Lisa Wimberger - Neurosculpting: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness

For my mother, Jean,

July 26, 1934October 29, 2013.

May you continue to teach me how to BE.

And for my father, Edward,

whose strength and resilience have astounded me.

To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.

FERNANDO PESSOA, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

contents

acknowledgments

No amount of thanks is enough for the many people who helped create the magical moments that have shaped me, and this content. Havana and Gilly, the loves of my life, thank you both for helping me go through the best and worst moments of my life during this magical and sometimes difficult process. I have also been blessed to use the techniques outlined in this book to journey through massive healing and transformation with my brother, Kurt. Its been amazing to be in this together. A special and deep thanks to Nathan Josephs, my partner in crime on many levels; your friendship has meant the world to me, and my family. The list that follows is, of course, a feeble attempt to recognize the gifts Ive been given by a great many individuals. Thank you Haven Iverson, Amber Taufen, Shanti Medina, Alicia Fall, ALL of my NSI-certified facilitators, and the supportive and powerful folks at Sounds True.

introduction

death doesnt get the last word

Imagine a normal and uneventful morning where in the midst of washing your face, your life disappeared without warning, along with everyone you loved. Ive flirted with and dated death since I was fifteen years old, when I had my first near-death experience in the bathroom at my parents house. Of course, I didnt know then that I had a seizure condition that caused me to flatline. I only had an inexplicable, mystical, and painful episode that left me confused and blown open. I had fainted before, but this time was different. I remember standing at the sink, looking at myself in the mirror, and wondering why my face suddenly appeared to be melting. The room quickly closed in on me while I desperately tried to hold on to the counter top. I heard a distant voice say, oh no as if it came from someone else. And suddenly I was in another space where I was fully conscious yet completely unaware that my body was on the floor. In that other consciousness I had a vivid encounter with Zahara, a mystical female force Id never forgetone who visited me often in later episodes and who would help shape the rest of my life. I came to know her as The Mother. I dont know how long I lay on the floor that day listening to her as she told me about neurons and the galaxy. Eventually a faraway buzzing sound grew closer and louder, crushing my ears and shooting pins and needles through each cell of my body. There was nowhere I could retreat to, no pain-free area of my body, no space of clarity in my mind in which I could find shelter.

I prayed for it to stop.

Just underneath that deafening sound-feeling came the whisper of my own moaning. When I opened my eyes, I could see the brown tile underneath the counter. To look elsewhere but straight ahead was a nauseating vertigo nightmare. What happened? Why couldnt I move? How was it possible to feel stuck to the floor as though a great force pinned me down?

I was in a puddle from head to toe and wondered if I had urinated. The floor tile on my face was cold. Cold was good. Thats all my clouded mind could grasp. I was embarrassed for my family to come home and find me, so I hoped they didnt. An indescribably long time later I managed to crawl to my room and fall asleep without anyone knowing what happened. Id keep this a secret for a long time.

I was a very healthy teenager who exercised, didnt smoke cigarettes, never drank alcohol or experimented with drugs. What could possibly be happening to me? Years later, I learned that my vagus nerve, which is responsible for regulating breathing and heart rate in the medulla of the brain stem, had triggered a very primitive response we all experience sometimes: the freeze response. You know those moments of fear when you hold your breath and remain silent? This is your body engaging in a normal freeze response. Mine, far beyond the normal spectrum, dropped my heart rate so rapidly that it stopped beating. This caused blood and oxygen to be in short supply to my brain. So my brain did what its supposed to do in those cases and shut down all cognitive processes. In other words, my cortex and cognitive functions turned off. One minute I was there, the next I was gone.

This continued to happen for the next twenty-five years: a few more times in bathrooms, some of them at my parents, others at my own home as I got older. One time in my twenties, I regained consciousness with my head wedged between the toilet base and the wall, my legs bent awkwardly under the claw-foot tub. When I was finally able to stand and look in the mirror I noticed a black eye from hitting my face on the windowsill on the way down. Later, in my thirties, I had an episode during a doctors exam and awoke to a needle of atropine, or liquid adrenaline, ready to plunge into my heart. I got my actual diagnosis that day: I had a seizure and flatlined. My heart stopped long enough for the nurse to run to the next room, load the needle with atropine, and come back. I had gone into the doctors office that day for a routine exam and I left with the news that I had a condition. I now had a story that helped me make sense of the most confusing pieces of my life.

Yet another time I seized and flatlined in a food court in front of my three-year-old daughter. I was unconscious long enough for the paramedics to arrive. They helped me, but of course could do nothing for the emotional scars that this caused my little girl. When I was coming to, I heard her ask the paramedics in her tiny little voice if mommy died.

My worst seizure was when I was almost forty. My husband found me unconscious and crumpled in the corner of the kitchen with my eyes fixed and unblinking and my body rigid. He prompted me to breathe over and over again each time I stopped. I remember feeling the ease with which silence takes over when theres no breath and no heartbeat. I remember hearing myself bargaining to surviveone self saying I should die for good, the other arguing to stay. My husband kept his hand on my chest for what seemed like forever, and he lovingly crawled with me in slow motion all the way up the stairs to our bedroom, inch by excruciating inch.

These are only a handful of times out of the many episodes that snuck up on me out of thin air and whisked everything away. In these moments of silent heart and mind Ive experienced a consciousness that has a life of its ownone that seemed to inform the path Id eventually take in life. Each of these blackouts fully engaged me in an alternate reality I perceived was real, including waking up with visceral memories of events I swore I was engaged in while I was actually unconscious. Fortunately, these alternate narratives gave me vital information through metaphor and storyline, which I never once took for granted. For example, the first day I experienced Zahara, The Mother, during my first blackout, was the day she taught me the importance of neurons as they relate to my ability to communicate and to heal myself.

Because some of us learn best through facts, and others of us learn best through allegory, I was well aware that my visions in these states were as important as what I might learn in a waking logic state. They seemed to be breadcrumb trails to the gateways of my wholeness.