Power Up Your Brain (23 page)

GETTING OUT OF A DEPRESSIVE SPIRAL

“Byron,” a successful entrepreneur and owner of a chain of food stores, came to our Power Up Your Brain Intensive because he felt exhausted. And no wonder: he had been managing to make it through each day on a dozen cups of coffee, with the help of amphetamines, and then knocking himself out at night with Valium and occasional recreational doses of oxycodone, which is derived from opium. In other words, Byron had his foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. His daily cocktail of uppers and downers temporarily kept him going at his grueling schedule but eventually sent his nervous system into a depressive spiral.

Like many people we have worked with, Byron was self-medicating with prescription and street drugs to try to correct an imbalance in his brain and make up for dysfunctional mitochondria that were not producing vital life energy.

The first thing we had to do was to help Byron detoxify his brain and nervous system. The drugs he was taking are all broken down in the liver, and glutathione is not only largely produced in the liver, but is also a major hepatic detoxifier. We knew we would have to get his liver to come back online so that it would be able to help the rest of his body eliminate the toxins.

Alberto and his staff began the energy medicine treatments, clearing the energy centers in the body and restoring coherence to Byron’s energy system. He was receiving up to four sessions daily, including massage, acupuncture, and shamanic healing. (For a more detailed description of shamanic healing practices, see Alberto Villoldo’s book
Shaman, Healer, Sage.)

The initial focus of Alberto’s staff was to help quiet Byron’s HPA axis by utilizing shamanic energy medicine techniques, to ensure that he did not function in constant fight-or-flight mode. Byron’s HPA axis was so compromised that he lived in a state of paralysis, which is the customary response when a person is unable to either fight or flee.

After the third day in the program, Byron reported that he was feeling weaker than ever and could hardly make it out of bed; he missed two of his morning sessions. Both of us, Alberto and David, recognized that he was detoxifying too rapidly, thus overwhelming his system. Because the body’s own detoxification pathways and systems are already overloaded, reducing the toxic load on the brain and nervous system has to be done with support. We ordered a lymphatic massage, which would help cleanse his system, gave him fresh organic vegetable juice, and asked him to rest for the remainder of the day.

The following morning, he bounded into our offices to tell us that, for the first time in many years, he had been able to sleep without medication. He looked cheerful and rested, and the black cloud that had been hanging over him since we met him seemed to have lifted.

Now that Byron had gained some strength and his body was detoxifying naturally, Alberto and his staff could really get to the deeper energy medicine. Our intention was to clear the trauma from his energy field that had led him to abuse drugs.

We worked with Byron right after his HBOT sessions, when his energy was strong and expansive. After one of his sessions, he told us the story of his alcoholic and emotionally abusive father and how daily incidents of ill-treatment from the age of 10 to 12 had marked him. As we cleared this imprint from his field—which we do without engaging in the drama of the story, because that is not important in shamanic healing—he started to experience inner peace.

On the last day of the intensive, he told Alberto that he had discovered his life calling: that he had come here not merely to own food stores, but to feed people real, living food. With that, he left the Power Up Your Brain Intensive with a new sense of direction and meaning.

Three years later, Byron is free from any drug use. He reports that his mind is clear, the brain fog has lifted, and he is able to sleep without the aid of medication. Furthermore, he is using the contemplation practices described in Chapter 13, “Shamanic Exercises,” to maintain and support his new, enlightened life. Professionally, he now owns a very popular restaurant that serves healthy, wholesome meals.

CHAPTER 11

THE SHAMAN’S GIFT

Shamans believe that the world seems real only because we perceive it as such and that everything we perceive is a reflection of an internal map that we ourselves, along with our culture, have constructed about the nature of reality. These maps are stored in what shamans know as the Light Body, and what scientists call neural networks in our brain. Shamans know that if they wish to change the outer world, they must begin by changing the inner maps, by healing the imprints of disease and trauma from the Light Body. They believe that the Light Body is the blueprint that creates health or disease. But how far does this metaphor of a blueprint go?

Biologists now recognize that only 5 percent of n-DNA codes for proteins to build the human body. The other 95 percent is considered “junk DNA” because it is noncoding. But what if this other 95 percent represents the “library shelf” of genetic possibilities that we are not currently selecting from? Could we cure illnesses and maintain health by modifying our gene expression? And what if we could do this by healing our Light Body?

When we heal our Light Body, we can access a knowledge that is available to all human beings. In doing so, we could interface with the biosphere in ways we’ve never imagined, to upgrade the quality of natural information available to us and install it in the hardware that’s been in our brains all along.

THE GREAT PERFECTION

Bön is the ancient indigenous spiritual tradition of Tibet. The lineage of Bön teachers is said to have been founded by Tönpa Shenrab nearly 18,000 years ago, predating Buddhism by many thousands of years. Tönpa Shenrab was born into a royal family and, according to legend, left the comfort of the palace and traveled to Mount Kailash, where he meditated and attained enlightenment. Even today, followers of the Bön religion venture into nature to fast and pray so they can heal their Light Body and attain a greater understanding of the workings of the mind and of consciousness.

An essential teaching of Bön, known as Dzogchen (or the Great Perfection), suggests that once you heal your Light Body with specific practices, you are even able to survive physical death.

After the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet during the 7th century, the Bön traditions, which to this day remain shamanistic, lost favor among the royal families. In 1987, however, the Dalai Lama, who is a master of Dzogchen, recognized Bön as one of the five schools of Tibetan Buddhism and forbade discrimination against Bön practitioners.

Dzogchen practice cultivates a Light Body that is free from the imprints of trauma and disease. This is known as the natural, primordial state of an unconditioned mind. In this state, meditation comes easily and infuses everyday activities. You no longer need to retire to a primordial cave or monastery to attain inner peace and joy.

As your Light Body heals and your natural mind establishes itself, you will start to attain an inner peace and equanimity that will radiate all around you. As you become increasingly enlightened, your body will become more luminous. People will notice there is no longer a figurative dark cloud hanging over you or a literal dark mood about you. Instead, there is a new radiance to your being.

THE EARLIEST SHAMANIC TRADITIONS

Tibet is nestled in the formidable Himalayan mountain range and was largely protected from the marauding armies that besieged most of Asia over the centuries. Yet it is outside of Tibet, at the ceremonial burial sites at the caves of Shanidar, in the Kurdistan, Iraq, that we find the earliest evidence of a dawning shamanic awareness. Archeologist Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University uncovered an elaborate Neanderthal burial site there, which they dated to around 80,000 years B.C.E. The remains discovered seem to suggest that, contrary to the general perception of Neanderthals as primitive, brutish creatures, they actually constructed elaborate burials, indicating an awareness of an afterlife. It is also believed that shamans at this site cared for the sick and injured, nursing them with flower and herbal remedies. Pollen samples suggest they used medicinal plants, including yarrow, ragwort, grape hyacinth, and hollyhock.

Many skills that we take for granted today were once considered mystical and held the general population in awe. If you were able to count past 20 without using your fingers and toes or were able to divide or multiply, you were considered gifted. The earliest evidence of counting comes from a wolf leg bone dated to about 30,000 years ago found by anthropologist Karel Absolon in Czechoslovakia in 1937.
¹
It was notched with 55 scratches, with deeper grooves for the 25th and 26th, perhaps marking the time between the bleeding cycles of a woman of the village. The shamans were not only healers and ceremonialists who tended to births and deaths, but also the earliest astronomers and mathematicians. The oldest evidence we have of a society that understood the value of pi (3.1416) comes from the Great Pyramid at Giza, constructed around 2500 B.C.E. The pyramid has a perimeter of 1,760 cubits and a height of 280 cubits, which gives us the ratio 1760:280, which is exactly equal to two times pi. This coincides with other historical markers of the awakening of the prefrontal cortex, including the discovery of the alphabet. The first written texts refer to the value of pi, which would not happen for another 600 years after the Great Pyramid was completed.

The prefrontal cortex allowed certain individuals to understand the nature of time and predict eclipses and equinoxes, which would also have been impressive displays of precognitive skills to the less enlightened. Early astronomers, such as the Dogon shamans, were members of religious societies who associated the heavenly bodies with gods or even identified them as gods. The Maya codices, which are written in hieroglyphic script, included detailed tables for calculating the phases of the moon and the progression of the equinoxes. So accurate were the ancient Mayan astronomers that they predicted that the sun’s elliptical path through the Milky Way will align with the galactic equator on the winter solstice on December 21, 2012, an event that modern astronomers have confirmed happens only once every 26,000 years. (The Maya believed that this cosmic event would mean the transformation but not the destruction of the world.) Yet, while Western science turned its gaze almost exclusively to the outer world, studying the motions of the planets, the origin of the universe, and the evolution of the species, sages also turned their gaze inward and studied the nature of the mind and consciousness itself.

TIMELESS AWARENESS

Shamans discovered that once our Light Body was free of trauma, our awareness could be refined to identify both favorable and dangerous events in the future. Those who developed these dormant skills were able to guide hunters to where buffalo would be grazing the following day, forewarn their villagers about an approaching tsunami, and lead fishermen to their catch—which gave them an elevated status of sages among their peers. Skeptics have gone to great length to debunk these prophetic abilities, but ample evidence exists that they were real.

One of the most renowned examples of shamans foreseeing beneficial opportunities for their people occurred in the 1800s when the United States government displaced the Osage nation from its traditional hunting ground in Missouri. The holy men of the Osage led them to settle on land in Oklahoma that consisted primarily of rocky meadows and barren hills, habitat undesirable to European settlers. Yet the Osage sages assured their people that the earth would look after them for many generations if they were to settle there.

One of the factors that made the land particularly unappealing was a black sticky substance that oozed from between the rocks and poisoned springs. Only later was it discovered that the Osage had settled on one of the richest oil and gas deposits in North America. In his book
Oil Man: The Story of Frank Phillips and
the Birth of Phillips Petroleum
, Michael Wallis tells the legend: “One visionary said that he saw, clear as the summer sky, the death of the old ways. He saw visions of more white men coming, and he could even picture their strange machines, snorting and bellowing as if they were iron buffaloes.”