penguin Random House.
11. Newberg, A. (2016). How enlightenment changes your brain: The new science of transformation. Penguin.
12. Barnes, S. J., & Finnerty, G. T. (2010). Sensory experience and cortical rewiring. The Neuroscientist, 16(2), 186-198.
13. Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. NY: Random House.
14. Knudsen, E. I. (2004). Sensitive periods in the development of the brain and behavior. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(8), 1412–1425. https://doi.org/10.1162/0898929042304796
15. Johnston, M. V. (2009). Plasticity in the developing brain: Implications for rehabilitation. Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 15(2), 94-101.
16. Kolb, B., & Gibb, R. (2011). Brain plasticity and behaviour in the developing brain. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 20(4), 265–276.
17. Blakemore, S.J. & Choudhury, S. (2006). Development of the adolescent brain: Implications for executive function and social cognition. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 47(3-4), 296-312.
18. Schore A. Affect regulation and the origin of the self. New York, NY: Routledge; 2015.
19. Spinazzola, J., van der Kolk, B., Ford, J.D. (2018). When nowhere is safe: Interpersonal trauma and attachment adversity as antecedents of posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Traumatic Stress.
20. Chen, S. Y., Chou, C. H., & Chen, Y. Y. (2020). The effect of yoga on stress reduction, anxiety, and depression in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine, 25(3), 2515690.
22. Nieman, D. C., & Wentz, L. M. (2019). The compelling link between physical activity and the body’s defense system. Journal of Sport and Health Science, 8(3), 201-217.
23. Ekkekakis, P. (2020). The effects of physical activity on stress: A meta-analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 130, 109915.
24. Voss, M. W., Vivar, C., Kramer, A. F., & van Praag, H. (2013). Bridging animal and human models of exercise-induced brain plasticity. Trends in cognitive sciences, 17(10), 525-544.
25. Speeth, K. (1982). The Gurdjieff work. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
26a. Doty, M (2016). In Ellison, K. P., & Weingast, M. (Eds.). Awake at the bedside: Contemplative teachings on palliative and end-of-life care. Wisdom Publications.
27. Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). NY: Guilford Press.
Curiosity fuels human progress. We start out wholehearted, curious and creative. Trying to assess whether or not this world is safe for tender hearts, kids ask about 40,000 questions by the time they’re five, but early education tends to dowse that impulse.
The most enlightened brain science does it’s best to try and revive and breathe life into that organic impulse. Kids in which that glowing ember remains smoldering, often become scientists, either by training or by an open heart’s natural inclination. One of the things we often pay attention to are anomalies. Anomalies invite us to ask more and more beautiful, heartful questions. Below are synopses of three books that I think in different ways answer this blog post’s title query.
A Trio of Female Heart Doctors
First is Jill Bolte Taylor’s book – inspired by her super-popular TED Talk – My Stroke of Insight. In this memoir Jill recounts a journey that began with a severe left hemisphere stroke that left her unable to speak, walk, read, write or recall much of her pre-stroke life. She essentially became a child living in a woman’s body – a woman/child however who had the good fortune to have a loving, full-hearted mother, GG, who recognized what had happened and then willingly took on the task of raising Jill all over again. Much like an unplanned pregnancy and delivery, it took 8 patient, loving years to raise Baby Jill back to being a fully functioning adult. Actually, more than “fully functioning.” For me, Jill’s journey epitomizes the essence of Antifragility, or post-traumatic growth. This also represents brain (and heart) healing beyond what medical science even considered possible at the time.
Not Settling for Status Quo
In a vein similar to Jill’s mom, Diane Ackerman recounts going “against medical advice” in her book 100 Names for Love. In that book, she ends up lovingly answering the Big Brain Question “Yes” big time for her English professor/poet husband, Paul West, who suffered a stroke similar to Jill’s.
Paul’s stroke left him aphasic – unable to speak or understand language – a devastating loss for anyone, but especially so for gifted language lovers like he and Diane were. The stroke immediately disrupted both their senses of self and their identities as life partners.
Soon after he returned home and began rehab, Diane went to work, much like GG did for Jill, lovingly “re-raising” her man/child. Drawing upon their shared history and love for wordplay, she began by challenging him to create new pet names for her every day – a name-a-day-come-what-may practice.
At one point during Paul’s recovery, Diane noticed that the staff at his rehab center was not especially connected to their hearts, continually “inviting” Paul to live down to their expectations, based on what they ignorantly believed was possible. Realizing this would not optimize whatever recovery Paul’s brain might be capable of making, Diane gently and repeatedly implored the staff to “examine your assumptions.” When they failed to do that to her heart’s satisfaction, Diane called on an acquaintance of hers to come in and give a wake-up talk to the rehab staff. Shortly after Oliver Sacks came in and spoke to the staff about what was actually possible for the brain to do in terms of neuroplastic healing and recovery, Paul began to make accelerated progress that astonished many. By the end of 100 Names for Love, Diane and Paul are once again enjoying their love and connection through language.
A Brain-Changing Heart Paradigm
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young recognized early on that she was “neuro-diverse”, although the term in vogue at the time was “slow.” Being “slow” meant you were grouped together and tracked through the public educational system as being one of the dumb kids. Dumb kids often show up disguised as unlovable. What she, like many, many kids had, was a brain that struggled with memory, spatial reasoning and language processing. In other words . . . she was neuro-diverse. Somewhere along the way Barbara encountered the writings and research of the Russian neuroscientist Alexander Luria and significant tracts of neurons in her brain lit up. One result was the writing and publication of her memoir, The Woman Who Changed Her Brain (she doesn’t directly mention the heart, but throughout its work is obvious).
Luria’s research helped Barbara target specific areas of weakness in her brain. She developed many techniques and exercises that, through repeated, targeted, mental practice, allowed her to improve her memory, object recognition, kinesthetic awareness, and language comprehension.
After experiencing profound changes in her own brain function, Barbara, went on to start specialized schools to apply her neuroplasticity methods and exercises to successfully help large numbers of students facing similar challenges (isn’t that what love would do?)
There you go: three truly inspirational women after my own heart.
Regular readers, friends and correspondents know that I have what I call my “Daily Ignorance Practice.” When people ask me how I’m doing, I will often respond by telling them my simple, personal truth: “I’m walking the fine line between wisdom and ignorance. Mostly . . . on the ignorance side. ”The signature line at the bottom of my email reads: “Last year ignorance reigned. This year, no change – yet!” Hope reigns eternal in my ignorance-conditioned neural networks.
Defining Terms
Here’s what a personal ignorance practice might look like. A number of neuroscientists think of the human brain as … a Prediction Machine. When I explore their wisdom writings, what I essentially come away with is a description of how conditioned learning takes place in you, me, and the whole rest of the world, and continues to the moment we take up residence in utero.
Most everything I think I know to be true and have learned over the decades has all been the result of physical wires in my brain making connections. These connections were central for insuring my survival. At the time. But my Prediction Machine brain often takes that learning and applies it to current day circumstances where it may or may not necessarily apply. When yesterday’s news doesn’t fit today’s reality, I often end up with a very stressful “Prediction Error.”
Live and Learn . . . By Example
Let me give you a potent example from my own early life. I was raised on Welfare. On the first of every month the State of Connecticut sent out Welfare checks to all the people on their rolls. In my experience, people on Welfare are there primarily because their brains are constantly making Prediction Errors when it comes to money. My family was no different, and Welfare simply reinforced how those errors continued to be made . . . to this day!
Here’s one, mostly accurate prediction that growing up on Welfare taught me to make: none of us get any money at all, except someone else gives it to us. If we get a paycheck, the people who hired us decided the company (i.e. people working there) would give us money; if we’re business owners – bankers, investors and customers give us money; if we’re professional investors – other investors or clients give us money. There are lots of reasons, simple and complex, why people end up giving us money, but if you trace money’s twisted path to us, you’ll inevitably find people behind the payout window.
In my case, the people (elected representatives) working on behalf of the citizens of the State of Connecticut passed laws to collect taxes to get people to give it money. Those workers administered a program to take a portion of that collected money and distribute it to people whose brains consistently made Prediction Errors where money was concerned – poor people. And while the intention may have been well-meaning, the result, in many cases, was not ideally what the people re-distributing the money (or the people who gave it to them – taxpayers) intended or expected.
The Cyclical Structure of Poverty
Because my mother’s brain was constantly making errors about how best to allocate the money the People of Connecticut provided (which, in my experience, even a brain great at predicting would be hard pressed to manage error-free. The money barely covered food and rent). At the beginning of every month our pantry would get restocked with “nutritional wasteland food” – sugary cereal, a few vegetables, bread, milk, butter and . . . beer.
But by week three of every month, the cupboard would be bare, the refrigerator would be empty and grocers and salesmen selling overpriced goods on credit, along with numerous bill collectors would be knocking on the door. And that pattern would repeat, month after month, and year after year. This is how the brains of people on Welfare experientially learn to think about and predict how money works in the world. Subconsciously. Often for the remainder of our lives and likely in our children’s lives as well!
When I think about money as a kind of compressed, material life energy, what I realize is that at the beginning of each month, for years and years, I went through a “birth” process, a three week process of living and then building toward an “end of life trajectory” culminating by month’s end in a near-death experience. Only to be energetically “reborn” on the first day of the next month when the check from the State arrived.
And this deeply engrained pattern persists even to this day! Only, instead of Aid to Dependent Children, it’s called Aid to Dependent Adults – aka “Social Security.”
The only thing that appears to have changed over my 7+ decades is: the duration of the intervals from one rebirth to the next. But errors are constantly lurking deep within the subconscious in my neural Prediction Machinery. And they seem to be increasing as I age. Yes, a true joy riot!
What Prediction Errors from your early life-learning might still be running below your conscious awareness? And who’s to blame for the mistakes YOU make?
The Flowering Brain 