The Way of the Nerve Whisperer: Ten Pathways to Explore
A Community Consciousness and Brain Health Essay.
“Alzheimer’s disease is not the best arrangement of the letters. There are lots of other ways that are much better, for example “A Sheared Lime Sizes”; “A Emerald Seizes His”; or even “A Admires Heel Sizes”. All of these phrases represent the same set of letters, just in different arrangements. Alzheimer’s disease is just an arrangement of the nervous system fibers in a way that doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t serve you. Change something now.”
— Kimberly Burnham, Certified Matrix Energetics Practitioner
Sometimes the brain and nervous system are suddenly damaged by a car accident, an explosion, or a lack of oxygen, but mostly they just deteriorate due to less-than-ideal conditions over a lifetime. We are all on a continuum of brain health, a spectrum or range. For example, on one end are people with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Farther along the continuum are folks with brain fog and memory loss. At the furthest end away from Alzheimer’s are those with great cognitive skills, intelligence, and sharp memories — definitely not like my father says, “A mind like a steel trap: a little rusty and banned in most states.” One way to move your brain along the line towards a healthy brain and to keep your mind focused on the wonderful end of things is to use touch.
Touch, Learn, and Remember
With a little understanding, visualizing, and assessment, everyone can touch the essence of his or her own nervous system. In a way, the eyes are just little bits of the brain placed on the outside of the body, providing a window into the nervous system. By putting one hand over your eyes or any other part of your body, you can connect with your nervous system. Touch also has a powerful effect on your sense of safety, your sense of love, your sense of being connected. Touch is so important that, tragically, babies fail to thrive in the absence of touch. With our hands, our hearts, and our minds we can use touch to heal our nervous systems and attain or regain clarity of mind, make positive choices, and respond to opportunities. Any kind of positive touch (massage therapy, integrative manual therapy, acupuncture, reiki, hands-on healing, therapeutic touch, osteopathic manual medicine) enhances our awareness and access to how we feel through the tactile or touch sensory pipeline. Touch brings individual awareness of what is Me and what is not Me. We learn about our boundaries through touch and engage in relationships with the people and world around us through touch. In the following chapter we will continue this exploration of touch and how you can use your own hands to improve your nervous system.
Breath, Relax, and Control
Again, there is a spectrum or range of control. For example, on one end are people with a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, and at the other end are those with perfect hand-eye coordination and full, voluntary control over their muscles. Most of us don’t have cerebral palsy, but how many of us have perfect hand-eye coordination, great reaction time, and can hit a baseball or make a basket every time? There are ten pathways, tools, and processes that support us in our goals to be closer to the healthy, conscious, and comfortable side of the continuum, and they can help us move, day by day, away from the damaged, degenerative end of the spectrum. Focusing on our breathing is the second way.
Cerebral palsy is caused by trauma, which often occurs during the birth process when the baby doesn’t get enough oxygen for a period of time. This lack of oxygen damages the brain. One way to improve the symptoms of cerebral palsy — or any other conditions along the spectrum, such as clumsiness, lack of fine motor skills, or an exacerbated startle response — is to increase the amount oxygen getting to the brain.
Breathing is part of the process in which nutrients (oxygen) get in and waste products or toxins get out (carbon dioxide and air pollutants). How much oxygen reaches the brain and nerve fibers depends on the conditions and quality of the air, the lungs inhaling the air, and the membranes or boundaries through which the air passes on its way around the body. Increasing the air quality we breathe, along with how deeply we breathe, influences our oxygen intake. Any breathing exercises, cardiovascular exercises, or hands-on or energy medicine approaches that increase the volume of air reaching the lungs and the amount of oxygen passing through to the nervous system increases our ability to think clearly and function at a high level.
In every cell there is a little power station, called the mitochondria, where oxygen is used up and carbon dioxide is given off during the process of energy production. Some brain fog is simply the result of insufficient amounts of oxygen getting to the mitochondria and not enough energy production occurring to fulfill the needs of the body.
Listen to the Sound and Vibrations with Understanding
Once you complete article, you will understand your brain and nervous system in new and exciting ways. You will understand the brain better, how some of its parts support your life, which emotions it holds, and how you can touch them with your hands, your heart, and your mind. All of this brings about healing and results in a brightly lit nervous system ready to fully participate in your life. Listening to the sounds, vibrations, and frequencies from your own body is one way to understand your body. The heartbeat sounds different and has a different frequency than the movement of the lungs or the sound of breathing. A healthy heart — one that is communicating well with the nervous system and other areas of the body — has a different sound than a heart with an arrhythmia (abnormal rhythm).
We also pick up lots of clues about our environment from the sounds and vibrations around us, even when we don’t want the information it brings, as this passage spoken by Juliet from “Romeo and Juliet” shows: “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree: Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.”
Virtual reality and simulation games are more and more often used in the rehabilitation of neurodegenerative disorders. Virtual reality is when visual inputs (light) and auditory inputs (sounds or vibrations) are being used, in a way, to trick the brain into thinking something is or is not happening.
Visualize, Look, and See
Visualization is a powerful tool for consciousness and healing. Some might also call it guided imagery, or prayer, or borrowing and connecting with the universe’s energy. Visualize health. Close your eyes, and visualize yourself. Embody healthy movement, powerful relationships, and the supportive nature of your environment. Our ability to visualize the results and activities we want can be enhanced by practicing, looking at images or pictures, listening to guided meditations or guided imagery audios, participating in virtual reality games, and more.
Some of the most powerful forms of information medicine supply us with this sense of sight, in both the way we see images, colors, lights, and pictures with our eyes, as well in how we sense things when we are visualizing a past or future event. Visualizing give you the ability to mentally time travel into the past and learn new lessons about your experiences by viewing them from a different perspective. We can also mentally time travel into the future and imagine ourselves accomplishing something. We can see ourselves getting an award, announcing our accomplishments, or completing a task.
On one end of this spectrum is blindness — the loss of physical sight, the loss of the ability to “see” more metaphorically, the loss of the ability to imagine the past from a different perspective or to see a different pathway into the future. Like a muscle, this ability to visualize and see ourselves healing gets stronger with practice. Working with chakra energy centers in the body and colors from the field of energy medicine can also open up our third eye, our ability to perceive beyond our sense of physical vision that enters through the eyes. There are also many hands-on self-care tools for improving both physical and mythical vision.
Assess Rewards and Threats: Assigning Meaning
It is through our senses that we come into contact with our world. We experience it and take in our surroundings. We see it. We hear it. We taste and smell it. We touch it, and, in touching it, we are able to distinguish between Us and Not Us — a powerful tool for resolving the confusion and misunderstandings that are autoimmune disorders. The variety and novelty of our environments is another powerful way in which we can communicate with our nervous systems. Assess your environment with awareness. Ask yourself several times a day, “What is my level of awareness of my environment?” What is the nature that is nurturing my nature?
There are many ways to enhance your ability to assess the threats and rewards around you. Exercises that focus on specific senses increase your ability to more clearly experience the world. For example, vision exercises increase your ability to see the world around you. Massage therapy increases your awareness of your body, your skin, and where you physically connect with the world. There are also many reflex points, like acupuncture points, that focus on the sweetening of our sensory awareness.
We can also change how our nervous systems respond by changing the meanings we assign to things. For example, when you see a plastic spider, do you laugh, or do you jump and scream? Some people laugh at the prank or joke, while the sight of a plastic spider triggers in others a fear response. The difference is in which meaning we have assigned to the plastic spider.
Several years ago, when the glass floor in the CN tower in Toronto was relatively new, I went up to have a look. I had read about it. I could see people on it jumping up and down. I knew that it was engineered to withstand the weight of 14 large hippos. I looked at it and asked myself, “What is all the fuss about?” Then I walked over to it, and, as I stepped onto it, my body jolted back, responding as if I was suicidal and just asked it to step off a 1,122-foot cliff. I finally had to close my eyes before I could convince my senses that I was not walking off a cliff but onto a glass floor. The view was 1,122 feet straight down, so I had to shut off some of my sensory input in order to reassign the meaning of my actions.
Autoimmune disorders, like multiple sclerosis, nystagmus, or rheumatoid arthritis, all concern confusion about the information traveling between the immune system and the nervous system. The messages get mixed up, and sometimes we have to reassign the classification or meaning of certain things. In multiple sclerosis, we have to reassign the classification of the myelin sheath, which is a protective fatty layer around the nerves in the brain and spinal cord which increase the speed of conduction of the messages along the nerve pathways. In multiple sclerosis, the immune system confuses the myelin sheath with something that doesn’t belong in the body and attacks it with the intent to destroy it. The problem is that, by destroying it, the nervous system loses its ability to conduct messages and gets even more confused and experiences decreased energy.
Hyper-vigilance and anxiety are also nervous system problems in which there is confusion. Too little information comes in through the sensory system, and it can lead to anxiety. It is like hearing a loud sound in a dark room when you thought you were alone. A lack of information can be frightening. The cure? Adequate information transmission.
Once again, information medicine approaches, such as matrix energetics, fractal homeomorphics, or homeopathy, can be very valuable in this situation. It is well known that the brain’s cognitive longevity increases with cognitive stimulation, such as doing crossword or Sudoku puzzles, reading interesting books or magazines, learning a new song, memorizing a poem — the variety of activities that different individuals find cognitively stimulating is endless. Most people would tune out or go to sleep reading neurology journals. I find them filled with fascinating, useful information that I ponder for weeks after having read them.
Learning a new language after the age of 50 significantly decreases the chances of developing Alzheimer’s. What languages are you learning?
Savoring Life and Absorbing Your Environment
Variety is the spice of life. When it comes to the brain, we can also say novelty is the key to great cognitive longevity. Along this continuum, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are on one end, and acute awareness, a sharp memory, and good voluntary-muscle control with physical, mental, and emotional flexibility are on the other end. A life filled with new, engaging, and stimulating people, things, food, and activities will help maintain brain function as we age. Losing the ability to taste and smell our food and experience and enjoy variety in our lives is one of the signs of cognitive decline. We will explore a number of different pathways, including the disgust pathway in the brain, as ways to activate brain pathways, many of which are also motor pathways, or the route along which information is sent to and received from the muscles.
How stress affects your digestive system influences the way nutrients arrive at the nervous system. Proteins, for example, are very important for any condition related to neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, which is related to depression, and dopamine, which is related to Parkinson’s disease, or histamine, which is related to inflammation and allergies. Allergens, like gluten or peanuts, can damage the digestive system and affect the nervous system. When the cause of ataxia (loss of balance, dizziness) is not obvious, one of the most common reasons for it ends up being gluten, which can also cause inflammation of nerves connecting to the eyes.
Sometimes pain interferes with the ability to savor life. Along this continuum, there are digestive-related nerve issues with diabetic (sugar handling) neuropathy (nerve pain and sensory loss) at one end and gradual loss of sensory experience in the middle. At the other end are all the things that get lost with unregulated sugars that are toxic to the nerves — great vision, great sensation in the feet and legs. These are the sharp sensory experiences that allow a person to do things like avoid tripping over a foot while walking or notice cuts or insect bites that should be taken care of right away.
Regulating and Reading Emotions
With emotions, which so strongly affect the health of your nervous system, it is important to first understand the messages our body is giving us about how we feel. Then you can much more easily feel what you are actually feeling. With this understanding and feeling comes the ability to shift, change, and regulate the meanings we give our experiences, and we have more control over and satisfaction with our lives. Predicting good things is a way to talk to the nervous system. Make your own predictions for improvements — better walking, more comfort in your head, more self-sufficiency, and self reliance — and see what changes in your mood. Increased sensation or increased information coming into your system increases your sense of safety and allows you to better regulate your emotions.
The words disgust and gustatory (related to digestion) come from a similar root. Disgust — an emotion that keeps our internal environment safe from rotting food, for example — is related to the basal ganglia. Our recognition of disgust in the faces of others travels along the same pathways to and from the basal ganglia as the impulses heading to our muscles, the impulses which influence our sense of balance and clear headedness. In other words, exercise activates these pathways, but so does thinking about disgusting things.
Move, Flow and Set Boundaries
A functioning nervous system allows you to move gracefully. It enables you to move through space, climb mountains, and experience the flow of emotions. It enables your heart to beat, your lungs to expand, and your muscles to relax. A functioning nervous system allows you to remember how to shoot a basketball, how to hold a pen, how to form the words you want to say to a loved one, and how to sing a song. Our nervous systems orchestrate all our movements, telling muscles to contract or relax as needed in order to reach for an apple or bake an apple pie.
By moving in specific, easy-to-learn ways, we support the nervous systems that give us so much in our lives. By moving in certain ways, you can encourage blood to flow towards the brain or the sciatic nerve or your lower back. By moving in certain ways, you can strengthen the connections between the right and left sides of your brain, allowing you to catch a ball, speak fluently, and play a musical instrument. Movement also allows you to assess what has changed through your actions and choices. Movement allows you to determine what is real and, at the same time, experience a new reality. Movement lets you explore your space and determine how much space you have compared to how much you need. Do you have enough space in the world, in your community, in your home, in your room, in your body?
Along this continuum, the rigidity of Parkinson’s is at one end, and complete flow and flexibility of movement, voluntary muscle control, and independence are at the other end. Movement does some very interesting things in the brain, and just thinking about moving, imagining moving in a certain way, can create new neural pathways and increase brain function. We are designed to alternate between moving and resting, activity and inactivity, cyclically moving through life.
A key component of understanding your nervous system is knowing the size and location of the boundaries in your life, relationships, body, nervous system, and cells, right down to the tiniest parts of you. Are your boundaries set where you want them to be? Do you want to adjust them? Do the things that you want have the ability to enter through doorways in your boundaries? Can the things you no longer need exit through the doorways?
There are four key components to the vibrant nervous system health you want — the needs of the brain and nervous system that are being fulfilled in people with brain clarity, a sense of purpose, the skills to accomplish these goals in a joyful, comfortable way — can be represented by a circle with arrows going in and out.
The circle is a boundary, a safety mechanism surrounding the space. We each need to have space in which we can accomplish our dreams, a space where we are independent and safe, and yet still touching or connected to the outside world. Our nervous systems need to have good boundaries and safety. These powerful communication fibers also keep us safe and determine where we should place our boundaries.
Space and boundaries are the first two pillars of great nervous system function, including the ability to communication. The second two pillars are also balanced between what comes across a boundary and what goes out, represented by arrows pointing in and pointing out. Our brains need nutrients to come in through the boundaries so they can provide the building blocks for neurons, or nerve cells, and so they can signal molecules like protein-based serotonin, the happiness neurotransmitter. The nervous system also needs fuel for the processes of information transmission or communication, healing and learning. The foods we eat, water and other liquids that we drink, the air we breathe, the sunlight on our skin — they all nourish our nervous systems. Our nervous systems also need information about the internal environment of our bodies and the outside world. All these things entering our bodies and nervous systems either provide better and continued function, or they don’t.
The second arrow pointing out from the circle represents the needs of our bodies along with each system for waste removal. Carbon dioxide from our tissues and lungs, toxins, waste products from important processes, and unneeded material from our food all need to be eliminated in order for our nervous systems to function effectively.
For example, the circle of Parkinson’s disease would have a line with gaps. Boundary breaches caused by head traumas or compression of the head and neck prevent the arrow of healing nutrients to enter the brain. There would also be a smaller-than-usual arrow leaving the circle because, in Parkinson’s disease, the brain is often overwhelmed by toxins, including pesticides. The boundary is not as protective as it should be, so too many irritants and not enough nutrients enter for the brain and nervous system to heal and communicate properly with the muscles. This leads to tremors, stiffness, and loss of balance.
Always be on the look out for easy-to-do, fast-and-effective methods for improving the space, the boundaries, and the protective mechanisms, as well as increasing the flow of nutrients in and irritants out, so that we can thrive and contribute to the world in whatever ways we each choose.
Sciatic pain, for example, could be represented by a circle smaller than it should be, reflecting compression and tension on the nerve. The compression also prevents the needed nutrients to flow to the nerve and prevents the elimination or flow of irritants away from the nerve. In this situation, protective mechanisms kick in and prevent you from moving, causing further compression. Pain is part of that compression and the protective mechanism, and it will get worse when you attempt movements that further compress the nerve. Our nervous systems know that pain is highly-motivating and that one way to prevent us from doing that which is unsafe for our nerves or blood vessels is to cause us pain. As anyone with sciatica knows, a compressed nerve is not a happy nerve — nor is the owner of that nerve.
Look at what our bodies are trying to tell us about our nervous systems — how can we be better listeners and respond in ways that improve the environments in which we and our nervous system live. We will look at how we can read the signals more easily, responding by providing our nervous systems with more-useful protective mechanisms and nourishing them with the nutrients and information they need. We will also look at what our nervous systems are trying to get rid of, and how can we support this sorting and elimination process.
Allergies, especially when they lead to anaphylactic shock, are our bodies and nervous systems responding to too many confusing irritants and the lack of a proper elimination process. The boundary or protective system has become bewildered and has started fighting the wrong enemy.
Look at what we take in from our environments — in terms of poisons, irritants, and information — that causes this confusion, and we will look at how we can straighten out the mess and allow our nervous systems to communicate effectively with our immune systems and digestive systems. In the end, it will allow for healing, efficient elimination, and the proper intake of nutrients.
We will also listen in on the communication between our nervous systems and our digestive systems. The digestive system includes not only as the stomach, but also the whole digestive tract: the liver, the pancreas, through the information-rich, fractal-like wall of the small intestine, and on from there to the distribution of nutrients that began in the mouth and ended up in the brain. All of this contributes to digestion and our ability to absorb nutrients.
Whether we are talking about a large metropolitan area like Tokyo, Japan, a small neighborhood, a human being, or the tiniest cells within the body, in order to live, we need four things: space, boundaries, food, and waste removal. Each of the seven billion inhabitants of this world needs individual space in which to move and expand. We each need to have protective boundaries and safety. Each of us needs nutrients. We also need information flowing to us from the environment and the ability to transit information into our space. The fourth thing we each need is waste removal, something the people of New York City understand well during a garbage strike.
A garbage strike can’t last for long inside a body before the nervous system starts to breakdown. Each cell needs to be able to communicate with its neighbor and, in order for that communication to travel through the body, the nervous system has to be functional. In order for the nerve cells to function, they need food, boundaries, and space.
Knowing these four pillars of nervous system health provides an opportunity to listen to and understand what your nerves are telling you and how to send a message back with the information, nutrients, and energy they need to function.
In this new world, where fewer and fewer of us have someone who will tell us what to do, we must look to our own hands, our own hearts, and our own minds for the solutions and tools we need to thrive in this world.
The person with Huntington’s or Parkinson’s or Macular Degeneration who is waiting for someone to “fix” them in this day and age has a long wait. The person with Multiple Sclerosis or hearing loss or learning disabilities that asks herself or himself, “Where can I put my hands to speed up healing?”, or, “What can I think about and talk about as I am releasing reflex points,” that person will be healthier and have a higher-quality of life than almost anyone else they know.
My mother, at 78, has had heart surgery and a knee replacement, and she is still healthier than most of her friends.
In order to be healthy, a person needs space in which to live, food to eat, waste removal services, and information about where these things can be obtained from his or her environment. This is true whether it is one cell in the body or huge metropolitan area. Without space, living things die. Without nourishment, things die. Without waste removal, things die.
All complementary medicine is based, in one way or another, on improving mobility, or the ability to move through space, and on improving nutrition, whether it is food, oxygen, vitamin C, or sunlight.
Someone once said, “The only people who truly enjoy change are wet babies.” Despite this, or perhaps because of this, it is time to change. It is time to look at real options that make sense. People who don’t look around at new options or different perspectives because they feel like they don’t have enough time, money, or trust will find themselves continuing to experience what they are currently experiencing, or they will further degenerate.
Anyone who has a nervous system diagnosis, whether it is back pain or chronic fatigue or even cold hands and feet, knows that, despite the best efforts of the medical system, they are not providing solutions. It is time to look elsewhere. It is time to look into complementary medicine for easy solutions that we can quickly implement with our own hands, hearts, and minds.
Wake-and-Sleep Cycle
The timing of our wake-and-sleep cycle is set by the nervous system. Deep within the brain, the name of our internal clock is the suprachiasmic nucleus of the hypothalamus. Its name tells us where it is — just above (supra) the optic chiasm, which is where the optic nerves carrying visual information from the eyes to the back of the head cross. When you are on the less-than-ideal part of the continuum, with insomnia on one end and restful sleep on the other, resetting the internal clock is a useful tool because along with insomnia comes fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, seasonal affective disorder, and hormonal imbalances. The relationship of the hormonal system to the wake-and-sleep cycle is underscored by the location of the pituitary, or master, hormonal gland — it is just below the optic chiasm. This is a busy neighborhood of the brain. Above this area, in the cortical or outer higher cognitive layer of the brain, is the corpus callosum, which connects the right and left sides of the brain. There are a number of exercises to improve the fluid flow around the optic chiasm and the right and left hemispheres.
Understand, Talk, and Respond
Someone once said, “Most conversations are made up of talking and waiting.” Once we have a little knowledge about our nervous systems, have listened for a short period of time, visualized, assessed, and touched our nervous systems, we can more easily regulate our moods and move in fluid, comfortable ways. In other words, we can more consciously create the environments we spend time in and regulate which messages we send to our nervous systems. We can become the Nerve Whisperer.
Do This Now: Regulating Your Limbic System
For example, one way to connect with your brain and regulate your emotions is by focusing on the limbic system, which is the center for a range of emotional content, from rage to ecstasy. It is centered in the brain, behind the frontonasal junction, which is the place where the top of the nose meets the forehead. Drain some of the stress out of this area by placing one hand over the upper face, covering the top of the nose, the eyes, and the lower part of the forehead. Place the other hand on the abdomen, over the belly button. Behind this hand, inside your body, sit the intestines, which is where our bodies decide what to absorb and what to eliminate. This area is also sometimes known as the lesser brain, and it is rich in nervous-system communication. The pancreas, where choices are made about how to regulate and store sugars and other things we take in from the environment, is also here. Further back are the ureters, or the tubes between the kidneys and the bladder. They carry waste products, the chemicals that we no longer need, and excesses fluids out of the body.
Pay attention to any movement in the abdomen. Feel the movement of your body as you breathe in and out. Notice how your head feels, the temperature of the skin, the flexibility of the bones. Do you notice any changes in temperature, softness, pulsing?
