BY CAROL BEDROSIAN
September 1, 2006
Neal Smookler has been an Alphabioticist for close to 15 years, receiving his professional training through Alphabiotics International in Dallas, TX in the early 90’s. Alphabiotics (alpha-bee-otics) is a physics-based, hands-on holistic helping system developed by Dr. Virgil Chrane after several pioneering decades of work in the holistic health field and a lifetime of collaboration with his father. Both father and son shared a deep interest in developing a new research perspective that they had come to call The Better Idea, which they believed to be a breakthrough in the evolution of consciousness and maximizing human potential.
Beginning in the 1950’s, Chrane introduced Health Radio to the airwaves, published his own health tabloid with a circulation of 300,000, authored numerous books and papers and ran a large, successful health and anti-aging center. In 1971, he introduced the Alphabiotic brain rebooting method as a simple way to help people reconnect with their fundamental power Source, self-healing and inner peace. Neal Smookler is just one of over 2,000 professionally trained Alphabioticists worldwide who shares this “better living through better brain function” philosophy with thousands of people each year in the hopes of “rebooting” our world into a more peaceful, healthful vibration one brain at a time.
Spirit of Change publisher Carol Bedrosian recently had the opportunity to interview Neal Smookler by phone from his Boston-based Alphabiotic Center on Newbury Street.
Carol Bedrosian: Aside from being the central processing unit of the human body, what is the connection between brain function and health?
Neal Smookler: Basically, it all comes down to stress. We live in a toxic, stressful, polluted world. It is not just the stress of job pressures or money worries and relationship problems that burdens us today. It is also pesticides on the foods we eat, electromagnetic pollution, negative self-talk, negativity on TV. What we are seeing as news today on TV, the Internet, newspapers and magazines is nothing more than 24-hour sensationalistic negativity. All this stress overloads the central nervous system, and even more specifically, the brain.
We know that our brain is divided into two halves, left and right hemispheres, with each hemisphere having its own distinct personality. The left side of the brain houses the abilities of verbal skills, logic, reason and sense of time. The right side of the brain houses an entirely different set of functions including intuition, creativity, abstract thought, and thinking outside the box. For example, if you were in a forest, the left side of the brain would see the details of the trees, etc., and would not have a clue that you were in the forest. The right side of the brain would not even see the individual trees, but it would see the big perspective of the forest. Both halves of the brain are of equal value and importance for you to tap into your genetic ideal as the highest expression of who you are.
At this point in human history, our stress levels are spiraling out of control. Stress is defined as something with high emotional content or pain. When we are dealing with something on a stressful level, the brain and nervous system react by dropping into a more primitive part of the brain called the limbic system. The limbic system is the part of the brain associated with fear, trauma, negativity, fight or flight activities — all the no’s, don’ts and cant’s of early childhood.
Pretend you’re going back 10,000 years and you are a primitive cave person coming out of your cave looking for food. All of the sudden you are attacked by this huge, prehistoric beast. Well, obviously, the attack is something of high emotional content and is a stressful situation. It is life threatening, a clear and present danger. You are in survival mode.
In survival mode, one hemisphere of the brain will shut down. The side of the brain that shuts down is referred to as the passive or subdominant hemisphere. Think of that hemisphere as being on a dimmer switch that just dimmed all the way down. Instantly, the brain will marshal all of its resources and energy into the other half of the brain. That side of the brain goes into this massively over-contracted, exhausted state. It is almost as if the dimmer switch is super charged all the way up.
Our brains today are wired the same as they were 10,000 years ago. When the brain receives stress signals, the body will shift from an inner-directed and hemispherically-balanced state to an outer reactive state where all of the body’s available resources and energy are focused outward to deal with what is perceived to be a very high priority — sometimes life or death — situation. Everything else that is not perceived as a high priority gets put on the back burner: healing, metabolism, reproduction, cognition, creativity, the highest expression of who you are, etc.
Carol Bedrosian: This is the common “flight or fight” reaction.
Neal Smookler: Years ago flight or fight was a good term for that. Today it is more of a flight, fight or freeze, meaning that if you have an argument with your boss, you can’t punch the boss out, you can’t run away, so you stuff it. In modern society, we have social rules to follow; so many people are continually walking around in a frozen state of flight or flight stress. One side of their brain is always more dominant than the other and they never achieve balance or integration.
Carol Bedrosian: Why do we lose access to either hemisphere at all?
Neal Smookler: It is a survival mechanism from an evolutionary standpoint. In other words if you are under attack, the survival mode of brain functioning puts one hemisphere into that dominant state which causes the neuromuscular skeletal system to contract more efficiently so your body doesn’t stand there all loosey goosey. It is a survival mechanism, and it is appropriate if you are truly in danger. When the threat passes, and you have survived, the brain relaxes back into its normal balanced state, with both hemispheres feeding you the information you need to go about your daily business. But in our lives today, we are not facing life-threatening situations that arise and then pass, yet our brains are receiving continuous stress signals keeping them locked in constant standby emergency mode.
Candice Pert wrote a book called Molecules of Emotions based on her research that showed that there is consciousness in every cell in the body. When the brain is geared up for battle, every cell in the body is geared up for battle, and battle becomes the highest priority. When there is really no battle to be fought, yet every cell in the body is gearing up for battle, there are not a lot of resources left in the cell to do much else.
Whenever you hear me use the word “reSource” it is with a capital S, because all of your body’s resources are coming from the Source of your higher Self, your sacred Self. The body is infinite wisdom, infinite intelligence. If you go through the majority of your life locked in an ongoing emergency standby mode, you are partially separated or disconnected from that wisdom within. In order for you to be the fullest expression of who you are, tapped into your genetic ideal, you want to be functioning out of both hemispheres. When you are balanced in both hemispheres, you’ve shifted out of limbic brain function and you are tapping what scientists call the neocortex, the most advanced part of the brain. Some call it the human or spiritual brain.
Carol Bedrosian: So reintegrating whole brain function from both sides of the brain would be a path to accessing the higher self?
Neal Smookler: Shifting out of that flight or fight emergency standby mode allows all of the subtle essence of Spirit, higher Self and all the energy that maintains the universe to be reconnected to the individual bodymind to do what it knows to do and wants to do and probably has been trying to do all along. When an individual is locked into that “waiting for that second shoe to drop,” so to speak, that ongoing flight or fight response, neurologically one hemisphere is shut down, the other is dominant and they are in limbic function.
Roger Sperry is a Nobel Prize laureate who did a study a number of years back which demonstrated that 90% of our brain energy output is used in relating the physical body to gravity. This is called the “righting reflex.” Basically, your body will do whatever it needs to do to maintain itself relative to the sidewalk. Well, that means that only 10% of the brain’s energy output is utilized for thinking, metabolism, healing, creativity, tapping your highest potential. Sperry’s research found that the more biomechanically out of balance a person is, the less energy that he or she has for healing metabolism, thinking, creativity, etc.
When you lock into one brain hemisphere and one side of the body goes into a massive state of contraction, you are now biomechanically out of balance. If you can come out of that flight or fight state, the body can come back into balance and you free up an enormous amount of resource that can then be put towards healing or being the highest expression of who you are and other stuff that gets put on the back burner. As long as you remain locked in this depleted state you don’t have access to that resource. (By the way, when you lose access to one hemisphere, it isn’t as if you lose functioning from that hemisphere entirely; it is just not an easy and fluid access. That is why people still retain the abilities of each side of the brain.) If you can somehow shift an individual out of that flight or fight response, they can reconnect back to the wisdom that created them whole.
Carol Bedrosian: So Alphabiotics is a process to help to make that shift?
Neal Smookler: The Alphabiotic method can metaphorically be compared to rebooting a computer that has crashed or is frozen in some way. Essentially, the computer gets reset back to its original factory settings with the push of a button or typing in some codes. In the same way, the brain needs to be released from its frozen emergency standby mode and reset back to whole brain functioning.
The way this rebooting process is done is to communicate with the brain in a way it can understand. The brain is a sensory organ, much like the skin, so it’s a physical hands-on process that delivers a sensation to the brain through contact points with my hands on both sides of the head. The person lies on their back on a special, narrow couch so that the head is higher than the feet and I am basically just cradling the head to secure and stabilize it, and my other hand is contacting right at the base of the skull, right behind the ear. Then I generate a movement of contraction with my body which delivers this reset stimulus to the brain and nervous system, unlocking the dominant hemisphere hold. This frees up an enormous amount of your own precious life energy for the body to be in a mode of repair and regrowth.
Carol Bedrosian: Is this permanent?
Neal Smookler: Typically, the effects of your first reboot will last for several days. There is phenomenon called psychophysical armoring, which is somewhat like cellular memory expressing itself through the neuromuscular skeletal system. Often times, the psychophysical armoring of all the stress we experience daily in our lives will literally lock you into that emergency standby mode. With each reboot, a little bit more of that armoring melts away so the flight or fight response doesn’t reinstate itself so quickly into the body. Eventually, you can start to hold that hemispherically balanced state for extended periods of time.
Carol Bedrosian: Does this mean that if our brains were functioning with both halves most of the time that we could potentially achieve perfect health?
Neal Smookler: When you come into a stronger connection with the body’s innate wisdom, it knows what to do. When an animal is sick it will rest because it instinctively knows that is going to free up energy for healing.
Carol Bedrosian: That is true…stress does not allow for rest, and a constant state of stress just wears the body down.
Neal Smookler: People will do all kinds of flushes and cleanses because they know that by getting rid of toxicity in the body you free up energy for healing. When the body doesn’t have to keep that toxicity constantly suppressed, it now has freed up resources for other things. But the amount of life energy that you free up when you come out of and stay out of a pervasive energy wasting stress response is enormous. The stress response eventually becomes hard wired into our brains until we open up new choices of how to respond. This is what a reboot does. If it is a priority for new alternative neurological pathways to be created, the body’s inner wisdom will do that, in a priority way according to its own agenda.
Carol Bedrosian: It seems that a lot of this is happening on an unconscious level and you are not aware that your body is repairing and regenerating itself. Once the two brain hemispheres are functioning together, potentially miracles of healing could be occurring, even without your awareness.
Neal Smookler: On the flip side, we are also not aware of how much damage is being done by our brain hardwiring due to stress that is already in place. You don’t even realize it because the stress response becomes the status quo, your normal reality. It’s not until you shift out of it, that you realize how unhealthful this hardwiring is. When you reboot the brain, you are reconnecting to your Source and you will feel the benefits.
Carol Bedrosian is publisher and editor of Spirit of Change Magazine.
