BASS: Transcendent Recovery Through Bilateral Alternating Sensory Stimulus

(BASS), a neurological practice for rapid healing and spiritual awakening.

This workshop will help you achieve personal freedom from traumatic stress, allowing you to achieve optimal spiritual growth. You will learn to transform your life by training your brain to create the springboard of your spiritual awakening and human evolution. This is a life-changing opportunity.

The simple energetic process, popularized as EMDR, has proven to be so powerful and effective that this psychotherapy modality is based on it, but goes beyond. There are more scientific research papers on this process than any other form of energy healing. You will effectively become your own therapist, accessing the answers you need within yourself.

Participants will learn how to:

• Use their sensory nervous system’s ability to heal their mind and optimize their abilities to respond positively and effectively to manage unexpected crises.
•  Create more love, happiness, forgiveness, gratitude, and most importantly personal satisfaction as you create and live your life’s purpose with maximum resilience.
• Remove all mental and emotional blocks to unlocking your life’s energetic healing abilities
• Activate radical relaxation throughout your body, your vascular system, and digestive tract, creating optimal blood pressure and gut health.
•  Instill the belief system for optimal resilience and crisis management.
• Achieve unconditional loving relationships with everyone you choose to have in your life.

And, of course, there will be gongs. Richard is one of the premier gong percussionists alive today. He was able to use neurofeedback imagery to teach himself how to play his set of gongs as he worked in hospitals for more than a decade. His efforts earned him the blessings of traditional spiritual teachers from Tibetan monasteries and the Native American Church to ayahuasquanderos from South America. 

Your workshop facilitator is Richard Hite. In 1988 he became one of America’s first yoga therapists with hospital privileges and was certified in EMDR in 1991. Richard has taught thousands of people in groups and individually all across the United States how to use the alternating bilateral sensory impulses the eye movement sends into the brain. He has demonsrated the use of the profound music of gongs at such prestigious institutions as Harvard University Medical School and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. 

Your workshop facilitator is Richard Hite. In 1988 he became one of America’s first yoga therapists with hospital privileges and was certified in EMDR in 1991. Richard has taught thousands of people in groups and individually all across the United States how to use the alternating bilateral sensory impulses the eye movement sends into the brain. He has demonsrated the use of the profound music of gongs at such prestigious institutions as Harvard University Medical School and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. 

A statement from the creator of the BASS approach.

What I am teaching is a simple practice that with regular, self directed sessions transforms our brains’ behaviors to create the best versions of ourselves fulfilling our highest individual potentials.

This practice is built around a simple phenomena, discovered in the late 1980s, by Francine Shapiro. When you send little energy pulses through your nervous system in short little bursts, alternating back and forth, left to right to left, for about 30 seconds and follow that by just paying attention you open a window of positive neuroplasticity, through which your brain/mind can heal what needs healing first, followed by intellectual and emotional transformation guided from within, All the answers you need are within you. Answers for questions you haven’t even asked yet, are already within you.

I met Francine Shapiro in November, 1991 in Sunnyvale, California. I flew in from Houston, Texas for what I was later told was her second public workshop for certifying Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). 

I was the main group therapist in an inpatient hospital unit created to treat trauma related diagnosed psychiatric disorders. The Phillips Chemical plant had blown up in the Houston Ship Channel the previous year killing several and traumatizing many more.

The science behind post traumatic stress and its symptoms was still very much in development. One of Shapiro’s first statements was “all the answers come from within the client” and to trust the process. The EMDR protocol she taught was pretty simple at that time and easy to folllow. During the training, we took turns with each other in small three person groups. When I played the role of the client my first experience with EMDR was life changing. I experienced healing around a traumatic memory that felt transformative. None of the psychotherapy, yoga therapy, meditation retreats, not even psychedelic experiences had produced such a clear transformative healing for me. I knew that this was the therapy I wanted to do for myself. The problem for me though was that, when I returned to Houston, I couldn’t find another EMDR certified therapist for me to see. 

This dilemma like many dilemmas actually was the best thing that could have happened. In the hospital, I got to work with the full range of trauma related diagnosed disorders. I could just follow the simple protocol for EMDR with patients and witness rapid relief over and over again, even with very complex and treatment resistant diagnoses. 

For myself, I choose to pick a new belief that I wanted to be true for me. In the EMDR protocol clients do this. These new beliefs act as provocative probes, exposing other trauma related beliefs to release until the new belief feels 100% true. I picked a statement that I knew would radically challenge what I had been taught in childhood. I choose, “God and I are one”. These words and the eye movement with mindfulness processed a lifetime of shame, self blame and self sabotage. This is how I started my practice with the eye movement from EMDR in January, 1992. 

With modern neuroscience and technologies we are able to move beyond the vast limitations of traditional psychotherapy modalities. There will always be a role for therapy and medications for treating mental illnesses, but most people do not identify with being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. It is a label that can negatively affect them for the rest of their lives. At the same time everyone has their most painful memories, their worse emotional feelings, their shame driven beliefs or just something they want to change to optimize their life experiences. 

This is a life changing program that also promises very quick positive results. It is built around a simple phenomena that occurs when alternating bilateral simple nerve generated pulses hit the brain. This phenomena is so powerful the psychotherapy modality Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is based on it. Outside of EMDR the eye movement is a powerful catalyst enabling the brain to realize its fuller potential for optimal experiences.

Traditional sources of wisdom are great resources to draw from to establish beliefs that guide us consciously and unconsciously to be the best version of ourselves possible. Modern teachers often talk about how powerful beliefs are and how all you gotta do is to believe it to be true to make it happen. Affirming a belief does not necessarily make it your belief and the difference between a belief and an affirmation is truly profound. 

Self awareness, mindful observation without judgment or other limitations is an integral part of the practice. The phenomena created with the eye movements allows one to physically release and replace mental and emotional constraints from the past, Even traumatic memories with severe post traumatic stress seem to miraculously release the painful feelings quickly.

Telling our stories helps us to make sense of the life we have lived. Talk therapies work. Some better than others. Writing our autobiography, especially if we lived a painful childhood helps to ease the emotional pain as the memories are gradually shifted into the left hemisphere from the more sensitive right hemisphere of our cerebral cortexes through this process. Traumatic memories are often difficult to talk about because of the emotional pain that comes with them. Hidden memories can be discovered through the talking process along with long forgotten beliefs created during childhood. Eventually stories change as they are told and reflected upon during therapy sessions. Self acceptance, forgiveness and compassion along with interpersonal relationship skills develop hopefully as a result of good therapy. 

Almost my entire career as a mental health professional has been spent working with people who had terrible things happen to them, who have done horrible things to other people or even just witnessed something incredibly gruesome happening to another human being. I know the power of telling stories and hearing those stories for the first, third or twentieth time. Listening to people’s stories attentively with care to be fully present is a threshold I cross with clients who need to tell enough of their story to feel connected with me. The story itself is not really that important to tell beyond that point. Once we establish a level of openness and trust they quickly become their own therapists and my role is more like a personal trainer except that it is the brain that we are training. 

Believers believe their beliefs are based on the truth or reality. In reality beliefs are based on patterns of neurons firing in particular sequences and intensities. Disconnect the right neurons and the belief is no longer a belief. It becomes something else, a past misperception perhaps. It doesn’t matter what it became nearly as much as the belief that replaced it. What is beautiful is how all the answers are already within, just like happiness is within. The question is can you get your brain to release dopamine when you want it to. The answer is yes if you train it. Happiness on demand is a great goal and reward at the same time. Pleasure and happiness are dopamine based. Beliefs born from traumatic types of memories can interfere with our ability to trigger dopamine release.      

Your brain operates on energy flows and endogenous chemicals like dopamine, the pleasure creator in your experiences. The optimal dopamine level is a very pleasurable experience. Discovering an unexpected reward or receiving a sincere compliment from someone you care about makes you feel good, creates bonds in our relationships. If our expectations of life are just being met and there are no pleasant surprises then dopamine production is not really stimulated. When the rewards exceed expectations then the brain produces more dopamine. Dopamine is our happy brain chemical. In a Psychology Today article, research showed that neurons release dopamine in proportion to the difference between the unexpected and realized rewards of a particular event. Unpredictable rewards cause more dopamine release than predictable ones. And more dopamine means more pleasure. 

Bring into your awareness a memory that fits for how the rewards for you were greater than you expected. Athletic events are good because we don’t know the outcome and so when our team players or ourselves achieve or witness our team winning a close game, we get dopamine production. It makes us feel happy. Gambling is the perfect example of how expectations that are exceeded by the occasional big reward can become addicting.

Training addicted brains to become independent and able to generate both anticipatory and reward triggers for dopamine release using sensory nerve impulses describes what I do with clients in recovery. Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure and is a feature of early recovery. Triggering an unexpected dopamine release through relationship and activity that is healthy really helps with generating beliefs and hopefulness to get through time until the brain is able to regulate itself again. This is also true for coming out of depressive episodes. Hope is the anticipation of something good and anticipatory dopamine motivates us to do something that is rewarding.

Happiness is within. Finding it means releasing dopamine in the brain in enough amounts to create happiness.

BASS cuts through the need for there to be an external experience before you can feel happiness. Once you remember a very rewarding memory and light up that particular network you can feel the happiness of that memory and believe in it. The words I am happy are experienced for that moment as true. Research has shown that along with the neural network of that happy memory other neural networks from other memories also light up with lass than happy feelings. But when you use the alternating bi-lateral nerve impulses with the happy memory then the other memories tend to not light up. As a practice this really helps to create an overall happier mood and outlook towards life.

How to create a daily practice to be happy.

When I learned to facilitate Firewalks from Peggy Burkan in 1987, she shared a Zen story about a Zen Monk who was being chased by two tigers through the woods until he comes to the edge of a cliff. As the tigers come closer to him, he climbs down a vine until he is out of reach of the tigers but then two mice appear and they start chewing on the vine. Hanging from the vine and looking down to the bottom hundreds of feet below the monk notices a strawberry plant with sweetest looking ripe strawberry. He reaches over and picks that strawberry and eats it. “UMMM good strawberry,” he said as the juices flooded his mouth in that moment.”

I share this story here to illustrate how the ability to generate happiness or pleasure in the midst  of impending doom has been a trait associated with long time meditation practices. However that meant years of trial and error. I know my practice had been more trials and errors than success until I learned how to train my brain to release dopamine when I choose, and then, to just repeat that everyday at the same time for several weeks. Just like when your brain releases dopamine because your expectations were exceeded at any time, you can train it to release dopamine when you want to be happier. Yes, your expectations can be trained as well based on the beliefs you include in your belief system. Practice grows the brain into the brain we want to experience. Practicing being happy increases the brain’s ability to generate dopamine to be released.

BASS uses the brain’s natural propensity to chase after dopamine release experiences to orient its focus on repeating those experiences chosen and articulated as beliefs. Anticipatory dopamine release is often the last major release the addict experiences when they have just learned their dealer is holding and their addiction has progressed to the point that getting high is just not feeling sick. Easier to access than reward based dopamine release, anticipatory dopamine just needs hopeful beliefs for release.