How to BalanceYour Brain Hemispheres: A Powerful Exercise

Ever felt like your brain is working against you? In today's episode, Maniisha Bluntschli, explains a short powerful daily exercise which helps to harmonise the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

Maniisha explains the fascinating science of neural programming and its profound impact on how we function, mentally and physically.

Moving on from the theory, Maniisha  dives straight into the step-by-step practice  of this brain-balancing exercise, pointing out the significance of acupuncture points and their role in our nervous system.

She explains the significance of using eye movements to help process emotional memories,  touches on the renowned therapies  such as EMDR and Syntonics which  also leverage eye movements to manage emotions and mental health.

By the end of this episode, you'll have a potent daily exercise to balance your brain hemispheres and regulate your emotions.

To assist in learning the process, Maniisha has provided a visual guide as a free resource (see below).

CONTENTS
2:20     Chiropractors specialise in neural reprogramming.
2:36     Encouraging left and right brain hemispheres to connect & communicate
3:05     Left & right sides of brain functions
3:26     Lateral light therapy
4:47     Altered states of consciousness & brain hemispheres
5:48     Two parts  to the exercise - stimulate key acup-neural points plus eye movements
6:25     Eye movements important for brain & neural reprogramming
6:38     EMDR Therapy
7:54     Syntontics & eye movements
8:30     Eyes & brain tissue share same origin
9:04     Overview of the exercise
10:03   Key acupuncture points near the mouth
13:39   First phase of the exercise
16:49   Second phase of the exercise
19:04   Third phase of the exercise
19:50   Autonomic nervous system and its effects


FREE RESOURCE
Download your free  video guide to demonstrate & learn this exercise   HERE
Download your free PDF, written document explaining steps of this exercise   HERE

MUSIC
Many thanks to -  Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0
 'Where The Waves Take Us'  by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com/Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/     
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:23

Welcome to Limbic Light Podcast, season 3. In this season, we'll be diving deep into the marvels of our subconscious mind light, sound, brainwave, entrainment and so many other natural ways to help you become clearer, calmer and more potent in being. I've titled this season Deep Brain Retrain. I'm Manisha Blunchley, your host, with more than 40 years experience in the natural health field, ready to share with you my very best tips. Let's get on with the show. Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Limbic Light Podcast and I have a very practical little exercise to share with you. It's all about neuro-programming to encourage our left and right hemisphere of the brain to communicate and connect and work well. So before I get any further into this, I wanted to let you know not to worry if you don't get everything in the description of the exercise today, because I have created a little video. It's under five minutes it's not very long to actually demonstrate visually how this exercise goes, and there will be a link at the bottom of the show notes for you to access this video, so it will help you. So don't worry if you don't get all the steps, but let's give it a go and I'm going to give you a little bit of the background why this exercise works so well for you. So, to start off, there's a lot of chiropractors who specialize in the area of helping the brain function better. It's a form of neural programming and this is where I've actually got this exercise from a chiropractor. So the basis of it is that we want to encourage our left and right hemispheres of our brain to communicate and connect and work well.

Speaker 1: 2:46

When there's an imbalance and often there is a predominance of people using either their left or their right hemisphere more than the other it can set up imbalances in the nervous system and how we think and how we feel. So you probably know this, but I'm going to cover it anyway. The left side of the brain is particularly associated with analytical and logic and reason types of activities, whereas the right side of the brain is more about imagination and emotions and creativity. There's a whole science which was devised by a neuropsychiatrist in Russia who developed a therapy called lateral light therapy. This would be a really good topic for me to talk about in another podcast with you, but his work was basically all around helping people. When there was a dominance of either the left or the right hemisphere of the brain, he found that there were imbalances in how people would live. When people use their right brain in preference to the left side of their brain, they can tend to be lower in mood and need more sleep and be less in their amounts of energy, whereas if people are left brain dominant, they tend to have more anxiety or problems with sleeping. So he found this technique where he was able to help people rebalance and connect reconnect their left and right hemisphere so they work in tandem, together, fairly equally, to balance out these tendencies in the nervous system and in the mind.

Speaker 1: 4:39

So I just wanted to touch on that to give you a bit of a background in how important it is to have our left and right hemispheres working and in fact, some of the scientists who were studying what happens to the brain when we have altered consciousness states, in states of high meditation or even inspiration, something happens with the left and right hemisphere. They start to communicate and connect and coalesce together, whereas often in our thinking and our activities, the left and right hemispheres of the brain work quite separately to each other. So this particular exercise that I'm going to be sharing with you is mostly about helping us to get our left and right hemisphere in balance and connecting and communicating in healthy ways again. So it can be a really good exercise to do on a daily basis. It's very short and very easy once you do learn it. So there's two main parts or aspects to this particular exercise which I wanted to just tell you about now. The first one is stimulating certain parts of the body which, with my training, relate to specific acupuncture points that have specific roles on the nervous system, on the chi, on the yin and the yang of the body. I'll go through this a little bit. So stimulating parts of the body through massaging or rubbing. And the second part is simultaneously doing specific eye movements.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Now we know that eye movements has a really strong connection with our brain activity and also to do with neural reprogramming. There's a whole therapy that's been devised in this light of eye movements and it's the EMDR, which is eye movement, desensitization, reprocessing. It's a technique that a lot of clinical psychologists or psychotherapists may use with their clients and it's specifically helpful for people who have had previous traumatic incidences in their life and it's used to help reprogram their brain or their association and memories with these previous experiences. So this particular EMDR therapy was developed by Dr Francine Shapiro in 1987, and it uses eye movements and also, interestingly, also sometimes rhythmic tapping on the body or the eye area to change the way a memory is stored in the brain which allows you to process it better. So I wanted to just introduce that to you to let you know the importance of using eyes as a form of therapy or accessing the neural aspects of our brain. And in fact there's a whole area of optometry behavioral optometrists who practice a therapy called SYNTONICS. They use a measuring method to measure the visual field extensively, to give them feedback as to what's going on in the brain. So there's this really strong connection between eyes and the brain, the visual field and the brain. I'm not surprised that's the case, because in our body, when we're a little fetus growing in our mother's womb, the eyes are actually made of exactly the same tissue as our brain. In fact it develops at the same time and it's exactly the same material. So some people go as far as saying that the eyes are an extension of the brain, that the eyes are the only part of the brain which is presenting to the outside of the world. So our eyes are actually so much more than what we actually give them credit for.

Speaker 1: 9:04

Okay, let's move on to the exercise itself. As I said, you can do this exercise in probably about three minutes, or definitely under five minutes If it's done every day, it's highly beneficial to your whole nervous system and brain. So when you're doing this exercise, there's going to be three things happening simultaneously. One of them will be stimulating acupuncture points, which I'm going to go through with you now which ones they are. The first one is the area of the mouth, and they're very important. And the second one is stimulation by rubbing another part of the body, and I'll go through that step by step. And the third part simultaneously is using your eyes to move backwards and forwards or up and down. So let's go through it.

Speaker 1: 9:58

There's three phases to this exercise, and so the first phase I'm going to give you the key acupuncture points which I spoke about, which are near the mouth, first and foremost, because that will be used in each phase of these three phases. So, first of all, what I'd like you to do is to bring your hand in front of you and you have your thumb, and then you'll have your index finger, and I'm going to get you to use both of those, the index finger and the thumb, to go just above your upper lip and just below your lower lip and you're going to move it backwards and forwards, side to side. So you're actually stimulating some very important acupuncture points just above the upper lip and just below the lower lip. Now I'd like to just tell you what those points are so you have a bit more understanding.

Speaker 1: 10:56

The point just above the upper lip in Chinese medicine we call it do 26. Some people will call it the governing vessel 26. The governing vessel is a very Yang meridian. It's a very active, assertive, warming aspect of your body and it actually goes up from the lower part of your spine all the way up the back of your spine, through the center area, over your head, and it finishes up just at this point, at do 26, above the lip. It's often used as a revival or an emergency point. It's very stimulating. So if someone goes unconscious, it's a first aid point that you can actually touch and dig your finger or thumb into quite firmly to revive that person, to bring them out of their unconsciousness or their coma or their fainting spell, whatever it is. So it's a very Yang stimulating point, whereas the second point, which is just underneath the lower lip, this is all in the central midline, by the way, is Ren 24. I say Ren 24, but there's another way of saying it, and it's also conception vessel 24. And again it's in the midline.

Speaker 1: 12:19

The Ren vessel, or the Ren meridian, is known to be the most Yin meridian of the whole body, and Yin is the feminine, cooling, calming aspect of our body, and it comes up from the pelvic region, right up the center midline, on the front of our body, and it finishes just there under the lip, at Ren 24. So what you've got there is you've got a combination of a very Yin meridian and a very Yang meridian. The Ren 24 under the lip is very Yin and also, if you stimulate this point, it does actually have a sedating effect on the body. So you've got a very stimulating point above the lip and a very sedating point below the lower lip, and you're going to be stimulating these both simultaneously, ones on a Yin meridian and the other ones on the Yang meridian. And what's also interesting about these two points is that there is a connection between these two very important meridians that connects through the mouth. So the Ren connects to the DOOM meridian through an internal branch inside the mouth. Now it's possible that the reason why we have such a balancing effect on the left and right hemisphere using these points is because we're using a very yin, which is calming, and a very yang, which is very stimulating point, and we're doing it simultaneously. It's not fully understood how this all works, but it's a fantastic exercise and I do notice, through doing it every day, my brain and my mind seems to be really quite calm and balanced.

Speaker 1: 14:12

Okay, so that is the very first and most important part of the exercise. Using your forefinger, your index finger and your thumb and inside motions, you're rubbing side to side on these two points above the lip and below the lower lip. Okay, so while you're doing this in the phase one, you're going to be using the other hand that you're not using to rub near your mouth. Your other hand is going to go to your abdomen area, to the umbilicus or the belly button area, and you're going to have a flat tongue and you're going to rub it rather firmly in circles in a clockwise direction around your umbilicus area. So you're rubbing around in a circular fashion around your belly button. Meanwhile, you're also rubbing side to side with the other hand, above and below your mouth area. Don't get too worried if I lose you.

Speaker 1: 15:18

As I said, there is a video that you can link to that you can actually receive, and it will show you in real life me doing this. But see if you can follow this. It's good to be able to see if you can do it while I'm speaking. So that's using your right and your left hand simultaneously doing circular motions around your belly button and side to side, above and below your lip. While you're doing that, you're going to do some eye movements, and your eye movements are going to go from up to down, up down, up down. So you're using your eyes. You tend to keep your head fairly still, so do your best not to move your actual head up and down, but just your eyes. So they're raising right up and then they're raising right down. So you're going to do this for a little while, whatever feels comfortable anything up to a minute, but I often only do it for 20 seconds and then what you'll be doing is swapping sides. So the hand that you used on your tummy is now going to go to your mouth and the hand that you had on your mouth is now going to go to your tummy, and you're going to repeat that exactly the same way with your eye movements, again up and down, up and down.

Speaker 1: 16:46

Okay, that's phase one. There's three phases. Second phase is going to be again having your forefinger and your thumb back to this mouth area, rubbing side to side. We want to stimulate this REN24 and the DOO26 points the really good ones for the brain and meanwhile, the other hand, this time it's going to go up towards the collarbone area. Just under the collarbone, on both sides, there's a dip, it's just like a natural dip on your chest, and I'm going to get you to move your thumb and your fingers thumb on one side, fingers on the other side in circular motions, just nice and steady and reasonably firm. Meanwhile, you're using the other hand, rubbing left and right, left and right near your mouth.

Speaker 1: 17:44

Okay, while you're doing this, there is an eye movement, a different eye movement, and this eye movement is going to be side to side, to the side and side, side and side. Okay, so we've got the three things going One hand near the mouth, rubbing Thank you for watching backwards and forwards the other hand near the collar bone, just under the collar bone, in the dips, circular movements and the eyes side to side. When you've done that, for whatever feels comfortable. Again, I do it, maybe for 20 seconds or so, swap hands, do exactly the same, but with the other side. Now I have to tell you that don't worry if you find this a bit complicated or difficult in the beginning or you find it hard to coordinate all these different movements. It's actually training the brain and so it's normal, while you're doing something brand new, that you're going to find it a little bit challenging, but you do get used to it, particularly as you practice each day. You'll be quite surprised how you'll pick it up in time rather quickly. So persist with it.

Speaker 1: 19:00

Okay, that was phase number two, with the hand on the collar bone. Now, this time, the third and final phase. Once again, we're going to bring our hand the forefinger and the thumb to our mouth and the same rubbing backwards and forwards on those really good points, rend 24 and do 26, but with the other hand we're going to put it behind at our sacral area. It's at the you could say our tailbone area, and we're just going to use some fingers there to rub up and down on this area. By the way, all these areas that I'm telling you to rub are areas where there are chock-a-block nerves which conglomerate, which join together to join to our autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is part of our nervous system that works automatically and it often connects to our state of feeling, how you could say, almost our unconscious state of feeling. So it's the flight and fight part of our body, part of our nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system and also the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the relax and digest and rest. So we're actually tapping into our autonomic nervous system greatly by touching these different parts of our body, under the collar bone, the tummy area, and now on this sacral area, the lower tailbone area. So you're stimulating that part of your nervous system.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Okay, back to the exercise. So you've got your fingers going up and down on our tailbone area and meanwhile you're doing left and right with your forefinger and your thumb near your mouth. Now the eye movement is different this time again, and what you're going to do with your eyes is you're going to look far in the distance, so you're going to focus on something out there in the distance and then bring it back in right, close to your nose. So it's far close, far close, far close, and that is it. Oh, and of course you do swap sides, so you use your other hand to do exactly the same, again, just swapping hands. So that's it.

Speaker 1: 21:39

It's the three steps and I'll just quickly go through that once again. Step one is near the mouth, stimulating those points, and the hand on the umbilicus area, circular motions and the eye movements are going up, down, up down. Part two is the hand on the collarbone and the other one stimulating the mouth area, and your eye movements are going side to side, side to side. And the third part is your hand on the lower part of your sacrum, meanwhile still stimulating the mouth area, and the eye movements are going to be far, close, far close. All right, I hope you've got that what I may do as well for you.

Speaker 1: 22:34

Just to really help you out, I will do a second little cheat sheet for you that you can download and it will be written instructions for you so that you can refer to that as you're practicing and getting to know how to apply this particular exercise.

Speaker 1: 22:51

So there'll be two resources available free for you in the show notes. One will be the video and the other one will be the little cheat sheet or the instructions, written instructions, a PDF which will go step by step through the motions. Okay, I hope you've enjoyed this and hopefully you can put this into practice and encourage teaching your children or anyone else who's close to you who might be struggling a little bit emotionally or mentally. This can be such a simple little tool to help us connect and rewire parts of our brain so that we can function so much better. Alright then, thank you once again and see you later. For now, and I look forward to speaking to you again. Bye for now. You've been listening to Mini Shablonchly on Limbiclight podcasts. If you liked this show, subscribe in the link below in the show notes so that you can be informed every time a new episode is released and also know about my upcoming courses and more. Thanks so much for listening and being here. Bye for now.