For years, psychologists have been telling us that we only use about 10 percent of our brain's potential.

Without realizing it, most people have been functioning in a linear mode that is logical, rational and analytical. It has a narrow focus. While this logical approach is important, it is limited, and, therefore, most people spend the majority of their waking, conscious hours with a myopic view of their experiences.

As children our spontaneity, creativity and joy were stopped by our parents, our educational system and culture, which wanted us to conform and "learn the rules." Certainly, it is important to learn and abide by rules but there is no reason why we can't tap into the wisdom, sensitivity and creativity we were born with, which allows us to be competent therapists and live life fully.

When people are stuck in a linear mode, they are usually not aware of it, and if they are aware of it, they don't know how to expand to their full potential. Our linear ways of thinking are based on past information. This narrow focus is equivalent to viewing life through a telescope. Imagine at the end of the telescope a prism that distorts incoming information. This prism would represent our conditioning and prejudices.

Our educational system taught us to view the world in a narrow, limited way through the distortion of conditioning and prejudices and to rely on past information presented to us by others.

We were taught that this was thinking. We became worshipers, trusting only what "authorities" said or wrote.

Our instincts and intuitive abilities were ridiculed in school and the implied message was to not trust your own thoughts and certainly not to trust your feelings. In other words, we were not educated, we were entranced. Certainly, our intellectual, analytical, verbal side is important, but was meant to be a function of the other 90 percent of who we are: our wisdom, creativity, intuition, feelings and emotions.

If we do not have access to the other 90 percent, then we reach a stage of ordinary consciousness or consensus trance.

In this trance state, we are not really thinking: we are on automatic pilot, functioning out of habitual patterns, regurgitating what we have memorized or been told to think and feel by others.

After a while, our habitual patterns run us. We create a situation in which many intelligent and "well trained" health care professionals experience difficulty working within the health care system. It is obvious that different health professions have become completely myopic and automatically perform the same, obsolete techniques that were taught in school, even though experience tells them these antiquated techniques and myopic views (symptomatic care) are not working.

If you put a rat in a maze with a piece of cheese in one of the tunnels, the rat will explore all of the tunnels until it locates the cheese. The human being will continually run back and forth in the same tunnel "ad infinitum" because the cheese "should" be there.

However, when we open up to the "genius" inside us, we put ourselves back in the driver's seat and, with this awareness, we use our habits instead of them using us.

Isn't it time that therapists use their full potential, combining our intellectual and analytical side with our wise, creative, feeling side? Let's open our focus and explore new vistas!

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