"One of the most precious substances on earth is nervous tissue – cells that through evolution have developed the ability to register information from a first experience and to “remember” it."

1. Animals are born ‘hard-wired” into a set of specific instinctual responses. They use this pattern-recognition for survival – to identify food, mates and danger.

2. At birth, human babies have the least wired-in instincts of any mammalian infant; while they are the most helpless at birth the absence of large amounts of wired-in instincts mean that our babies have an enormous capacity for both learning and error. Human nervous systems have developed a further capacity – to recognize their own patterns of behavior, to “feel” their effects, and to consciously choose to change those patterns that do not serve them.

We are the result of everything we have experienced since the womb. How a baby learns to reach out, to speak, to crawl and walk in such a short time is a near miraculous and incredibly complex, sequential process which is a remarkable illustration of how our brain developed to register and utilize information. Imagine for a moment trying to “show” an infant what muscles to contract to focus the eyes or reach out a hand. These developmental skills cannot be taught, they can only be learned by the baby herself with direct exploration and the right external stimuli.

Unfortunately, in the childhood of “civilized” man, this natural spontaneous process is often subverted. Most formal education insists on a one-size-fits-all approach and ignores the ways in which we are wired to learn best. In addition, our private experience of learning is often colored by an adult sending emotionally-charged messages of  “Do it well”,  “Make me proud”, “I’m afraid you’ll be a failure”, or  “Hurry up”. All these factors tend to pollute the ideal of un-interfered-with exploration at our own pace.

Negative emotional situations distort the child’s natural learning process. All emotions are a muscular occurrence. Tension, fear at home, ridicule or rejection at school will freeze the development of a skill, be it catching a ball or solving a math problem. For the rest of his life, he will not do that thing well or will always rush though doing it, thus making his inability permanent.

As civilized adults, we have more “facts” than ever before about our universe, yet we live lives that routinely override the messages from our body. This vital source of information is the basis of our brain’s ability to self-adjust and self-heal as well as pick up the more subtle vibrations of intuition. Yet, in our pressured society, because we cannot afford the time to rest after en injury (emotional we well as physical), we anesthetize ourselves against feeling the pain. Brain-secreted chemical, purchased medicines, drugs, alcohol, overeating, overworking, or any compulsive activity, constriction of the muscles of the chest, which armor the heart and depress the breathing, all help dull the feeling that “something-isn’t-right.” But in doing so, we drastically reduce out ability to feel across the board. Joy is dulled as well as grief or pain. And so are the incoming sensory impulses to the brain from all the outlying joints and muscles which would otherwise alert the motor-cortex to any dysfunctions that need adjustment or to injured areas that have healed and are ready to come back into function. Instead, old compensatory patterns put in temporarily, keep needlessly protecting against old injuries, leaving long since healed muscles to gradually atrophy from disuse.

Exercise, self-improvement techniques, and treatments from specialists will never truly bring these areas back in the ball game. A PATTERN PUT IN ON AN UNCONSCIOUS LEVEL CAN NEVER BE CHANGED AT A CONSCIOUS LEVEL. Only by clearing away the anesthesia so that the brain can start experiencing again the clear and constantly up-dated information that it received as a child can it order the kind of changes that an outside agent could not begin to do.