Our mammalian/limbic brain is our emotional brain. It is through our mammalian brain that we have feelings for our world.

Our mammalian brain is connected both to the reptilian and the higher cortical brain.

Our more primitive mammalian brain gives us our most basic feelings of being alive and introduces us to the primary colors of our emotional life. Terror, rage, confusion, feeling bereft, and various shades of total delight and pleasure are the colors of our basic feeling of the world.

As we begin to inhabit our higher cortical brain, we also begin to have feelings and judgements about our more raw and intense feelings.

Many of our symptoms are really secondary symptoms. We hate feeling fear, or grief, or rage and so we develop neurotic patterns of avoiding these intense felt experiences of being alive.

On the positive side, having some felt distance from these intense primary feelings allows us to have these intense feelings without also being lost in them. We are able to ride the waves of these intense emotions without drowning in them.

Also, it is through our mammalian brain that we are able to “read” the minds of those around us. When we walk into a room with other people, it is our mammalian brain that is able to resonate with the emotional tone of the room.

We cannot help but have a feeling for our lives. We cananot help but feel waves of emotion as we resonantly move through our lives.

Therefore, if we are unable to tolerate the wide range of emotions, then we will not be able to be effectively present to the world and our lives.

If we want to feel true unfettered joy, delight, and pleasure, we must be able to be open and ride the waves of our unavoidable (and transient) and more difficult feelings of pain, fear, and grief. The cost of this gift and capacity to feel the world and for the world to enjoy a feelingful self-relationship, is that we don’t get to choose what we have been given to feel. We only get to choose whether or not we are going to embrace or flee this wild blessing/gift.

Our reptilian brain is the most primitive and oldest part of our brain. Among other jobs, it is mainly concerned with regulating physiological homeostasis.

It regulates heart rate, breathing, and digestion.

It regulates the level of overall excitation of the nervous system.

It is concerned with basic survival and security needs and is responsible for fight, flight and freeze responses. Actually, there are variants to the basic flight or fight reactions that are just as basic.

It is the job of our reptilian brain to help us feel physically oriented in space-time of our immediate situation.

When we experience something that is either actually dangerous, or reminds us of some past experience of danger, our autonomic brain immediately gets the whole nervous system geared up for some variation of the basic fight, flight, freeze safety procedures.

Unless we have a robust relationship with our own reptilian reactivity, we cannot reset our patterns of reactivity. Our reptilian brain cannot be fooled. It will go on protecting us and managing ground level patterns of self-maintenence until a reliable partner – ours, or a trusted other higher cortical brain – shows up and demonstrates that it will be reliably present to and honor the concerns of the reptilian brain.

Because our primitive brain is concerned with safety and survival needs, difficult experiences stick in the brain like velcro. We need to remember these experiences to make sure that we are alert and ready for the next time these come around. Positive experiences are less relevant to our most primitive needs for safety and security and so they slide off like velcro.

Armed with this knowledge, neuroscience and psychological research have shown that we can influence the environment of our brain, by making use of our higher cortical capacities to combat the velcro-teflon tendencies of the brain. P

Armed with knowledge of how the brain handles various traumas and illnesses, neuroplasticity research has shown that we can make use of our higher cortical brain to intervene and wake up parts of the brain that are asleep, coach our brain to compensate activate areas of the brain that are compromised by illness or injury.

To counter the teflon tendencies of the brain, positive psychology teaches us to pause and savor positive experiences so that the environment of our brain can neurologically benefit from these sunny experiences. In effect, we can change our brain from a cold, dark, and guarded place to one that is more sunny and open and creatively responsive to the world.

Many spiritual traditions have top down practices that are designed to introduce new brain habits and bathe the brain, from the top down, in the salutary sauce that these practices generate. Maitre or loving kindness practices, in buddhism, and mussar practices, in judaism, are examples of this. When our brain/mind is infused with loving kindness, it is more relaxed and open. Hussar practices help us to work directly with harmful and hateful patterns of behavior that arise from fear. By developing a sober and wholesome relationship with these patterns, the higher cortical brain, somewhat free from the deeper structures of the brain, can introduce a kind of freedom to the brain so that it can respond in more wholesome and ultimately more safety producing ways.

We know a lot more about our brains than ever before. Based upon what we now know, it is clear that it is possible to really change how our brain reacts to situations. It is possible to develop new axonal and dendritic connections and create new neural pathways. New neural pathways means that we have new ways of knowing and responding to the world.

These kinds of changes can now be measured and verified using brain scanning technologies. This is really cool because it shows that non-medicinal healing practices really do change the brain, really do help the brain find more functional ways of dealing with situations. This is true even for individuals who have suffered from severe trauma (this is even true with many kinds of brain injury, see N. Doidge).

However, we really need to understand how the brain works if we are to make use of our new knowledge to facilitate the kinds of healing that are possible.