Is Your Brain Like A GPS?

If So, Where Is It Taking You?

My sister asked me to go dancing with her last week. Loud music, strobe lights, a club a few blocks from my house.

My body yelled “No!” before my brain caught up. Not a polite no. A full-body, hard-pass, absolutely-not no.

My sister can be hyper-sensitive, and I try not to hurt her feelings. So, I didn’t understand my own reaction. She’s fourteen years younger than I am, raised by the same nutty parents, but in a completely different era and neighborhood. She loves excitement, and she thrives on a kind of chaos. I used to think I did too.

Then I remembered why my brain reacted so strongly.

THE BUNNY SUIT YEARS

In my twenties, I worked nights for three years at a nightclub in New York. Fishnets, bunny ears, the whole costume. Music blaring, drunk teenagers in from New Jersey grinding on the dance floor, treating the staff like furniture. Rude. Dismissive. Sometimes cruel.

I didn’t consciously store that memory as danger. But my nervous system did. Decades later, one invitation to a club, and my body reacted as if it were walking back into that noisy chaos. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s neuroplasticity working exactly the way it’s supposed to.

Here’s the part that most people don’t know about their own brain: it doesn’t just remember events. In my Jungian dream work at the Neuropsychiatric Institute years ago, two psychiatrists identified something in me they called eidetic memory, a kind of full-body recall. I don’t just remember things. I feel them again, in my nervous system, as if they’re happening now. It’s part of why autoimmune conditions like the Lupus that I micro-manage show up so often in people wired this way.

“The Body Keeps the Score” is not just a great book; it’s a game-changer. The body sometimes keeps score a little too well.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SAME BRAIN

But the exact same wiring that gave me a trauma response to a nightclub also gave me a weird superpower.

I drove a cab in Manhattan for seven years. Somewhere in those years, my brain built itself into a functioning GPS. This was before Waze, before any of it existed. My stepson, Jon, used to call me from wherever he was stuck and ask how to get somewhere without the freeway, and I just knew. Instantly. It made me so happy!

Same brain. Same capacity to encode experience so deeply that it becomes automatic. Neuroplasticity doesn’t care what you feed it. It just builds whatever you repeatedly hand it. That’s why I give everyone the “brain exercise,” to switch their brain from “Poppy Brain to Puppy Brain” in the first session,

THE BOOK THAT CRACKED MY WORLD OPEN

In 1973, in the middle of all that studying, I picked up Jane Roberts. Seth Speaks, and The Nature of Personal Reality. I had no idea a couple of books could reach in and rearrange your actual worldview, not just your opinions. That’s what it did.

Not long after, I was lying on my couch listening to the radio when a practitioner came on to lead listeners through a guided past-life regression. I had no framework for this. I just closed my eyes and went.

I saw myself as a sixteen-year-old girl in the Middle East, hot, angry, and stunning, dressed to the nines in bright reds and blues, with gold bracelets stacked on my wrists and ankles. I’m walking beside a stinky camel, who is dressed even more elaborately than I am. My father is a Bedouin tribal chief. I was being brought here to marry a boy I had never met. I walked into a huge, white silk tent where all the men sat on one side and the women on the other, while dancers whirled through the commotion. And then, there we were, about to be married. We stared at each other, wide-eyed and terrified.

But later that night, our sixteen-year-old selves had a glorious time together. Later in that same life, I saw myself as the mother of five children.

I’ve never forgotten a single detail of that regression. Not the bracelets, not the tent, not his dark, terrified eyes. Decades before I became a hypnotherapist, before I had any language for past-life work, those Jane Roberts paperbacks and a radio program handed my brain an entirely new category of experience. I didn’t go looking for reincarnation. My brain built the pathway the moment I gave it the raw material, and it never closed back up.

WHAT I ACTUALLY BUILT MY BRAIN WITH

Here’s the thing I want my twenty-something clients to sit with. From twenty-three to thirty-four, I did almost nothing but study in New York City. Stella Adler. Harold Clurman. John Houseman. Free Joseph Papp Shakespeare in the Park, every summer, watching the best actors alive work for nothing but love of the craft. Literature classes at the New School. Writing, dancing, singing, sculpting. Two full days a week at the Met, just looking at art until it rearranged something in me. And somewhere in the middle of it, a Seth book and a radio regression that rearranged something even deeper.

I paid for all of it working three nights a week, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. That was the whole trade. Three shifts of learning opportunities and chaos, in exchange for years of feeding my brain the finest inputs a city could offer.

That wasn’t luck. That was a choice, repeated for over a decade, and it built the brain I still use in my practice every single day.

THE PART I WANT MY TWENTY-SOMETHING CLIENTS TO HEAR

Some choices in life aren’t really choices. Sometimes the only order the universe gives you is to survive, and you do it, because the path lights up in red blinking neon lights.

But on most days, most hours, you can choose what you say to your nervous system. And your nervous system can build something with it, whether you’re aware of it or not.

So what habits are you actively building your brain with right now? An hour of art, music, and Shakespeare? Or an hour on Instagram/TikTok? Books strange enough to rearrange your whole perspective, or a feed engineered to addict you with dopamine, just to keep you hooked?

I’m not scolding you. I love my clients too much for that. I’m asking because your brain is going to become whatever you hand it, whatever you focus on, just the same as mine did, and you don’t get to skip that part.

READY TO SEE CHANGE YOUR BRAIN?

Through hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and past-life regression, we can find out what your nervous system has been quietly encoding for years, and you can start handing it something better.

Sessions available in person in Los Angeles and worldwide via Zoom.

Please call at (323) 933-4377 to schedule a FREE CONSULTATION.

Sending you all hope, healing, and love.

Stephanie