CALCO

Taking the speed out of speed reading through mindful embodiment and the spirit of exploratory reading. Have the intention of curiosity or openness, a level of inquiry and utilizing consciousness we can absorb the word pictures as a “felt sense”. With practice we can absorb content with our whole mind (the brain-body). This kind of reading a level of service and joy!

I was just reading an article on boosting brain power with the body, that I found through my twitter account. The article discusses how to improve memory by physical training, but not just any sort of training, its brain games while biking on the Brain Center America’s NeuroActive Bike. As much as I find this an interesting approach to learning, that is just barely cutting edge, it continues the fallacy that we need to add something new to our lives to improve our intelligence. Buy something to be better, but really we are absolutely filled to the brim with all that we need. We are a highly evolved mammal, who have forgotten to practice evolution, through growing, learning, and focused attention. How about this for boosting brain-body power. Learn to read with your body. First let me explain my thinking. There is no brain. Absurd? Well only marginally. We do have a brain, but research galore is revealing that the demarcation between brain and body is shrinking. If this is the case than simply through developing awareness, skills, focus, and intention we can integrate and unify our intelligence. Much like any sum who is greater than the parts, we have a habit of being hyper focused on the brain, yet ignore and marginalize how the brain actually is nested, or part of the body, the tool, the instrument of receptivity. What is your T.V. with out the cable? I go as far to suggest we actually have five brains: a left hemisphere, a right hemisphere, a heart brain, a gut brain, and finally our skin, which is part of the ectoderm during our fetal development, which also makes the brain. Cognition is not king and as long as we orient ourselves in this way, we as a society will never advance the mystery of our ever evolving, adapting, species. Okay with that being said lets talk about speed reading with the body.

Regular 2D reading is where we subvocalize the words with the voice in our neocortical brain. This is the way we have been taught as a culture to experience ourselves, not bad, not good, just who we are and have been when it comes to reading. A fairly efficient way to process information. Reading from the gut is allowing our attentional field to open up beyond subvocalization. Through slowing the breathe to soothe the autonomic nervous system and placing attention in the gut brain we can then open our whole somatic brain to read. At first the practice is slow, so taking time to just feel the state of openness, smooth breathe, and anchored attention is the first phase. Get a “felt sense” of this in the body brain and spend time in this state several times a day, looking around, slowing the internal biology down and opening up. This grounds the body’s electricity to be able to pattern recognize the reading. When our body is in a hyper aroused state or sympathetically activated our consciousness becomes myopic, as it should, yet in our times, we are in this state often and need to practice new states in order to have a greater range of choices to a rapidly changing world. Imagine two attentional streams that are mutually exclusive currents, myopic sympathetic can not simultaneously run with a relaxed openness. Each attentional stream has it uses and we can practice and master these attentional streams through body awareness. Awareness is like massaging the nerves endings of the brain-body.

With practice we can all speed read through our right brain (to be addressed in future articles) attentional channels and respond to the rapidly changing environment in ways that create and support change that is creative rather than destructive.

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Scot