Noëlle’s story: It would be difficult to tell Noëlle’s story without reference to her origins. The first nine months of Noëlle’s s life were spent in an orphanage in Haiti, an orphanage set up in the midst of a violent coup and stretched far beyond its means. Violence in her home country was a daily occurrence. In her first few months of life, Noëlle did not receive the love and tactile stimulation (she was not held) that is every child’s birthright. Undersized, underdeveloped and with a serious heart condition, she gave no signs of asking for food.

Then came a big piece around being black. Noëlle was struggling with the question: "What color is God?" More emotional clearing followed as we realized that Noëlle was dealing with the whole issue of victimization experienced by Blacks at the hands of Whites oppressors. This had at least three ramifications. First, it made her feel "not beautiful" since, to be beautiful is to be "white", secondly, it more her feel inferior, and third, it prevented her from feeling that she was part of her family.

As Noëlle continued to make important changes within, it became evident that her present school setting was no longer appropriate. Her parents started looking for other options and found a school they felt would better meet their needs. They decided to switch to another French language school after March break. Noëlle made the transition to her new school with ease. Soon after, her reading began to improve.

Two issues continued to be of major concern. Noëlle got stuck in negative ideas and she was easily influenced by others. We found that spiritual corrections⁴, further nutritional modifications and meridian balances helped her make a shift.
The next major change Noëlle made was related to her self-confidence. She came up with the affirmation: "I believe in me. I can be anything I want to be." Emotional clearing, more energy work and a technique from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)⁵ allowed Noëlle to integrate these new affirmations. In the NLP procedure you identify a resource state (for Noëlle it was dancing), a situation in which the client is fully in touch with their resources, and a stuck state (for Noëlle it was being at school). You overlap the two resulting in the resource state being generalized to the stuck state. In NLP terms this is called "collapsing anchors". It operates much like a conditioned response: Noëlle was learning that she could stay in her resource state, no matter where she was, including while in school.

Noëlle is now doing Brain Gym® movements at home on a daily basis. She has also started to go for chiropractic treatments. At her last session her mother remarked on how pleased she was with the results. Her comment: "She’s the happiest she’s ever been."

Stabilizing in Chaos1

You are ready to begin Part C when you fully land clearly feel the sensation of prana moving through the pranic tube and out into the physical body.

Step 1: Now place your awareness in the heart chakra at the center of the chest. Recall a feeling of unconditional love and acceptance. Make sure you’re actually feeling this state. Thinking about it will not do¹.

Step 2: With your awareness in the heart center and holding the feeling-state of unconditional love and acceptance, inhale and draw up from the Earth into your pranic tube. Hold the breath for a moment as you focus on the pranic tube, still holding the feeling-state of love and acceptance. When you exhale, move your awareness into the physical body and allow the "qualified prana" to move out from the pranic tube into the entire body.(see diagram)

Step 3: Return your awareness to the heart center and, holding the feeling-state of unconditional love and acceptance one again, inhale and draw prana down from the space above your head into the pranic tube. Hold the breath for a moment, and focus on the pranic tube, still holding the feeling-state of love and acceptance. When you exhale, move your awareness into the physical body and allow the "qualified prana" to move out from the pranic tube into the body.

Diagram: The heavenly and Earthly energies move into the pranic tube and then to the heart center or chakra. The "qualified" energies are then circulated throughout the body.

This exercise will both strengthen your life force and your sense of wellbeing.

Brain Gym® Diploma Course: October 19/20 and October 26/27, 2002

We are now accepting registrations for this wonderful course. It is especially useful for parents, teachers and practitioners.

For further information on any of our workshops, please visit our website

http://www.jagostabraingym.net/workshops/workshops.html or contact us at

(519) 822 4491. There will be no workshops during the summer months. We would, however, encourage you to visit the web site of The Elm Tree Centre which has a full schedule of activities for the summer: http://www.elmtreecentre.com/

Children’s minds go catatonic
"In the early 1960’s . . .it was discovered that kid’s minds go catatonic in front of the tube. This has to do with the way that the brain reacts to radiant light, which is the light source of television and computer monitors, and reflected light, which is what brings us the rest of our visual experience. . . the brain tends to close down in response to radiant light sources. Children get hypnotized when they watch television for any length of time."

The startle effect
". . .the television industry countered this effect by introducing . . startle effects into children’s programming. A startle effect is anything that triggers the brain into thinking that there might be an emergency out there and alerts it to pay special attention to the source of the disturbance.

Television accomplishes this with sudden and dramatic changes of intensity of light or sound and a rapid shifting of camera angles. Eventually, however, the brain starts habituating itself to the situation, realizing that these are just false alarms, and it starts to tune out again. As a result, every ten years or so the television industry has had to up the ante by making the startles bigger and bigger, until finally what we have are periodic bursts of violent imagery in children’s cartoons and so on, to the point now where there are an average of sixteen bits of violence every half-hour. Here the nature of the program content does matter. While the higher brain, or neocortex, knows that the images on TV aren’t real, the lower, or reptilian brain does not. This means that when a child views violence on television, the reptilian brain sends a series of alarm messages up to the emotional brain (limbic system), which in turn immediately contacts the heart. The moment the heart receives any indication of negativity or danger, it drops out of its usual harmonic mode into an incoherent one, triggering the release of the single most potent hormone in the human body, known as cortisol. Cortisol instantly wakes up the brain and causes it to produce trillions of neural links in order to ready the individual to face the emergency. . . .The trouble with current-day children’s television programming is that there’s never any letdown, and the brain of the average American child, who has watched 5000 to 6000 hours by the age of five or six, is suffering a great deal of confusion as a result. The massive over-stimulus from TV is causing the brain to maladapt in ways previously thought impossible. It is literally breaking down on all levels of neural development."

Conclusions supported by Research
". . .The German Psychological Institute has conducted a twenty-year study of 4000 children per year, children who have watched the average 5000 to 6000 hours of television by the age of six. . .The most serious change they uncovered was a breakdown of the brain’s ability to cross index its whole kinesthetic/sensory system.. . .more and more children’s sensory systems are acting as isolated components in the brain and less and less as coordinated whole gestalts.

When they place the young test subject in a natural environment that had no high-density stimuli, such as those which come from television, they grew very anxiety-ridden, bored and tended toward violence. . . .there has been . . .a 20% reduction in the children’s awareness of their natural environment."

Joe posits that research points to the desensitization of children exposed to inappropriate stimuli from television, rock music and computers. Computers have the same debilitating effect on the mind as television. In one study, three groups of fourth grade students were asked to read a single page from a textbook. Twenty minutes later they were tested on comprehension and retention. Students who had read a paper copy showed 85% comprehension and retention of the material. Those who studied it on a movie screen scored between 25 and 30%. Those who read the same text on a TV monitor scored only between 3 and 5%. Numerous tests were carried out, mixing the groups up and testing them again with different pages from the book, in every case the retentions and comprehension were identical.

Joe was asked to attend a computer conference at the University of California at Berkeley during which twenty-one experts from all over the world spent four days discussing the computers-in-education issue. He says that at that conference "one professor from MIT made the passionate plea that we must encourage children to develop the ability to think first, and them give them the computer. . . if you introduce the computer before the child’s thought processes are worked out, then you have disaster in the making. This is because, as Piaget pointed out, the first twelve years of life are spent putting into place the structures of knowledge that enable young people to grasp abstract, metaphoric, symbolic types of information. The capacity for abstract thinking developed as a result of the natural concrete processes that have been going on for millions of years. The danger here is that the computer, which operates by the same artificial, cathode-ray-tube technology as the television, will interrupt that development."

Famous PEOPLE Players
We encourage you to check out the Famous PEOPLE Players in Toronto this summer. This unique experience in black-light theatre exists thanks to the talent, dedication and vision of its founder, Diane Dupuy. It is the first theatre in the world dedicated to people with special needs. From their web site:

Famous PEOPLE Players opened the first dinner theatre dedicated to people with special needs where the veteran performers who no longer perform could further enhance their life skills. Actor Paul Newman who had become a big supporter and fan of Famous PEOPLE Players, generously underwrote the restaurant through the sales of Newman’s Own products.