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for the Mystical BrainExpert advice for getting your

BRAIN and BODY back in balanceBy Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D.,

With Louise Hay

For more than 30 years, I have worked in the field of medical intuition—the capacity to understand how certain illnesses in our body warn us that something in our life is out of

balance. Knowing only a client’s name and age over the phone, I describe how a specific emotional pattern in their life aggravates certain organs in their body. I teach the client how to name the emotional pattern, respond to it effectively, and then release it. I also explain how if they don’t, the emotion can become more entrenched in the form of a physical problem.

To facilitate the process, I teach them how an array of solutions—conventional medicine, herbs, nutritional supplements, affirmations, body work, and other suggestions—can support their healing process, offering a cornucopia of remedies from which they and their practitioner may choose to create whole health.

Spiritual Transformation of Brain and Body

I have yet to meet anyone who was a shaman, an intuitive healer, or a mystic of sorts who didn’t have a lot of emotional and physical health problems. I’ve found that people who work in the field of intuition, myself included, are some of the moodiest, most anxious, irritable, high-strung, blunt, and passionate individuals I have ever met.

Many of the great saints who were medically intuitive—Catherine of Genoa, Teresa of Avila, Catherine de Ricci, and Thérèse of Lisieux among them—were notorious for having “unique minds.” They were often eccentric, temperamental, anxious, and very direct and cutting when they delivered their prophetic, intuitive information. In addition, intuitive advisors often have a variety of hard-to-treat, complex health problems, including migraine headaches, weight and thyroid problems, and immune system disorders, to name a few.

Whenever I’m told about a mystic, a shaman, or a medical intuitive, I don’t ask for stories illustrating their unique gifts. I check out their mind and body. Are they moody? Anxious? Irritable? Cranky? Argumentative? How many surgeries have they had? How many times have they almost died? Do they have migraines, epilepsy, autoimmune problems, or thyroid disorders?

If the answer is “yes” to many of these questions, I know the person is the real thing. All the shamans and native healers of indigenous tribes, as well as the intuitive healers who came later in history, had a lot of health problems because one’s tendency to be intuitively porous, mystically inclined, is related to having a reactive brain and body.

So, is this you? You may find that you’ve been “on your spiritual path” for years and along the way you notice

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changes in your mood, anxiety, and memory, not to mention your physical health. By being on that path you are leaving ordinary life on earth and wanting to create an extraordinary life by touching the Divine. It may take a while for your body and brain to adapt to your new, porous, sensitized, globalized brain-set. Consider the following story.

Denise: The Mystical BrainDenise, 37, called me because she was on a

spiritual path and she wanted to learn how to straighten her health out so she could access her intuition better.

The Intuitive Reading: When I looked at Denise’s life, specifically her family, I could see chaos everywhere, including constant arguments between parents and siblings. If someone was in the house, an argument was going on. I could see Denise hiding behind a door as her relatives were arguing in the other room. Was she avoiding violence, afraid of being the next target of emotional and physical abuse? I could also see Denise intuitively know when an argument was about to erupt.

The Body: It felt like Denise’s body had gone through a war zone. Her brain felt numb. There were pressure headaches, neck pain. Her head felt hot. I saw a red dotted pattern where her thyroid was supposed to be. Did Denise have problems with chest pressure? There was shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness, and vertigo.

When I got to Denise’s digestive tract, I could see that she manipulated her health by forever changing her diet. Was this due to food intolerances or allergies? I could see that these nutritional maneuvers helped her for about a month or two, but eventually any improvement stopped. She seemed to have a lifelong struggle with weight and food restriction. And finally, I saw sadness enveloping Denise, with waves of panic that affected her capacity to pay attention and focus in school.

The Facts: Denise said she had had problems with her brain and her health since youth, but no one could tell her why. She had always known she was different. She was the “black sheep” in the family. People told her she was too sensitive and emotional.

Denise said she tried to make up for feeling like a social outcast in school by excelling academically, but that didn’t work. She studied three times as long as everyone else, but she just couldn’t get the right answers on tests. After a year of college, she dropped out because she just couldn’t keep up with the reading.

Denise told me she just wanted to be normal. She had finished a certificate program in massage therapy, but she said, “I’m just too intuitively connected to the problems of my clients.” Recently, she’d had an MRI to find out why she was having dizziness, vertigo, and chest pain. All the tests were negative. Only one test was slightly abnormal—an EEG showed atypical slow brain waves. The doctors didn’t know how to interpret it.

The Solution: If you, like Denise, have always felt unique, maybe a black sheep in your family, congratulations! On some level, you don’t want to be ordinary, you want to be extraordinary. However, with our unique genius wired in our brain, we somehow need to find happiness and health and lead productive lives.

If you’ve always had learning disabilities and episodes of panic, anxiety, and depression, it’s important to love yourself just the way you are. And to love yourself, you need to

know how your brain works so you can utilize it in the best way possible. Go to a behavioral neurologist or neuropsychology department at a major medical center so they can elucidate what is unique about your brain so you can best use it. Don’t wait decades. You don’t want to miss opportunities in education or career advancement as you experience failure in both. There is a way you can learn how, with support and instruction, to identify what makes you different, and with remediation have more successful relationships, finances, and career.

I have yet to meet anyone who was a

shaman, an intuitive healer, or a mystic

of sorts who didn’t have a lot of emotional and physical health

problems.

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A variety of different brain styles occur in people who are spiritual and mystical. The temporal lobe specifically is a key area that functions for intuition, spirituality, and mysticism. Whether one has an injury there through emotional or physical trauma, epilepsy, or other disorders, one may have exaggerated gifts for spirituality. But all of us have a capacity for mysticism. How? At night when we dream, especially between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m., our hippocampus has microseizures. These microseizures may be involved not just with memory or dreams, but also connecting with the Divine.

Saint Paul, Mohammed, Margery of Kempe, and Joan of Arc all had some form of seizures in this temporal lobe region. Joan of Arc had ecstatic states in which she heard the voice of an angel and saw a great light when she had seizures. Catherine of Genoa also had seizures, as well as sleepwalking and other seizure-like phenomena. Teresa of Avila had visions too; in addition to chronic headaches, she would lose consciousness and also have other seizure symptoms. Catherine de Ricci had complex partial seizures that induced visual hallucinations and mystical states. Emanuel Swedenborg had seizures that involved multiple senses, whether it was smelling, tasting, or feeling things. Joseph Smith, who started Mormonism, had seizures as well. He saw a pillar of light and heard voices in episodes where he said he could “look up at heaven.” And finally, Ann Lee, who started the Shaker movement, had epilepsy, too, with episodes where she would see and hear things.

What does this mean for you? If you’re drawn to spirituality, altered states, and mysticism, you may be rewiring your temporal lobe, or if your temporal lobe has been rewired by trauma, you may be a savant for intuition. Either way, you have the brain and the body for intuition and mysticism; however, you may have noticed the fallout

in your body, because the temporal lobe has huge amounts of connections to our body, especially our immune system, adrenal glands, hormones, and heart.

The Affirmations: Consider Louise Hay’s premise: I love myself just the way I am. As you evolve spiritually, you may also grow to see that even though you may feel different from other people, we are all still human. And by seeing the similarities in all of us, we can learn to love all of us just the way we are.

Balancing Mind and Body for Health

Which leads me to the next set of solutions: radical acceptance. Working with someone who understands dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) will help you balance your intuitive, mystical temporal lobe with that more earthbound frontal lobe. Though you may not be able to do much about your intuitive and spiritual porousness, DBT and other cognitive behavioral therapies will help you more effectively respond so that your mood, anxiety, distractibility, memory, and health problems come back to baseline.

Adapted from Heal Your Mind: Your Prescription for Wholeness Through Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., with Louise Hay. Reprinted with the permission of Hay House (hayhouse.com). Copyright © 2016.

You don’t want to be ordinary, you want to be extraordinary.