for an integrated brain

Six-part plan for facilitating the brains capacity for development and deepening integration.

The six parts of the plan are a list from Dan Siegel, MD. I've added comments and practice suggestions.

1. Aerobic exercise

Consider not just exercising but paying close attention to the body as it moves. Can you notice movement without identifying the particular body part or muscles working?

Are you exerting energy in a balanced way? Are you overworking the body? Or under working? Are you alert and relaxed even as you increase exertion?

Or going further, can you notice stillness of mind within which the movement flows?

Consider also the quality of mind and the state of body after? Was your exercise mindful?

2. Sleep: adequate and restful

Just as it is good for our children to have a bedtime routine and a wind down time, so, too, for us. Are you giving yourself a balanced day, including work and relaxation?

Your system needs balance. Optimal performance requires you give yourself some rest and relaxation, even if you think you don't have time - especially if you don't have time!

3. Nutrition and Omega 3s

Seigel emphasized Omega 3s, but also mentioned overall good nutrition. Consider thinking of food and medicine. For an highly intuitive and supportive move into healthful eating see http://www.eatrightamerica.com/home. This link came to me through the Whole Foods mailing list.

4. Relationships

The Buddha suggests that if you want to be a kind person hang out with kind people. If you want to avoid being angry, limit your exposure to angry people. Whatever qualities you want to foster can be facilitated by increased exposure to them in others and to awareness of those qualities in your own continuum of experience. Like wise with what we want to diminish.

From what we now know about brain chemistry, the way we treat others actually influences their brain chemistry and cell function. From what we understand from Buddhist science of mind is that our treatment of others influences our mind and body as well. The kind of treatment we extend to others or receive from others creates health or proclivity for disease. Humiliation and shame are not just unpleasant and psychologically damaging, but harmful to the functioning of the organism on a metabolic level.

5. Novelty

Be open to variety. Try something new everyday. Simply changing your routine is a simple way to do this. Sitting in a different chair, taking a different route to work. Choose to be open and willing to explore. Take a creating course.

6. Mindful Attention (focus and mindful awareness)

Awareness is the most important step, not only to health, but to freedom. Without awareness we operate unconsciously out of past conditioning. Events come together in every moment, causes and conditions both from within our personal historical experience and within the context of the moment, from immediate events in our environment. With awareness we can learn to focus skillfully. This skillful focus is something we develop in a mature meditation practice, once we have learned the basics of practice - relaxed and alert attention to breath and body and a muscle for returning again and again to this simple focus.


Practice suggestions

Do a benchmark check. Where are you with the six step supports for brain/mind health? With this awareness you will naturally begin to take advantage of knowledge of these prescriptions and of our understanding of plastic capacity of the brain.

Please be aware that you don't need to make a project of any of these. Your natural inclination to health combined with this information will modify some choices you make. Through awareness and knowledge you have added another skillful element to the causes and conditions creating the next moment.


This writing evolved from our discussion of Siegel's suggestions and their relationship to practice that came out of our cyber sitting April 7, 2011.

thinking emergently

Awareness of causes and conditions, the limiting nature of our constructions, and keeping our perspectives loose (letting things unfold) are alluded to in the passage below. David Brooks speaks about skillful thinking in dealing with some difficult contemporary issues.

"Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence...

We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.

Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.

Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently."

What he is saying is very valuable. May he be heard!

I'd like to add only one thought - that we see all experience as emergent.

David Brooks in NY Times article, Tools for Thinking 2011/03/29
Link to original New York Times article

internal freedom

"Mindfulness practice offers the restraint necessary to overcome the tug of desire upon the senses. As we notice the mind wandering off to explore a gratifying train of thought, or as we notice the body's urging to nudge ourselves into a more comfortable position, we gently abandon the impulse and return attention to the primary object of awareness. We do this again and again, until the mind becomes content with being fully present [with] what is manifesting here and now in the field of experience, rather than rushing off for some other form of stimulation. As the mind settles down it becomes considerably more powerful, and thus more empowered."

Please notice, "we gently abandon the impulse." Thoughts and sense desires will arise. But we don't try to get rid of them. We notice what is happening. In doing so there is clear seeing of what is arising, of what is present here and now.

"In this mode [mindfulness] the mind is said to be unlimited, and is capable of experiencing freedom through wisdom. Its freedom comes not from the license to broadly explore a shallow terrain, defined by its likes and dislikes, but rather from the ability to shake off the contraints of desire altogether and plunge deeply into investigating the field of experience as it is. It turns out that what one sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, or thinks, is not as important as how one does this."

The quotations above are taken from an article by Andy Olendzki published in Tricycle (Summer 2007). The article is a commentary on The Parable of the Six Creatures S 35:247