An interview by New Harbinger Publications with David Harp

New Harbinger Publications: In the preface of Neural Path Therapy you say that, “The better you understand a tool, the better you can use it. And your brain is the best tool you’ll ever have.” Can you give us a lay person’s anatomy lesson of the brain? What do you think are a few things everyone should understand about it?

David Harp: In my opinion, there are four important things to understand about the brain. The first is that it’s made up of about one hundred billion nerve cells called neurons, which are tiny devices for transmitting information, in the form of chemicals, from one end to the other. These neurons connect up, end to end, whenever we perform any action or think a thought and form a chain of neurons—imagine each tiny little neuron cell as one link in a chain.

The second is that many of these neural chains are hardwired directly into our brains. That is, when a car jumps the curb and comes straight at us, we don’t think, we just jump! A large object moving speedily towards us activates a neural chain that starts by perceiving said large speedy object, and ends with a physical reaction called the fight-or- flight response. Our body is flooded with adrenaline and other hormones, our blood pressure shoots up, our muscles get extra energy, and we leap to safety.

The third is that while most people know—at least intuitively—about the fight response, which evokes the emotion we call anger, and the flight response, which generates the feelings that we know as fear, many of us don’t realize that there is also an equal but opposite response. In this book I call it the relax-and-release response. This response reverses the effects of the fight or flight response.

The fourth? That by developing mental muscle we can learn to summon and apply the relax-and-release response at will—and that doing so will change every aspect of our life.

NHP: To a non-scientist neural path therapy may sound a bit daunting, yet you offer it as a program that anyone can use. Can you give us a thumbnail explanation of what neural path therapy entails and how it can be used to overcome anger, anxiety, and other emotional difficulties?

DH: Neural path therapy simply refers to the fact that once we are aware of the existence of the neural chains that control or produce our every action, thought, and emotion, we can learn to control them. Then they become paths that we can skillfully navigate, rather than chains that bind us and dictate our actions.

What we call emotions are the result of thoughts or events that trigger neural paths leading to the fight-or-flight response, or to a desire response. And that these natural responses can be consciously reversed by activating the relax-and-release response. We then start to build the mental muscle necessary to activate the relax-and-release response at will. Add the compassion response and we are well on the way to controlling our own brain rather than letting it control us.

NHP: The subtitle of your book is How to Change Your Brain’s Response to Anger, Fear, Pain, and Desire. Most Westerners don’t think of desire as a problematic emotion. After all, it’s what leads us to achieve and consume: two activities that lay at the heart of contemporary life. So why do you group desire with these other, troublesome emotions?

DH: Many desires are, well, desirable. Without the desire to take the next breath, or to get a drink of water on a dry day, we wouldn’t last very long. Other desires give harmless pleasure. But for some of us, unreasonable, unhealthy, or unachievable desires cause mental or physical pain. Envy of others; craving alcohol or drugs; lusting after an inappropriate person; over or under-eating; wishing that we were richer, more beautiful, or more successful—these are all desires that can detract from rather than enhance the quality of our lives. I’d also add that achieving and consuming, though perhaps okay in moderation, are two elements that may indeed lie at the heart of contemporary life, but in excess do little to improve it.

NHP: Most people would probably say that they don’t have a choice about how their brain responds to something like anger or fear. Aren’t these responses hardwired?

DH: Sure. In lots of cases, these are hardwired. When that car is aiming straight for you, it’s perfectly appropriate for your fight-or-flight response to be triggered. But most of the time, it’s our own thoughts which create neural paths that trigger fight-or-flight responses. Worried about your job? Every time you think about your boss approaching, pink slip in hand, you trigger almost the same physiological reaction that an attacking saber-toothed tiger would! That doesn’t help your productivity! Does a partner, child, or friend have a particularly annoying habit? You don’t need to experience a fight-or-flight reaction of anger each time you notice it or even think of it. You simply need to develop the mental muscle necessary to stimulate the relax-and-release response whenever the need arises.

NHP: For more than two decades you’ve been a corporate presenter who has shown clients ranging from the FBI to pharmaceutical company executives how to relax. You use the “humble vehicle of the blues harmonica” in your presentations. Can you explain this?

DH: It sounds funny, but it’s no joke. The harmonica forces you to focus your attention onto your breathing. And focusing attention onto the breath is one of the easiest ways to stimulate the relax-and-release response. Learning to achieve any new skill is also a great way to observe the way the brain creates neural paths, then strengthens or modifies them. Also, since the idea of learning to play a new musical instrument almost instantly is stressful for most people, it provides a great opportunity to learn to navigate neural paths to avoid useless habits based in stress or insecurity. Plus it’s loads of fun! What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Must be the hand wah wah of the blues harmonica! By the way, I guarantee that any group will learn to play their first blues song within three minutes.

NHP: What is automaticity?

DH: It’s just a fancy way of saying that a neural path has been repeated so many times that traveling it becomes automatic. Consider the word “gizgerbet.” Write it down a few times. It gets easier. Why? Because the first time you wrote “gizgerbet,” you created a new neural path. Each time you repeated the action, more neurons joined in, to create a thicker, stronger, more robust chain of neurons. When you get to the point where you can dash off a well-written “gizgerbet” as quickly as you know your own name, your new “gizgerbet neural path” has achieved automaticity. What does “gizgerbet” mean? Beats me!

Automaticity is a great attribute for useful neural paths. Once you know how to drive, you barely need to think about it, unless an unusual or dangerous event arises. But, unfortunately, many of our most often-traveled neural paths were formed when we were young and may no longer be appropriate.

NHP: In Neural Path Therapy, you talk about two neural paths to avoid. What are these, and why do you urge readers to stay away from them?

DH: Many of us, early in life, developed either or both of neural paths to deal with frustration. For some, frustration of desire—whether for a mate, for getting to the liquor store before it shuts, or whatnot—generates the fight part of the fight-or-flight response, and we become angry. For others, frustration yields angst—“I can’t do that. I’m not much good at anything.” As I said, in my Harmonica Neural Path Workshops, I give people a difficult and slightly stressful task. I warn them that some, when they cannot do it perfectly at first, will want to take the path of “I want to do this, but I can’t. This is stupid. This Harp guy is stupid. I quit!” Others notice a tendency to say to themselves, “I want to do this, but I can’t. I can’t do much of anything. I’m just not much good. I guess I’ll just give up.” From long observation and experience, I’ve seen that how we react to any particular frustration is apt to be the way we will act to most frustrations. It’s a useful thing to know about yourself and to avoid if it no longer serves you.

NHP: Some of your exercises take place at “the point of no return.” What is this?

DH: The point of no return, or PONR (“pon’ ner”) refers to the point in a neural path where the fight-or-flight response has been completely activated and so is much more difficult to reverse by activating the relax-and-release response. It’s the moment between “I’m starting to lose it with this fool” and “AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!”

NHP: Throughout your book you talk about compassion. What role does this play in neural path therapy?

DH: I believe that just as there are hardwired paths for fight, for flight, and for desire, there is a hardwired path, born of hundreds of millions of years of mother-love and father-love for their offspring, for compassion. Once we understand the more obvious neural paths—“I trigger a fight-or-flight response and get mad at the boss when he reminds me of my father,” or “When my wife asks me to take out the garbage after a hard day at work, it evokes a ‘everyone pushes me around’ thought which triggers a fight response and I get angry”—we can look at more subtle paths. Compassion is, in my opinion, the most important of these and leads to even more subtle paths that are more the realm of the spiritual than the psychological.

NHP: You talk about developing self-love without self-pity and narcissism. Why are these two such common pitfalls in trying to develop self-love?

DH: I’d say that it’s no so much that these are pitfalls in developing self-love, but that many of us confuse self-love with narcissism or self-pity. Narcissism can seem, on the surface, like love-of-self (“Look at me! Aren’t I beautiful and smart?”), but it often is used to cover up insecurity or even self-hatred. Self-pity (“Oh, poor me!”) is often used as an excuse for inaction, or as a way of covertly holding a grudge against another (“The way they treat me is awful.”). True self-love needs, in my opinion, to involve honest self-examination, compassion, and a wry acceptance of the human condition, with its pain and joy, awe, and awfulness.