Do you want to really know how to use your brain?

Listen to this short but intensely fascinating podcast from Joseph.

http://josephriggio.com/how-to-super-charge-your-brain/

This is Jeff Leiken at TEDx Academy in Greece, you can read more about Jeff at his website http://leiken.com/

“Who’d want to be ordinary?”

There was a great article yesterday in the New York Times by the author of the recent bio of Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson. I’ve just finished reading the book, and having been a Mac user since 1984 I’d kind of got the marketing genius of Steve Jobs. What I hadn’t realised was how much an artist Steve was. This is brought out clearly in the book. And in the article yesterday Isaacson speaks to Jobs intuition.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead … Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.

China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.

So how do you develop this kind of intuition, these aesthetic sensibilities? I’ve gotten that from my mentor Dr. Joseph Riggio who happens to be running a training this month in the UK called INFLUENCE.

Not to knock Eckart Tolle but your dog can be a far more profound spiritual teacher when you remember that one of the gifts that dogs give you is they bring you into the now because that is where they live. BUT are you noticing it? Next time you see someone taking their dog for a walk look to see how present that person is or isn’t. Most of the time it’s like the dog is awake taking this sleepwalker for a walk.

What you often see with spiritual teachers is they end up using the language of different spiritual traditions to express themselves. But are they actually expressing themselves, or parroting profound truths of others?

Years ago I trained in an Hawaiian Shamanic lineage, Huna Mua. And I had the profound good fortune of my teacher Phil Young being someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He enjoyed the incongruence of being a “middle class white guy” to use his phrase who had the extraordinary experience he was living (which is chronicled in the book A Promise Kept). And what I’ve realised more recently is that if you want to be able to make a difference in the world you need to learn how to become a shaman. BUT…

What this is NOT is copying what a shaman did in some indigenous culture. Unless you are going to live in that culture that is kind of pointless. It may seem to satisfy your longings to go back to a time where there weren’t the problems we have today with the poisoning of the environment and therefore the food we eat and how that then affects us. As well as all the financial difficulties and trouble the world has shared recently. The romanticised view of going back to the past unfortunately just isn’t true. I apologise if I’m spoiling your illusions. But that’s part of the problem we share today, so many people living in delusion where they think only of themselves disconnected from the reality of the people around them. Many people love the idea of the Native American culture, or rather how they think it was. And don’t realise in their naivety that they just wouldn’t have survived. That is what the job of the shaman was all about, helping their tribe, their culture not just survive but thrive.

This is what a modern day shaman does. They help not just their tribe but their culture thrive.

Remember you can’t do this if you JUST want your tribe to survive. The boundary of your tribe is the boundaries of planet earth. The mess you make washes up on the shore the other side of the world, just as their mess washes up on yours.

Another way of saying this is most people live in the world of ‘OR’. The choice is this OR that, if we’re successful someone else has to lose out. If you learn to live in the world of ‘AND’ you realise if we’re going to be successful we also have to make everyone else successful as well. There is no choice. You build ecology into your decision making process. This is one of the things the MythoSelf process does, it teaches you an embodied ethical decision making process. So you think ecologically.

The secret to getting other people to change is that you can’t make them. But if you become a leader worth following and embody the change that you want to see then people will happily change to follow the example of what works.

How many dogs do you see taking their ‘owners’ for a walk? Most of them, yes? Listen to your dog.

Sometimes poetry because it speaks from an aesthetic point of view can be more real than ‘factual’ reality. You could think of ‘factual’ reality as living in the black and white world and living from an aesthetic point of view in the rich world of colour. If you haven’t watched the film Pleasantville this illustrates this beautifully.

The title is a line from one of Mary Oliver’s poems ‘Wild Geese’. You can find a lot of Mary’s poems by Googling her name, this one is from the book Dream Work. Here’s the poem:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver published by Atlantic Monthly Press © Mary Oliver

The line I like is ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’ because when you do this it changes how you experience the world.

One of the problems people often talk to me about is that when things go wrong they wind up beating themselves up. Like when something goes wrong in their relationship, or when they are trying to get into a relationship with someone else and they get turned down or to use the worst metaphor or way of thinking it imaginable they ‘crash and burn’. This beating yourself up doesn’t make things better it makes you feel worse. Yet this has become such an ingrained habit for most people that they no longer have conscious control over this or realise that they can have control over this. In addition the normal schooling process and just growing up in western culture, the process of enculturation or the learning process of fitting in to your surroundings you learn to place your attention on what isn’t working and fix it. Remember all those mistakes they circled in red at school, that is what they were telling you to pay attention to, what wasn’t working, how you don’t get what you want.

So instead of beating yourself up just let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Here’s how you do this:

Pay attention to your body and how you feel. Whatever you feel acknowledge that and notice for what would make you feel better. That’s likely to be a treat like chocolate or your favourite biscuits or whatever it is you use to make yourself feel good… If it’s really bad you may be thinking about drowning your sorrows with alcohol or having a cigarette to relieve the stress. Whatever it is pay attention to that feeling. I’ve had people tell me that it feels like they have been wounded. You can even think of being given a hug. But what is really interesting is that when you do this you’ll start to feel better. NOT eating the chocolate or the biscuits or any of the other things. Simply letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves will change how you experience things.

From the neuroscience point of view what you are doing is letting the neurological cascade that you had started of bad feelings and emotions subside and replacing those toxic brain chemicals with good feelings, good brain chemicals that you generate yourself with your body, you create a new cascade of positive good feelings that washes away the bad toxic stuff.

Go on try it.

Next time you are feeling bad. Just stop. And let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.