Just Breathe by Dan Brule

Author:Dan Brule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Enliven Books

Boosting Your Creativity

Barnet Bain is a Hollywood producer, director, writer, filmmaker, and author of The Book of Doing and Being. As I read through his book, I couldn’t help but notice how many times he mentioned breathing. He didn’t give any specific instructions, but it was obvious that he was very aware of it, and that he used it consciously in his work. So I decided to meet him.

Since then, we have had some wonderful conversations about life, breathing, consciousness, and spirituality. During one of our conversations, Barnet pointed out that 98 percent of three-year-old children test as creative geniuses, yet only 2 percent of college graduates test as creative geniuses!11

What happens to us? And how can we fix it? Barnet’s answer: “When there’s too much aliveness in the body, we evacuate the building. When feelings in the body become too strong, we abandon ship and take up residence in the head. Creativity is not born in the head; it comes as a gift from beyond. It’s a heart thing. It’s an emotional thing. It’s a feeling thing. And so in the process of avoiding intense feelings, we cut ourselves off from the body, and therefore our creativity. The solution is to get back in touch with the body, to connect with feeling, and there is only one way to do that: breathing. Breathing is the whole deal!”

Brain science can help us to understand this. We have a reptilian brain that controls our fight-or-flight response. It also regulates other body systems, blood pressure, and so on. We have a limbic brain, a limbic system. This is responsible for emotional attunement, and attunement in general: play, fun, imagining, and so on. And we have the neocortex, the prefrontal cortex. It is in charge of the executive function, the logician.

Some people are born into unfortunate situations; for example, they have terrible parents. Even in the most fortunate situation, the fact is, no person can fully meet the needs of another human being. The problem begins something like this: you are an infant, days, weeks, or months old. Your mother is very loving, very attentive to you. Maybe you have a sibling, maybe she’s on the phone, maybe she’s busy with something else, and in that moment you crave attention. Where is she? She’s gone! She’s left me! This is not logical or rational, because your neocortex is not operational in that sense. It is a limbic response. It is preverbal. You experience an energetic abandonment. There is a severing of emotional attunement. The child feels it, and it is extremely painful.

So now you have this child who experiences a lack of attunement from his mother, his caregiver. Feelings of fear, abandonment, stress, and anxiety—an existential threat. It’s too much. There’s too much energy, there’s too much aliveness—energetic aliveness—in that infant.

The feeling of abandonment is too much for that infant to handle. The system goes into overload. So what does the child do? The only thing it can do: it leaves the body, splits off, goes into a dissociative state.

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