Do We Really Have Three Brains?

I recently had a wonderful interview with Grant Soosalu, co-author of the book, mBraining: Using Your Multiple Brains to do Cool Stuff. The interview, “Opening a Space in the Heart,” is posted on my website. This book is fascinating, as it provides an opportunity to tap into the wisdom of each of our three brains.  That’s right – we have three!

We live in the brain in our head most of the time, the one that has become the master when it is supposed to be the servant. Yet, we actually have two other powerful and wise brains. One is the hara or the abdominal brain. It is often called the belly brain and it is the spot where the umbilical cord connected us to our mother. We feel this brain when we have that sensation in our stomach or that “gut instinct”. In Chinese theory, it is called the dan tien point and it is where our chi or energy begins. In the 1993 PBS series, The Mystery of Chi with Bill Moyers, we meet Tai Chi Master Shir in a park with his students.  He is an elderly man who is stronger than most men half his age. When six of his students attempt to push him over, they are unable to do so because Master Shir uses his dan tien or hara, his powerful ball of energy, to keep him upright.

There is a wonderful book that played a big part in my awakening called Hara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim. One of my favorite stories in the book is about a Japanese Zen Master who has a huge bow and arrow that most people would have a hard time even picking up.  Yet, he uses with great ease. The Zen Master tells us that he pulls from his hara so there is no tension in his bow. By adopting a belly-centered posture and attitude of hara, Japanese Zen Masters teach us that we can live a calm, grounded, and more balanced life. Most of us cannot relate to this experience because we are cut off from our belly.

Our other brain is the heart brain, which is our main brain. The heart brain includes, it doesn’t exclude. It unites rather than divides. It has compassion rather than judgment. So much of awakening is learning to train the brain in our head so that the mind can drop into the heart. But this is difficult for most people because we do not want to be in our body.

In The Living Matrix, a fascinating documentary film about the new science of healing, we learn that the heart, not the brain in our head, is the place where information originates. Dr. Rollin McCraty tells us, “The heart actually sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart… If we look within the nervous system at the parasympathetic branch, ninety percent of the nerves are carrying information from the heart to the brain… What the heart is sending to the brain profoundly affects brain function.” Dr. McCraty is essentially saying that the heart is the healer of the body.

One of the ways we can heal ourselves with our heart brain is to put our hand over our heart when we are in a state of pain, shame, struggle, or any uncomfortable place. Then, we can breathe deeply, right down through our heart to our belly brain, and bring awareness to the sensations in our body. This helps to ground and come back to the present moment. So, just for this moment, tap into your heart brain and your belly brain, and send gratitude to these amazingly intelligent organs in your body.

Can you think of a time when you acted on information from one of your other brains – a gut feeling or a heart response?