By Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D

Book Digest by Lorrie Kazan

Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz is a physician, practicing psychiatrist and holds a PH.D in neuroanatomy and behavioral science'the study of the brain and intelligence. Beyond this, she is also a respected medical intuitive, providing psychic health readings to clients by phone, using only the vibration of the client's name as her source of information.

In her book Awakening intuition: Using your Body-Mind network insight and healing (Three Rivers Press) Dr. Schulz presents her contention that all significant life experiences are encoded in our cells and these long-forgotten memories continue to influence and form the way we see and respond to the world, though our conscious minds may be unaware of them. Memories and forgotten emotions speak to us in a language unique to each individual. One common way they speak is through illness and disease.

Having suffered from debilitating injury and disease, herself, she proposes that our health and well being will be significantly increased by accepting the idea that intuition not only exists, but is available to all of us. If we learn our body's secret (or symbolic) language, we will have access to our unconscious and may create within it images and feelings that empower and inspire us and avoid being blindly controlled by ideas and emotions that might not serve us. If we learn to listen to the body when it's speaking softly, subtly, it does not have to break down into full-blown disease in order to get our attention.

Clearly she sees an emotional component to disease and cites numerous scientific studies to support her contention. A major portion of the book is devoted to her theories relating particular emotions to specific organs and charkas.

As a child, the author had intuitively solved difficult math problems. Swayed by her family's (and certainly our culture's) high regard for the analytical approach, while discounting the intuitive, she soon blocked her intuition and relied upon her rational, analytical skills. As a result, her success began to wane.

In college she was diagnosed with a brain disorder, similar to narcolepsy (in which the person falls asleep uncontrollably no matter where they are or what they're doing'this includes everything from sex to casual conversation). In order to cover-up the gaps in recollection she returned to guessing, i.e., to intuition.

Because of the severity of her situation, she took a leave from college, and yet was high-functioning enough to obtain work in a laboratory where she quickly developed a reputation for accuracy in the office football pool. Ultimately, when pressed during her job to come up with a substance to facilitate a biological experiment, her intuition led her to a scientific breakthrough. Rather than admit it was an act of intuition, she cloaked it behind intellectual theories. Soon she began taking a new medicine, which stopped her sleep attacks, and enabled her to return to school where she again relied upon the brilliance of her newly restored intellect.

However, shortly after graduating, the author was struck by a truck and suffered debilitating injuries. She also realized that the medication for her sleep disorder was not only becoming ineffective, but it was killing her blood cells and clearly endangering her life. Despite her pleas to the contrary, doctors discontinued the medication. At this point she realized that her body was sending her a message and her intuition was all she had to rely on. It certainly hadn't led her into the kind of trouble and pain she was currently experiencing.

Seeking guidance, she was led to a medical intuitive who proposed that she could stop the sleeping attacks with her mind. 'In fact, she said, most of my mind's ability and my emotions were frozen. Unless I unfroze my emotions and got my mind and body in sync, I would never heal.'

She noticed that worry and bad relationships seemed to exacerbate her symptoms while proper diet, acupuncture and exercise appeared to minimize them. In her search she stumbled upon Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life and put Hays' affirmations into constant, consistent practice, and in so doing believes that she taught herself and each of her cells 'how to love and accept myself, how to forgive, and how to believe that I deserved health. To my complete astonishment, it worked.' Ultimately, and under doctor supervision, she was able to wean herself off the medications.

Subsequently, she began medical school clerkship in a busy and chaotic hospital. Given the name of her first patient, she had a vision of the woman and her problems, which upon later meeting the woman turned out to be accurate. Before meeting her, however, she took the time to check the medical research on the problems she perceived, and came into the patient's room with her intuitive and intellectual skills acting as a strong team.

Dr. Schultz believes that we all have fixed ideas by which we come to live and which we may not even realize are only ideas rather than ultimate truth. Many of these ideas are self-limiting; for example, 'I'll always struggle.' 'There will never be enough money.' 'I'll always be alone.' These ideas become encoded in the cells and affect the body's health and ability to function. Illness, she believes, creates holes through which the intuition can express. The supposition is that symptoms may start small, the subtle pleading or request for attention, and when ignored become unavoidable. Any asthmatic can tell you it's difficult to go on with life as if everything is fine when you can't breathe. The cessation of 'life as usual' can be the beginning of creating a conscious, self-empowered life, which may be unusual, at least at first.

'The temporal lobe serves as the heart of the intuition network and sends us intuitive thoughts and feelings through its connection to other centers in the brain and the body'It tells us how we feel about something and what we ought to do about it.'

'The temporal lobe also plays a vital role in memory formation, one of the critical elements of the intuition network. It contains the hippocampus, which helps form verbal memory (memories in the brain) and plays an important role in dreaming, and the amygdala, which constructs memories you can't put into words, which is known as body memory.

Some investigators believe the temporal lobe is sensitive to low electromagnetic energy frequencies, the currency in which intuitive information is believed to be transmitted and received.'

It's long been noticed that particularly intuitive people have changes in the temporal lobes. It's speculated that trauma does something to the temporal lobe that ultimately allows one greater access to intuition.

Dr. Schultz cites the effects of temporal lobe epilepsy, a disease in which the temporal lobe 'hyperfunctions or actually seizes,' thus creating a range of dreamlike affects and generally increased access to intuition.

Interestingly, she notes a similar timing between temporal lobe seizures and precognizance, stating that intuitive insights often occur between 10 and 11 p.m. and 2 ' 4 a.m., which are the most frequently noted times for temporal seizures. 'We all have microseizures, or microspikes, in our temporal lobes at night when we dream. The most hidden information comes to us in the darkness of the night.' She reminds us to work with our dreams and trust them as a major source of intuition.

She also tells us about a chilling experiment done to monkeys, who at the beginning of the experiment rightfully regarded the experimenters as dangerous but after having the amydala removed from their temporal lobes, the monkeys saw their captors as sources of nourishment and tried to mouth them, copulate with them, or simply bond.

'In our society, what do so many people who are confused, who don't know how they're feeling or what to do about anything, do instead? We eat, and we have sex. Our temporal lobes may be in tact, but we sometimes walk around disconnected from them'.Like the monkeys, we become passive. One of the leading causes of depression, especially in women, is passivity'helplessness and hopelessness.'

Learned helplessness is one of the factors considered to instigate the onset of disease. Schultz shows us from the scientific perspective that our bodies and minds are wired to give us information that will enable us to lead healthier more abundant lives. The key is to realize the importance of this bodymind connection, and maintain rather than avoid it.

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