By Trish Briggs
For years, I would hear people say that they were either right or left brain oriented. I eventually translated this to mean right or left brain dominated. With greater awareness and understanding, I realized the goal was to find balance between the right and left brain so that they could work together as a team, offering the individual access to a more advanced levels of processing information on all levels (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and energetic). This is integration.
From birth to about age two, we are right brain oriented. (The terrible-two tantrums are right brain reactions.) Our right side allows us to sense emotions and information from the body, nonlinear, nonverbal, and eventually when it matures, puts things into context, allowing one to see the whole picture. The child is relying on his/her senses, energetic reads, and innate intuition for information during this time. This is why someone’s tone and intention read louder than the actual words.
Our corpus callosum (nerve tract linking the two hemispheres of the brain) needs time to mature so it can effectively link the two hemispheres. This doesn’t start to happen until around school age. By the time the child reaches school age, the left hemisphere is functioning and eventually takes precedence over the right. The left side is considered the logical, linear, lateral, and linguistic side. Traditional schooling was created around educating the left brain, with little focus on the right brain.
However, we need both the right and left brain to understand life, and especially who we are as individuals.
Our left side, when it matures, give work and order to our lives. It specializes in linguistic analysis, right and wrong thinking, and syllogistic reasoning (cause and effect patterns). Whereas the right side gives us the emotional texture and context to expression. It specializes in autobiographic information, sending and receiving nonverbal signals, spontaneous raw emotions, awareness, and self-regulation of the nervous system. Our empathic connection to others, mindset, and sense of self originates in the right brain.
Another way to view it is the left side is the letter of the law and the right is the spirit of the law.
The two hemispheres process differently because they work with different parts of the mind. The left brain is working in the realm of the conscious and gives access to the physical dimension, everything that is visible, tangible, and measurable. The right brain is working in the realm of the subconscious and gives access to the astral dimension, the invisible reality that supports manifestation. When the two work together (balance & integrate), they activate the limbic system and prefrontal lobes of the brain, function in the realm of superconscious, and gives access to the spiritual, the source of all existence.
One way to begin balancing and integrating the right and left brains is by working with the pendulum (remember the pendulum is just a tool)! As one would expect, integration opens the door to alignment between the physical and spiritual, and greater intuitive abilities.
Resources:
Atwater, P.M.H. (2005). Beyond the Indigo Children. Bear and Company, division of Inner Traditions International: Rochester, VT.
Seigel, Daniel & Payne Bryson, Tara (2012). The Whole Brain Child. Bantam Books, division of Random House: New York, NY.
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