What Goes Around Comes Around
by Dr. Mark Brady
“Soul-knowing is a fountainhead from within you moving out. Drink from there!”
Years ago I transferred out of a well-regarded PhD program at UCLA in favor of attending and graduating from this small startup school. It was founded by two male college graduates, one from Stanford, one from Harvard, who believed they only got 1/2 their brain (the left) and little of their heart educated. Their school would be different – it would be designed and intended to educate the right brain and the heart as much as possible.
One of my students in those days was an impressive mother of four kids who also worked as a civil engineer. She specialized in the design and restoration of movable bridges – the kind that rise up or swivel round to allow waterway traffic flow. She also worked as a birth doula and . . . a death doula in her spare time. Since I was a builder, had just fathered a child of my own and had been researching, writing and teaching about death for many years, Jeanne and I hit it off. I eventually became first her mentor and then her colleague. She ended up researching and writing an award-winning thesis (measuring heart variability resonance in bedside sitters with the dying). She went on to talk about that research to various groups who received it, and her, with open kindness and appreciative applause. I personally witnessed a group of retired, curmudgeonly Stanford professors receiving her talk with surprising warmth and appreciation.
Joining Whole Brain to Whole Heart
After I got my right brain educated at Sofia, I spent the next ten years tuning up my left brain at a Stanford Think Tank hanging out with Nobel Laureates and MacArthur geniuses – as a cultural anthropologist disguised as the maintenance man. Kind of like my own strange version of Good Will Hunting, I suppose. I learned many things over those ten years (I’ll share three of the most significant takeaways from that decade in an upcoming post).
Currently, I am enrolled at another small startup school. It’s a school conceived and birthed with mostly female energy, primarily designed for adults who have gone through traditional education. The school grew out of Jeanne’s interest and experience with birth, death, somatic psychology and engineering. And, things that exist before, during and after those things. Things known and unknown. Things seen and unseen. Things sensed and not sensed. It’s a refreshing School of Unusual Life Learning (Although I’m not a fan of naming any learning organization a “school” since Ken Robinson informed 76 million people of the many ways that modern schools kill creativity – people judge you by the circles you travel in).
I’m currently finding SoULL to be anything but a creativity-killer. In fact, simultaneously, along with my recent enrollment as a student, I’m just about finished with first drafts of my fourth screenplay (The Muffin-Truckin’ Change Agency; The Levamine Conspiracy; Triumph of the Intransigents and The Winner); I’ve created and taught extremely well-received seminars on Social Safety Science (Polyvagal Theory) and Artificial Intelligence and I’ve researched and written first drafts of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of curriculum for a course in Embodied Altruism and . . . all while pretty much keeping up with my weekly blog-writing.
Rounding the Circle
It’s difficult to clearly and compellingly speak about numinous, expansive, healing, learning experiences. If you’re at all interested and resonate with such things, a startup School of Unusual Life Learning may indeed have some appeal. You can find out more by visiting: SoULL.
Mark Brady, Ph.D. is a transpersonal neurobiologist and a neuroscience and creativity educator. Dr. Brady also writes regularly on his own blog site, The Flowering Brain (https://thefloweringbrain.wordpress.com/) .
