Episode Details

Hi Everyone

I hope you can get just as excited about this research as I am. It has been around a while but I am just putting the peices together. References are below.I want you to EXPERIENCE THIS for yourself. Here are three ways NOW!

Shiloh Sophia

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The Neuroscience of Self-Expression: Why the Brush Knows Before We Do

I want to speak to you about something I am so passionate about — the neuroscience of self-expression. It comes from my root system, because I come from the Stardust Lineage, and we are creative, spiritual, magical women who pass tools of Intentional Creativity from hand to hand and heart to heart. This isn’t a woo-woo idea, and neither is it entirely scientific. It’s a hybrid. Sometimes the brush knows before we know what’s actually going to happen.

I want to tell you about a researcher at Drexel University who has spent a decade strapping near-infrared sensors onto people’s foreheads and watching what happens when the human brain is firing and wiring the moment the paintbrush touches the paper or the canvas. Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do this? Her name is Girija Kaimal — Wow. I would love to have a cup of tea with her. Of course, she doesn’t know me. She probably will at some point, because I’m going to reach out. And she’s probably never heard the words medicine painting — one of the terms we use for our work, because it’s an approach to painting that’s healing.

Her data has been confirming what the women in our lineage have known since the 1930s. Self-expression is healing. Painting for us is a spiritual practice. It is not just a hobby. It is literally a neurological event. And guess what? When you paint with intention, the event begins before the brush ever touches the canvas. If you’ve worked with me, you know I talk about this all the time as energy equals matter at the speed of light — your energy as thought, expressed through your physical body, the equal sign, manifests matter at the speed of light on the canvas. Are you kidding me? Yes. The neurological awakening of what’s going to happen happens before the brush touches the material.

You may also be aware of another piece of research that adds to our point, by Audrey van der Meer, a Norwegian neuroscientist who has proved that writing by hand wakes up the brain in ways that typing cannot. Imagine how many kids these days are no longer learning to handwrite?! Her work is finding something so incredible about what happens when people are actually handwriting — she’s measuring how the brain encodes the writing of letters into memory, and the brain is lighting up.

When Kaimal’s team did their research, they put 26 people in headbands — the kind that read blood flow inside the prefrontal cortex literally in real time. (Gosh, I wish it were here.) They were given three minutes to color in a mandala, to doodle around a circle, and to free-draw whatever they wanted. The results were published back in 2017 in Art Therapy. Guess what? All three activities lit up the medial prefrontal cortex. Wow. Wow. That region is part of the brain’s reward pathway. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? That’s the same circuit that fires when someone you love walks into the room. This is when you get to have tea with your best friend and you’re jumping up and down. This is when your lover winks at you and you know what’s coming next. This is when those of us in Intentional Creativity know that I’m going to do a power-packed livestream that’s going to knock our red striped socks off. We feel love.

The people she studied were not artists — most of them. And their brain did not care, in a literal way. Their bra