All Three Brains: Using Your Head, Heart and Gut in Transformation Work

I’ve written before about the three Centers of Intelligence and how which one you call home base influences your behavior. Part of the work of becoming our true selves, or what Richard Rohr is lately calling the “anchored self,” is to learn to end our over-reliance on our particular Center and incorporate the wisdom of the other two. For instance, a Gut type learns over time to access the wisdom of the Heart and Head as well for a more well-rounded response to the world.

That’s just what authors Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka are aiming for in their book, mBraining: Using Your Multiple Brains to Do Cool Stuff. They have collected volumes of research and done real-world investigation and practice to back up the assertion taught since Plato’s time that humans do, indeed, have three brains. In fact, one of the coolest things I learned in the book is that both the heart and the gut have massive numbers of neurons – their own kind of thought and memory networks – which, when working together in a balanced way, communicate with each other and with the head brain.

The book describes the prime functions of each of the brains, as well as their core competencies. The authors explain how these competencies work when they are balanced and when they are being run by the parasympathetic or sympathetic system of the head brain. So, for instance, if joy is out of balance, the parasympathetic system turns it to sadness and the sympathetic system turns it to mania. Knowing this information helps you understand which brain is at the core of whatever issue you are having.

Then the book takes you through ways to communicate with and align all your brains. It teaches about the various Neural Integration Blocks that may exist and how to overcome them. There are plenty of real-world examples of people who used the techniques the authors describe to align their brains and heal from trauma, overcome negative relationship patterns and so on.

mBraining is full of discovery exercises that help clarify your issues and teach you how to begin to bring all your brains into alignment. Just knowing this fascinating information isn’t enough; just like with the Enneagram, you have to put this knowledge into practice to derive benefit.

The book goes on to discuss the highest expressions of the three brains: creativity (head), compassion (heart) and courage (gut). “It’s only by combining all of them together that you give yourself the best chance to produce wise and generative action in the world. Action that fully expresses the deepest nature of your integrated and authentic self.” Authentic self – they’re speaking my language!

The authors then spend an entire chapter on wisdom, one of my favorite topics (no surprise, since it’s the Seven’s Holy Idea). As they put it, “Because wisdom requires the ability to see the larger pattern of any situation or issue, the minimum number of reference points for increasing wisdom is three…when you align these perspectives through the highest expressions of compassion, creativity and courage, you unlock a form of wisdom that is truly incredible.”

The last chapter, “mBraining Your World,” is even more inspirational and aspirational. It encourages readers to seek personal integration and wisdom as a way to help heal the world, essentially. As each person becomes more healthy, there’s a ripple effect on that person’s loved ones, friends, coworkers and even random strangers they interact with. This principle is right in line with the Enneagram work I do, where we don’t try to “fix” others but return to our true selves and then watch the ripple effect across our sphere of influence.

At 345 pages, mBraining isn’t a quick read, but I think it’s a worthwhile one. There are important and intriguing truths in this book that I don’t think you’ll find elsewhere. Grant and Marvin have done the hard work of gathering known data and synthesizing from it and from personal experience a practical set of tools that are easily accessible.

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