Power Up Your Brain (13 page)

Chronic stress can lead to a rut in which the wiring of our neural networks keeps us repeating the same dysfunctional behavior and hoping for a different outcome. As we experience depression and repetitive behaviors that stem from chronic stress, we’re less capable of analytic thought. The stress hormones released into the bloodstream keep us at a lower order of brain function, unable to attain synergy. Like iron and carbon, we remain brittle and easily afflicted, unable to find the strength of steel. We find it increasingly difficult to learn from past experiences, to alter the beliefs that cause us to re-create those experiences again and again, and to break out of our behavioral ruts. Because of the way our brains have been wired by stress and trauma, we’re unable to think or feel our way out of personal crises.

Dr. Sapolsky, in his book
Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms
of Neuron Death
, eloquently describes the science that correlates stress, exposure to cortisol, and the ultimate destruction of the hippocampus. His extensive research with rodents and primates clearly supports the contention that this stress-induced neurodegenerative process also occurs in humans. Interestingly, Sapolsky points out that elevated cortisol levels are found in at least 50 percent of Alzheimer’s patients.
⁵

Fortunately, in the last several years, researchers have discovered that we can stop this cascade of destructive chemical events. Research using animals has shown that an elevated level of brainderived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is a protective brain hormone increased by such activities as calorie reduction, fasting, and mental and physical exercise, imparts a high level of protection for the hippocampus, making it resistant to damage from elevated cortisol; and we now understand that in humans, BDNF plays the identical role.

Alberto:
Lifting the Dark Cloud

“Natasha” came to see me complaining that she was very unhappy with her life and her marriage. She and her husband had three young children, and she felt her life had been reduced to being a soccer mom. Before having her children, she had been a designer for a popular magazine, but now felt her life was directionless. She thought herself to be mildly depressed and was considering going on medication to treat her changing moods.

One of the tenets of shamanic energy medicine is that nothing is only what it seems to be. I asked Natasha if she was taking medication, and she explained that she was taking medicine for her thyroid. I entered the quiet state of awareness that facilitates the shaman’s “seeing” and began to scan Natasha’s Luminous Energy Field, looking for pools of stagnant energy that might indicate pathology. I also checked her chakras, the energy centers along the spine.

The chakras are swirling vortexes of energy, shaped like a funnel. The large end of the funnel extends a couple of inches outside the skin, while the narrow end connects to the spinal cord and the endocrine glands that produce hormones and release them into the bloodstream. Hindu texts describe chakras as spinning vortexes of energy, and sages in the Americas identify them as “wells of light.” My own investigation showed me that the chakras coincide with the nerve plexuses, that is, networks of intersecting nerves.

I noticed that Natasha’s throat chakra was spinning sluggishly, which was not surprising, since her thyroid was hypoactive. Then I noticed that her sixth chakra, located at the forehead, was withered and completely shut down like some flower that had closed its petals a long time ago. The sixth chakra is connected to the pituitary gland, the
P
in the HPA axis.

As I continued to scan Natasha’s Luminous Energy Field, I observed that there was no physical pathology, which generally appears as pools of dark, stagnant energy that settle over an organ or tissue. Instead, I saw the markings of emotional trauma, which appear as ribbons of various luminous colors swirling around the field and interfering with the chakras. These are manifestations of toxic neural networks and are always an indication of early life trauma.

I asked Natasha what happened to her when she was six or seven years of age, and she explained that she and her family were living in the Bryansk region of Russia, close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, when reactor number four exploded in 1986. This explosion deposited radioactive iodine in the fields and pastures surrounding Chernobyl, which caused the evacuation of more than 200,000 people, including Natasha’s family. This forced mass exodus proved to be a very traumatic and disruptive event in their lives because they knew they would never return to their homes.

Because iodine binds to the thyroid, Natasha’s story might explain her thyroid condition. But even though she had not suffered any further radiation exposure and lived in Canada, where her doctors monitored her closely, she still suffered from trauma and fear caused by this nuclear explosion.

In my training as a shaman, I had learned to track and intervene at the level of my client’s energetic matrix, a practice that we at the Healing the Light Body School teach our students to do with great success. I was able to clear these ribbons of noxious energy, breaking up the habitual patterns through which Natasha perceived the world and allowing her to grow new neural networks in her brain.

I also “tuned up” her second chakra, which is connected to the adrenals, getting it to spin in harmony with the rest of her energy system. And I reset her fight-or-flight system using an energy intervention practiced by shamans and described in my book
Shaman,
Healer, Sage.
This was necessary because her HPA axis had been on high alert since she was six, exhausting her adrenals and throwing off her entire hormonal system.

But I also knew that, until Natasha repaired her hippocampus, she would not be able to heal from the memory of trauma and loss she suffered as a child. I asked Natasha to start taking DHA daily and to eliminate all stimulants such as coffee from her diet. And I advised her to practice the shamanic meditations.

Three months later, the dark cloud began to lift from Natasha’s body. She had found a part-time job with a local magazine, and her family life had improved dramatically.

CHANGING THE HIPPOCAMPUS SET POINT

To protect against the damage of chronic stress is to change the hippocampus set point. As research continued to expose the connection between cortisol production and hippocampal damage, scientists began to wonder what actually controlled the amount of cortisol produced by the adrenal glands during a stressful event. It has long been recognized, for example, that not only do older humans and animals alike generally have higher levels of cortisol, but the degree of cortisol production following stress also seems to increase with age. Great efforts have been made to find the “pacemaker” for the adrenal gland. Scientists reasoned that if such a structure indeed existed in the human body, perhaps there is also a way to control excess cortisol production. In this way, the damage to the hippocampus that occurs during normal aging—and at a much faster rate in Alzheimer’s patients—could be reduced.

Much to the surprise of many, the ultimate governor of adrenal activity is none other than the hippocampus itself. That’s right; the hippocampus actually regulates the adrenal’s production of cortisol, in effect controlling its own fate! When functioning optimally, the hippocampus is able to maintain cortisol production in response to stress at a normal level. However, when the hippocampus is damaged, it loses this ability and calls for excessive cortisol production.

To understand what it means to reset your hippocampal set point, think of the hippocampus as being like the thermostat in your home. With stress and trauma, the set point of the hippocampus changes, much as when you adjust the temperature on your air conditioner. Lowering the thermostat makes the air conditioner run longer: lowering the set point of the hippocampus has the same effect on the adrenals.

We now understand that the hippocampus set point that modulates the adrenal’s production of cortisol is programmed very early in life. Thus, trauma at a young age increases the hippocampus’s sensitivity to cortisol. And this sets the stage for an everincreasing decline in hippocampal function in adulthood, which inhibits our ability to respond to situations in novel ways.

Researchers have wondered if intervention could perhaps lower cortisol levels. If stress raised cortisol, they reasoned, then perhaps living a nonstressful life could lower it. The pioneering work in this area was carried out by the late psychoneuroendocrinologist Seymour “Gig” Levine, beginning in 1962. His groundbreaking research demonstrated that when laboratory guinea pigs were lovingly handled as pups, their cortisol secretion was diminished and this reduction persisted into adulthood.

Levine’s early experiments paved the way for countless other researchers who tested a variety of animals, including primates, to reaffirm that positive emotional experiences can provide protection to the delicate hippocampus by reducing cortisol production. While the set point of hippocampal control of adrenal cortisol production may be genetically determined, we now understand that all positive and negative life experiences, whether in childhood or adulthood, can reset that sensitivity.

So we need not run off to a secluded cabin in the woods to ensure a stress-free life, appealing as this may be. For, as many of us have discovered, we take our ghosts and demons with us wherever we go, and our dramas become like the story of the traveler who meets a fellow traveler on the road, going the opposite direction, and asks him what the people were like in the city he is going to. The first traveler responds by asking him what the people were like in the city he just left. “It was full of thieves and liars. There was not a decent person in the town,” he states. To which the other traveler replies, “It will be exactly the same in the next town.”

The ongoing biochemical assault from stress hormones on our hippocampus makes it impossible to heal from emotional trauma. Like the second traveler above, everywhere we go seems to be populated by liars and thieves. But this can also be a beneficial signal. When we feel imprisoned by our toxic emotions, we
know
at some core level that we must heal our lifelong trauma. We
know
that in order to regain our sanity and discover new behaviors, we must change.

While the destructive emotions associated with past traumas, whether real or imagined, may tend to dominate your moods, you are nevertheless capable of developing neural networks that allow you to think and feel differently. You have the ability to experience events without letting the past cast them in a negative light. Once the limbic brain is enlisted to serve the greater brain synergy, you begin to establish new neural networks for joy, well-being, and creativity.