We each have a left and a right side to our brain but their functions are so drastically different that I like to refer to them as separate brains.
The right brain is our antenna to the universe. It receives ideas; very abstract ideas with absolutely no rules attached. Reality as we know it doesn’t affect the right brain. It is where creation happens and anything can happen there. It is where feelings of the heart come from. You can trace any desire, any goal down to one thing; a feeling. Isn’t that what we are all after anyway? Self-importance, happiness, love, passion, excitement, peace or some other feeling? It’s not the fancy house or car that you want. It’s the feeling that you think it will give you to have those things. The right brain is very important to our progression!
The left brain makes sense of stuff so we can understand and build on to those very abstract ideas from righty. Left brain is all about rules and logic. It decides how to interpret right brain’s abstract ideas. Without left brain we would wander through a pointless existence, not knowing good from evil, happiness from sadness, pleasure from pain, etc. At times we would feel good or bad but we would not know why and we would not know how to recreate it later. Left brain is also very important to our progression!
Your two brains never really stop. They do experience higher and lower levels of activity though. For instance when you go to sleep at night, your left brain relaxes a bit which allows your right brain to dominate. This is where those really crazy and disturbing dreams come from. You know what I’m talking about, the one where there are two of your mother and they are kissing each other? No, that wasn’t my dream but mine was equally disturbing. When you wake up and your left brain kicks in it immediately discounts the reality of such an idea by throwing out all your rules about why it is not possible and even if it were, it would never happen. Another example is the financial analyst or the computer programmer who goes into 100% logic mode every day to do their job. During this time the right brain relaxes.
Left and right brains are a team. They must work together. Musician’s and Programmers alike will be better at what they do if they learn to balance the use of both sides of their brain. Their creations and solutions will be both exquisit and sound. When the left and the right brain are working together we are unstoppable as human beings! This is when true focus is attained. The experiences of life are for practicing this very thing! When both left and right brain agree on an idea, it becomes wired into our nervous system. It can become a very deep part of us.
Have you ever had a knee jerk reaction that you regretted later? When you thought about it you realized that your action didn’t represent who you are inside. That was your nervous system doing what it is wired to do. Whatever seed of thought you nourish in the garden of your mind will bear fruit in your reality. If you grab a lizard by the tail it will pop off and he will run away. His tail, even though completely disconnected from his brain, will continue to try and help him get away by writhing about for a few minutes until it loses what energy is left in its cells. This is because his body is wired! Moving fast and getting away are actions that are so deeply rooted in his nervous system that you can disconnect the source and they still act accordingly.
Whatever it is that you wish to accomplish, you must get it wired into your nervous system by use of BOTH your left and your right brains! You cannot do it with all logic or all big ideas. You must combine the two to produce intense feeling and focus. This is what gets you pumped! It’s what makes your actions reflect your desires. When you are wired in this way your goals will pull you toward them. Some call this the law of attraction.
In so many ways we need to learn from and become like children. Children are not hampered by the rules of the left brain and they often experience a lot of extreme feelings. They haven’t been around this earth long enough to make up a bunch of rules which may or may not be true and which prevent them from being emotional. Many adults are so limited by logic and rules that there is no place in them for creativity and passion. They have essentially disconnected their antenna to the universe (right brain) by caging it in to a prison of rules about what reality is. This limits their ability to create and to experience joy. This is kind of scary because we have heard it said that, “you lose what you don’t use.” In the case of the brain, this literally true. We know that neurons travel through neural nets in your brain. When you don’t use a particular neural net for a long time it becomes week and other neural nets connected to it begin to disconnect. What this means to you is that your relational memories start breaking apart into individual memories. This is bad because everything that we learn is by association.
This information is all well and good but how do you use it to your benefit? How do you keep your brains working together?
Ask yourself these questions…
- Is the brilliance of my right brain stifled by the rules of my left brain?
- Is the power and focus of my logical left brain dormant because I let my right brain dominate (too many big ideas and no focus)?
- When was the last time I did something creative?
- When was the last time I got laser focused on a project until I completed it?
- Do I use both sides of my brain in my daily activities?
These are action questions. Don’t just read them. If you realize that you should change something in your life to allow for more left or right brained activity, change your actions today! Become something greater than you are! The power is within you to do so!