connecting with your spirit 151
World - renowned philosophers, hypnotherapists, brain scien-
tists, and our own endocrinologist and poet in residence, Dr. Frank
Neelon, are well aware of the power of the spoken word to inspire
change. Learning to do what we really want to do but are not yet
doing is key to much health and happiness. People do change.
Dr. Neelon beautifully summarizes why we offer poetry at the Rice
Diet Program:
People often ask why we use poetry at the Rice House. Why
not just stick to “ science ”? they ask, as though information
alone will get us on the right track. My position is that lack of
information is not the problem. For example, if I asked each
Rice Diet participant to write down the ten things that he or
she needs to do to get and to stay healthy, every one of them
would get the answers right. But life is not a quiz; rather, it is
a struggle between knowing what to do and doing it.
That, I think, is where poetry comes in. Look at poetry as
a form of heightened and concentrated speech, speech where
every word, every pause, every syllable has meaning. This
formulation implies that poems should be heard, not read
(and further, that the poems should be recited, not simply
read aloud). This formulation allows poetic words to stick
in the soul, to become one with the hearer, to stay with the
receiver long after the transmitter is silent. The Velcrolike
stickiness of good poems puts them in the same class as
the therapeutic trance messages delivered by the famous
hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, who said, “ My voice will go
with you. ” Poems go with you, too.
The cortex (the outer, “ thinking ” layer) of the human
brain comprises two nearly identical halves, only one of
which (almost always the left hemisphere) harbors the ability
to speak. We know from the elegant observations of Roger
W. Sperry and Michael S. Gazzaniga that the right (silent or
mute) half of the brain can communicate with the left, both
directly (that is, information delivered to the right brain can
be sent to the left, where it is put into words) and indirectly