The Important Balance of Right vs Left-Brained Healing
I’ve often been told by my clients and students that I have a good balance between the right and the left side of my brain. That I am both artistic and intuitive, as well as logical and analytical. I think of our history of medicine from this simple perspective.
At the beginning, our indigenous ancestors were tuned into parts of themselves that we now have a lot of difficulty accessing. Their wisdom was intuitive and came from their environments, both the natural worlds and the spiritual worlds. It was founded by connecting with all that was around them including plants, animals, and spirit guides.
Where We Are Today
Fast forward to today and modern medicine, which relies on dissecting things in order to understand them. Separating cells and organs and molecules from each other in order to understand all the working parts.
I was born living in my right brain. I think all of us are. We are so in tune with sounds, smells, sights, movement, and touch as infants. These are all right brain processes. As a child, I was a daydreamer. I could swim around in my imagination for hours, creating elaborate worlds I would interact with. They were alive and they felt real to me.
Then, as I got older and started school, I was taught, as everyone was, to use the left side of my brain and push the right side of the brain aside. I was taught to doubt my intuition, to consider my feelings a nuisance, and to think of my creativity as unimportant.
Gathering New Materials
In college, I was trained in the traditional medical model of Occupational Therapy. I learned all about anatomy, physiology, how the systems of the physical body worked, about human development, psychology, sociology, visual perception, and cognition.
My education as an OT was well-rounded in learning about the different aspects of a human being from a left-brained perspective. When I did my field work training, I liked nothing more than to gather as much information about a patient as I could. I used all the standardized evaluation methods I’d learned. And, I came up with a sound treatment plan. I was very good at it.
I received high marks for my fieldwork studies, and I was offered a job at all of them. It wasn’t until I took my first job as an OT that I could follow through on my treatment plans and notice something was missing. Things were not as clear cut as I was led to believe. Some of my patients did well, some did okay, and some didn’t make any progress.
The Moment It All Clicked
When I took my first myofascial release class in 1996, a huge piece of who I am as a therapeutic artist was found. Using John Barnes, MFR, my right brain was welcomed into my work as an OT. I learned how to access and trust the big wisdom I found when using the right side of my brain.
When using myofascial release, we consider not just the physical body, but also the emotional, mental and the energetic aspects. Working this way, with both sides of my brain, allowed me to help hundreds of people get the results they needed and regain their quality of life.
Creating my two MFR practices so I could offer my clients MFR and then teaching other healthcare professionals this important work brought me joy. Since then, my work has never been just work; it’s been a calling, and a passion.
Honoring Right and Left
For me, shifting back and forth from the right brain to the left brain works similarly to a method I was taught as an actor. In another life, within this life, I trained and worked as an actor. I was taught to learn my lines so well that I could recite them verbatim without thinking about them, and without any emotional attachment to them.
Many people think learning all the lines is the most challenging aspect of being an actor. It isn’t. Learning lines is like gathering bricks to build a house. The design, the method used to lay the bricks, the team of people gathered, the constant adjusting to what’s presented to you each day—that is the real work.
What I learned in the classroom as an OT and graduated with honors knowing well—those are the bricks. When I evaluate a client using measurements, and standardized tests, those are also bricks. Really seeing a client, really listening to them, reading between the lines, and feeling into what their body language is sharing—that is the start of artistry, the bigger work. In this way of working, the learning never ends. Each day, each moment presents new challenges, new wins, and new ways of working.
The Missing Ingredient
So when I found Shamanism just a few years later, I was ready. I was able to quickly experience the power of accessing this spiritual information using my right brain. It was strong and fully online. Shamanism for me is a return to grace. A return to the wisdom of my ancestors. The knowledge we all have in our DNA, that if we allow it to, will bring us home.
The worlds I created as a child are real. I now know I didn’t create them, I co-created them or discovered them for myself. They are just as real to me now as this place that we humans collectively agree is our reality.
Accessing other worlds filled with wisdom, information, and guidance has transformed my life. It has deepened my ability to help my clients. It has allowed my right brain to fly, to travel to incredible places and bring back amazing information, insight, and healing energy for myself and for my clients. It is as if my right brain is in full trusting mode.
It is here, in this place where I am grounded and yet I can fly, that I feel a deep sense of belonging. It’s where I feel most at home. And, in this way of being, I no longer think of it as the right vs the left side of the brain. It’s something much more comprehensive. It’s non binary, a place of oneness. We all have access to this place, and during the Power Retrieval retreat, I will show you how. .