Body/instinctive brain

Our physical bodies are often badly neglected in modern times. Most of us in our culture can easily get enough to eat, yet we often eat poorly balanced diets, or diets that try to slim us into the current anorexic fashion, rather than listen to our bodies essential needs. The external appearance of our bodies, their fashionability, too often gets far more attention than their basic soundness, until illness temporarily gets our attention. Proper evaluation by the body/instinctive brain should alert us to the early beginning of illness. 

Developing the body/instinctive brain also leads to the development of a special kind of will power, one that does not depend on the push of strong emotional desire to win or brutish stubbornness, but on steadiness, skillfulness, and clarity of intent. To those of us whose body/instinctive brains are poorly developed, the feats of skill in internal martial arts like Aikido often seem miraculous. 

My experience is that the body/instinctive brain evaluates reality and expresses many of its conclusions in the form of sensations and feelings... 

It didn t work very well. Finally I discovered a way of sitting still and watching the demonstration of a technique with my body, with few or no words. I began learning from a whole new perspective. My body/ instinctive brain was now handling my body, and was far better at it than my intellectual brain. 

The body/instinctive brain can also wrongly handle the work of other brains. A person who acts out his ideas and feelings with no regard for the consequences—hitting others whenever he gets angry, for... 

The physical tasks used extensively in work groups are very important in providing opportunities for students to observe one another in a wide range of situations, as well as in educating the body/instinctive brain. Too... 

When we go to school we are required to take innumerable courses designed to develop our intellectual intelligence, and even a few physical education courses to develop specialized aspects of our body/instinctive intelligence. But there is an almost total lack of education of our emotional brains. Some of us were fortunate enough to be born with exceptional emotional talent and sensitivity, or our lives forced us to develop and refine our emotional sensitivities. For most of us, though, our emotional brain remains largely at the level of an untrained idiot. 

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