I love this question! Although I only realised recently just how relevant it is to the work I do. I set up “Pick your Brains” sessions in response to the question “I don’t need a full coaching session, but may I pick your brains?”

As I was considering this, I realised how instinctively I had hit upon a perfect description of what these short 20-minute sessions were about. They are literally an invitation to pick my “brains”. Over my breathwork journey, I have realised the significance of our 3 brains and how we might feel or experience them in our bodies.

First the reptilian brain, our oldest brain and considered the least evolved, oh but how powerful and glorious this brain is. It is the brain that regulates our nervous system, that keeps us safe from real and perceived dangers. You probably know it as the fight, flight or freeze response. But I would like to propose that there is also a built-in early warning system that we might call gut instinct. A feeling in the belly that encourages us to check in. Maybe even to double check. Before we leap.

Then we move to our second brain, the limbic brain, that encourages us to feel and allow the movement of emotions. I liken this to our heart brain or our intuition. This is a quiet brain, that opens and closes in response to our listening. Perhaps with this brain we don’t understand the logic, but somehow, intuitively our heart feels open. Or indeed closed. This opening and closing of our intuition accesses an innate wisdom from deep within us that allows us to feel our way through whatever is before us. It is our intuitive felt sense.

Then finally our most recently evolved brain, the prefrontal cortex, the brain that allows us to follow the logic. Our intelligence. I would like to add a dimension to this and call it our imaginative intelligence. The organicity that catalogues our life experience to create our comfort zone, and that allows us simultaneously to explore our boundaries and to push them inwards and outwards, a little or maybe even a lot!

In my imagination it is like an elastic egg around us, that in overdrive can restrict us, contracting and making us small, in underdrive it has no edges or end and no learned experiences, so we barrel forward into the same behaviours without thought, in neutral it allows us space to explore just beyond where we are now, whilst still holding us. We can step forward or reach out in one area and it expands, or pull back in another and it contracts, gently shifting and changing in response to our explorations.

Each of these brains has a purpose in our lives, designed to work for us or with us in tandem. Enhancing our experience of life. Equally, each of these brains can go into overdrive or underdrive based on our experiences of life.

We can quiet the early warning signs of our gut instinct with an overdrive of taught logic that encourages us to keep going regardless. We can treat our heart with supreme reverence and forget that we have innate intelligence built up over lifetimes that supports our intuition. Like most of our brilliant body, they work better when harnessed together. We might call it teamwork.

They work better when asked, which of my beautiful brains is best placed to lead in this situation? And having established this, the evolved leader looks to his/her full team to find a balanced solution from all the wisdom and experience contained within. In business we call this situational leadership. One size does not fit all situations, we will rarely find the solution in the energy that created the problem.

Using this approach in combination with breathwork has led to my absolute genius moments, to my healing of wounds with love and compassion, to the unleashing of my creativity, to the gentle support needed in the moment of crisis.

And so, when you pick my brains, you are really allowing me to guide you towards accessing your own three brains. Your gut instinct, the intuition of your heart and your innate imaginative intelligence.

Sharyn-With-A-Why

To find out more about Sharyn, take a look at her profile in Practitioners Corner