Once you make the initial contact, you must meet with the child inside — or the children inside, as the case may be — on a regular basis. Twice a day for five minutes is ideal, but five minutes three times a week will do as a minimum. It doesn’t really matter what you imagine as long as it’s loving and positive. It’s the accumulated time spent with

relative underactivity of inhibitory centers in the front of the brain. This means that people with ADD who need to focus on an attentionally demanding task may have difficulty turning off or preventing the activation of competing areas of the brain.

Conflict and lack of clarity create discomfort, which interferes with reflection and therefore creates more conflict and sets off more danger signals.

Ego States Theory and Therapy

When all is said and done, the experience of growing up with ADD — especially when in the dark about it, as most people with ADD are or were — is about feeling different, feeling confused, feeling inferior, feeling behind. It is about out-of-sync and often sad children, about rebellious and angry teenagers, about floundering and confused young adul

In my view, meditation, Buddhism, Taoism, yoga, Guirdjieff, Joseph Campbell’s hero journey, the many different types of psychotherapy — the whole pursuit of “enlightenment” in general — can all be seen as addressing the central issue of the integration of left-right-brain functioning.

One of the functions of our left brain is to constantly explain things to all the other selves that are listening. It turns out that our left-brain verbal self tends to talk to our right-brain inner selves in the same manner that our parents and the world talked to us as children. This can be good or bad. If our folks were encouraging, empathic, an

As the left brain develops, it creates a whole new spectrum of selves — or, rather, it alters all the existing selves, intertwining itself with all the different combinations of the moving, feeling, and sensing selves that were already being integrated through the right brain. It adds self-consciousness. It adds planning. It adds goals.

The fact that the above trance sequences each contain four steps is key. The left brain can process only three items at a time. What we are essentially doing in these exercises is occupying the left brain with three tasks (breathing, descending the stairs, and sensing the life force in the first example) so that when we add the fourth step, we auto