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Psychobiology of Soul

Telephone and Skype Coaching with Martyn Carruthers

Many people use drugs as a substitute for changing relationships. Self-medication with alcohol or nicotine, or prescription anti-depressants and stimulants are easier than applying intelligence, focus and analytical skills to complex relationship situations. Drugs are also cheaper for patients (in the short term) and more profitable for health professionals.

Soulwork Systemic Solutions and Brain Chemistry

We began using the name Soulwork in 1994, when our students and clients attempted to describe a stable resource state that seemed important to having meaning or sense of life. As many people called this stable experience Soul, we called that part of our coaching Soul-work. That name seemed to stick, although some people find it too religious or too New Age. See Origins of Soulwork.

As many symptoms of physical and mental health problems seem to vanish following our Soul-work coaching (see Human Consciousness), we wanted to better understand and improve the results that we already enjoyed [i].

When we interviewed people who recovered from serious mental and physical disease without medical assistance, we found that self-healed people had typically:

  1. Resolved (not dissociated) guilt from past actions
  2. Accepted disease symptoms as “teachers”
  3. Resolved traumatic or abusive memories
  4. Found a stable experience of integrity
  5. Created quality relationships
  6. Chosen healthy role models

Our challenges were obvious. What was the physiology and psychobiology of human consciousness? How could we apply this knowledge? And how could we coach people to take these steps?

I translated psychobiology and quantum thinking into Slovak language. You talk to the whole brain. You understand wide connections and binds. That is why people mark your coaching methods and articles as the most effective and understandable. SG, Slovakia

Which Reality is Real?

Do you want to understand your past, to live appropriately in your present and to plan future events? People who confuse their subjective models with objective reality may be called neurotic or psychotic. We sought to model how people create inner worlds (see Quantum Thinking), to help people make appropriate decisions (see Expert Modeling) and to enjoy relationships (see Enjoying Partnership)

Clues to coaching people to move from disease to health lie in the biology of the neurological structures that mediate perceptual, emotional and cognitive experiences - a body-mind. Changes in your body-mind worlds are followed by changes in your emotional reactions, your behavior and your physical body.

Coaching the Body-Mind

We coach people to change their physical, perceptual, emotional and cognitive experience. Short-term change is commonplace. For us, long-term change indicates that:

  • appropriate neurotransmitters are now generated, and
  • changes were appropriate and were rightfully accepted, and
  • the coach communicated with many brain structures simultaneously

Cognitive coaching interventions (thinking) are unlikely to communicate with brain structures that mediate emotional, perceptual and somatic change. Our systemic coaching goes deeper ... applying the strange realm of psychobiology - communicating with the limbic system ... and more.

Psychobiological Change

A person can acknowledge and respond to logical questions and requests. You can check if a verbal message was received by observing a person's verbal responses. A person can also respond to imagery, music, metaphors, movement and symbols. You can check if a nonverbal message was received by observing the person’s nonverbal responses.

The words conscious and unconscious seem to refer to which parts of the brain process the information. In most people, the left cerebral hemisphere is considered to dominate the processing of logic, reason, judgment and understanding, while the right hemisphere is believed to dominate the processing of images, metaphor and inferred communication.

Coaching the Left Cerebral Hemisphere

Your left brain hemisphere appears to store and process logical information. We can coach you to define your goals and to explore the consequences of achieving those goals and the blocks to achieving them. You are actively and consciously involved with the cognitive details of your own coaching.

Coaching the Right Cerebral Hemisphere

Research on alexithymia (people cannot express emotions and develop somatic symptoms) implicates your right brain for storing emotions. We can communicate with your right hemisphere using humor, metaphors, puns and symbols.

The work of Milton Erickson, MD, inspired us to develop a Hawaiian dreamtime ritual (moe uhane) into what we call interactive metaphors. Interactive metaphors appear to simultaneously stimulate both cerebral hemispheres. We call it Dreamwork - using interactive isomorphic metaphors to help you understand and integrate your emotional and cognitive responses - to change emotional reactions that prevent you getting what you want.

What do you want?

Our systemic coaching stimulates left and right brain activity simultaneously. While verbalizing goals, you unknowingly communicate objections by nonverbal incongruence, which can be recognized and dissolved by coaches we have trained. Such incongruence is commonly observed between verbal language (left brain) and accompanying nonverbal language (right brain), or between the cerebral cortex and the hind-brain. (For example, you may say, "I understand", while shaking your head from side to side.) Other common signs of incongruence include asymmetric posture, gestures or facial asymmetry.

A coach who can gently dissolve yes-no incongruence has a powerful tool for helping people find inner peace and congruent goals by balancing brain communication. (We teach dissolving verbal and nonverbal objections during our Systems 2 training, including self-criticism and responses beginning with "Yes, but...”).

Coaching the Limbic System

Your right brain and left brain communications are simultaneously processed through your limbic system, which associates your thoughts with emotions. Emotional states generated by the limbic brain influence and can override the cognitive processes of your neo-cortex. Your limbic brain can produce somatic sensations and psychosomatic symptoms.

Coaching at the limbic level can help you change emotional states. Examples include the uplifting effect of certain art or music on depressed people. When your limbic system is engaged, your physiology and emotions change. You may find better solutions for a problem if you listen to music, for example. This concept is utilized in many forms of hypnosis and meditation.

Coaching, Logic & Emotion

Our knowledge of the limbic brain helps us understand simultaneous incongruence between knowing (intellectually) that something is true, while feeling (emotionally) that it is not true. (This is especially common when thinking is influenced by identity loss and relationships bonds).

Your limbic brain is the source of your feelings of conviction. Paul MacLean, a neurobiology pioneer, said: "The limbic system, that primitive brain that can neither read nor write, provides us with a feeling of what is real, true and important.”

Logical arguments (mediated by the neocortex) rarely change emotional beliefs (mediated by the limbic system). Intuiting this, effective salespeople and politicians often make emotional, rather than logical, appeals. Your emotions may not be subject to your logical neocortex - can you spontaneously choose to be angry or happy?

As your limbic system can operate without conscious logic, classical conditioning strategies such as the anchoring used by practitioners of Neuro-Linguistic Programming can be used to access emotions, and to merge or dissociate them (often outside a person's conscious awareness and perhaps without consent).

By communicating with the limbic brain, we coach people change their perception of emotions, so that they can experience emotions as interesting body-mind communications. (We find that integrated brain function seems to minimize the influence of sales pitches, hypnotic language and political rhetoric! People can better choose how to react!)

Coaching the Pineal Gland

Your pineal gland is in the center of your brain. It is active until puberty, then it shrinks and may calcify. It is rich in lecithin which has both neural and endocrine properties. A neural connection between the eyes and pineal gland sensitizes your nervous system to ambient light.

Your pineal gland synthesizes and secretes melatonin and pinoline during darkness, entraining your nervous system to your local circadian 24-hour clock and perhaps acting as an antidepressant. Melatonin is an antioxidant that inhibits pre-puberty sexual development and may protect the nervous system against degeneration. Pinoline is also antioxidant and induces Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and dreams. (Pineal gland extract improves the metabolism of sugar in chronically ill patients.)

The pineal gland has been a mystery for centuries and has been attributed
with superstition, myth and many metaphysical theories.
Many people claim that the pineal gland is an intuitive third eye and chakra.

"Lao Tzu described a small 'gateway to heaven and earth' in the center of the brain behind the eyes and wrote that concentrating on it leads to realizing oneness. In this pearl is a light which Confucius called virtuous perfection (jen); the Book of Change (I Ching) called it the ultimateless (wu chi), the Buddha called it perfect knowledge (yuan ming) and Taoist literature called it an elixir of immortality and spiritual light." Jan Sikorski

"The pineal gland is the receptor and sender of subtle vibrations which carry thoughts and psychic phenomena throughout the cosmos. The pineal gland converts brain waves into subtle electrical energy traveling faster that the speed of light." Swami Sivananda

You are affected by the rhythm of your pineal gland and thus by ambient light levels. (This hints at why dark retreats were favored by Buddhist and Taoist monks). We find that coaching with interactive metaphor (Dreamwork) leads to predictable ecstatic states of consciousness that are commonly described as light-filled, etc, which seem to affect pineal gland function.

As the pineal reacts to light and darkness, and as the limbic system provides a sense of reality, subjectively perceived light (during interactive metaphors or meditation) seems to affect the pineal gland and melatonin / pinoline production.

(Pineal stimulation may resolve some frigidity and erectile dysfunction issues).

Coaching the Amygdala

Your limbic brain (including your amygdala) also mediates music, speech intonation and metaphor. Coaching strategies that communicate directly with the limbic brain are interactive metaphors and symbolic integration. As your limbic brain responds emotionally to symbols, such as icons, mandalas and art, we can use real or imagined symbols to stimulate your limbic brain.

Your amygdala associates emotions with symbols. Your amygdala receives information from your cortex, and integrates sensory information from both the external (objective) and internal (subjective) worlds, resulting in your experience of “reality”.

Your amygdala has been called the heart of your limbic brain. If you take a moment and remember the bitter taste and smell of lemon juice ... what happens to your saliva flow within a few seconds? Your amygdala rapidly responds as if imagined events were actually taking place.

By stimulating the amygdala, we can better coach people to explore strategies for achieving worthwhile goals, and to reduce the emotional impact of trauma. We coach people to learn from traumatic, phobic or abusive events without being overwhelmed by emotion, until the trauma, phobia or abuse can be peacefully evaluated and assimilated.

Coaching and Synesthesia

(Synesthesia is an experience in which the stimulation of one sense elicits a perception that ordinarily would be elicited had another sense been stimulated, as when a loud noise registers as a light, or vice versa: Encyclopedia Encarta)

We often use synesthesia to cross-link (or unhook) sensory systems. Systemic coaching at the limbic level helps a person experience unpleasant feelings as interesting communications, without being overwhelmed by body sensations such as guilt, sadness or anxiety.

As the limbic system also interprets music, speech intonations and metaphors, we can communicate directly with the limbic brain with interactive metaphors and symbols. We find symbolic maps and relationship matrices to be valuable tools for utilizing synesthesia during our systemic diagnosis and systemic coaching.

Coaching the Hind Brain

Your hind-brain also translates body-mind communication. It is sometimes called the reptilian hind- brain and controls everyday repetitive behaviors such as habits, rituals, routines and motor skills. You might think of it as your auto-pilot when you daydream - even when driving.

Your hind-brain associates emotions with action (action is often honest communication). You communicate aggression, submission and sexual interest through your actions. Your body movements and particularly your unconscious nonverbal communication involve your hind-brain.

Like the limbic system, your hind-brain responds to metaphors and symbols. Hence we use interactive metaphors, symbolic language, puns and non-verbal signals to communicate with this part of the brain. This is particularly useful when we coach people to pull themselves together as they recover from crisis, trauma or identity loss.

Coaching the Adrenal Glands

Your adrenal glands (not in your brain - they are above your kidneys) guide your “fight or flight” response to stress. Healthy adrenal glands release adrenaline, to make you more alert and focused, and cortisol, to convert proteins to energy. Adrenalin increases your heart rate, respiration and blood pressure while tensing your muscles, sharpening your senses, and slowing your digestion so that you can fight or run away.

Chronic stress can cause your adrenal glands to maintain high cortisol levels, which can damage your body tissues. Some people say they have adrenaline addiction, although subsequent adrenal fatigue can cause mood swings - depression, fatigue and insomnia. Adrenal exhaustion can cause serious health concerns and mental breakdown.

We can help you control stress reactions, and we can coach you to define and achieve your life goals. This provides you with the energy, focus and intent to live a fulfilled life.

A Psychobiology of Soul

These various parts of your brain can function and communicate simultaneously ... and ecstatically. We coach people to enjoy a stable experience of integrity as a basis for congruent decisions and long-term inspiration to choose and fulfill life goals.

People experiencing this integration display verbal congruence and nonverbal symmetry, which may indicate that the both cranial hemispheres, limbic system, amygdala and hind-brain are in an unusual state of cooperation. During this experience, people can simultaneously focus on abstract concepts and on specific details. Most people report a sense of transcendental awareness. (So many people called this experience Soul that we called this part of systemic coaching Soul-work.)

Many people, during and after Soul experience, have told us that Soul has an independent existence; that Soul existed before they were born; and that Soul will continue after the death of their bodies. (Psychobiology cannot confirm or disprove this concept, although many people enjoy this notion!)

Some of our team believe that our coaching can enable or enhance spiritual connectedness – while others believe that Soul experience is a natural result of integrated brain activity. Whatever is true, Soul experience seems to fulfill the requirements for spontaneous health described above and provides a rational basis for significant body-mind healing in short time frames.

People who cannot experience Integrity (Soul)

Some people cannot experience this existential harmony because of trauma (preoccupied), guilt (a need to suffer) and codependence (independent happiness may damage an important relationship). Other reasons were that the person suffered long term dissociation (lost identity), had identified with another person (identification) or had simultaneously identified with two people (identity conflict).

Hence our systemic coaching includes strategies for dissolving these systemic (relationship) issues. Our systemic solutions are steps towards optimal immune system function (as part of a spectrum of modalities, including diet, supplements and exercise.) This appears to help reduce aging, increase resistance to disease, and offer potential solutions for psychosomatic illness and autoimmune disease.

Please consult a physician about any medical or psychiatric conditions!

October 2008

Since I wrote this article ten years ago, we have redefined and improved our systemic solutions. Our paradigm has shifted. At first, we expected people to welcome effective change ... but so many people remain loyal to their conditioning ... and to their suffering. So many people seeking relief from emotional and relationship problems prefer to medicate or distract themselves. If you are searching for sense of life - for integrity (without drugs) we invite you to explore our transformational coaching.

Do you want telephone coaching or professional training?
We coach people to resolve emotional and relationship challenges.

Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1998-2009 All rights reserved


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Workshop

Systemic Coach Training  (Calendar)

Systems 1 How to evaluate relationship dynamics and recognize common entanglements
Systems 2 How to define life goals, identify blocks, resolve objections & plan for success
Systems 3 How to provide or continue goalwork using interactive metaphors and Dreamwork
Systems 4 How to dissolve the consequences of abuse and trauma, and rebuild motivation
Systems 5 How to change limiting beliefs and codependence for emotional freedom
Systems 6 How to recognize and resolve identity loss: recover lost qualities and lost skills
Systems 7 How to resolve therapist or spiritual damage and provide inspirational mentorship
Systems 8 How to coach partners to build lasting happiness and avoid partnership breakdown
Systems 9 How to coach parents to resolve family problems and to achieve family goals
Systems 10 How to coach team leaders and teams to develop while solving team problems
Systems 11 How to coach communities to survive and prosper in a changing world
Specialty Advanced workshops and specialty training tailored to fulfill your goals and needs

Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2009 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Solutions were primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers. We train people to resolve emotional blocks and improve relationships. This information is for your general knowledge only. Please consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing any medical treatment. Link to our pages, but get Martyn's written permission to post or publish his work.

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