Brain Shift: From head to heart

By John P. Brennan

Today, after 39 years of working for the military and other large organizations, I find myself living a very different life. A long underlying interest in mountaineering, together with my shamanic path has led me to become an outdoor school instructor, a mentor for young men, and most importantly, a shamanic healer. My private healing practice serves those circling in uncertainty, pain, or distress. Seemingly, every time I get comfortable using my gifts, a new spirit helper comes in, a new object with greater power is gifted to me, or something else more profound and more challenging appears. It’s been 30 years since I became aware of my first gift from the spirit world in the sweat lodge. The helpful spirits, using me to do the work, bring my clients healing, wisdom, and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781638298304

John P. Brennan

John P. Brennan, born in New York City, moved to California in 1952. The West sparked his interests in nature and outdoor adventuring. After completing a 50-year career as a professional engineer he found more time to immerse himself in Native American ceremony and wilderness exploration. He subsequently became motivated to study the deeper spiritual aspects of these practices which led to training as a shamanic healer and teacher. He is an adopted member of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County California. He and his wife, Susan, live in rural Northern California, near Mt. Shasta.

Book preview

Brain Shift

… John came through the Vietnam conflict with his full power intact and has tools to teach others about the gifts of going through any initiation that brings one to their knees where they feel such darkness and cannot find the light…

Sandra Ingerman, MA, author of 12 books including Soul Retrieval and Walking in Light: The Everyday Empowerment of Shamanic Life.

… Author John P. Brennan takes us on a richly detailed journey of personal discovery in which we are privileged to accompany him through the long process of opening to his heart and learning to trust the guidance of Spirit…

Melissa M. Reading, Ph.D.

… Brain Shift is a compelling story of adventure, exploration, and initiation into shamanism in its most healing form…

Marge Hulburt, Shamanic Practitioner, Missoula, MT

John P. Brennan, an engineer, has provided us with a candid and engaging account of his spiritual awakening as a visionary… His book is a gift and contains very good medicine.

Hank Wesselman PhD., author anthropologist and author of 9 books on shamanism including The Re-Enchantment: A Shamanic Path to a Life of Wonder, The Bowl of Light: Ancestral Wisdom from a Hawaiian Shaman, and The Spiritwalker Trilogy.

About the Author

John P. Brennan, born in New York City, moved to California in 1952. The West sparked his interests in nature and outdoor adventuring. After completing a 50-year career as a professional engineer he found more time to immerse himself in Native American ceremony and wilderness exploration. He subsequently became motivated to study the deeper spiritual aspects of these practices which led to training as a shamanic healer and teacher. He is an adopted member of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County California.

He and his wife, Susan, live in rural Northern California, near Mt. Shasta.

Dedication

For Susan

Copyright Information ©

John P. Brennan 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Brennan, John P.

Brain Shift

ISBN 9781638298298 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638298304 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022923943

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Preface

Most years monsoon-bred rains come to northwestern Wyoming in summer, tourist season. Depends on what Nature wants to do. With a stroke of good fortune, August 12, 1952, dawned clear at Lewis Lake campground just east of Pitchstone Plateau in Yellowstone National Park. My folks and I broke camp early to spend most of the day further south along the Snake River and Jackson Hole Valley. After a short stretch on highway 89 running through private lands, we entered Grand Teton National Park at the northern end of Jackson Lake.

As our view opened to the west the lake appeared in the low morning light. Angled threads of reflected sunlight eerily illuminated the underside of a thin linear cloud hovering about 300 feet above the lake. Above the cloud the tops of Ranger Peak, Eagles Rest and Bivouac Peak shone crisply in the new light – sparkling remnants of winter’s snows. Mountains and clouds reflected in the still waters of Jackson Lake. The light of the lake, in turn, reflected on the cloud. It was as if the might of the peaks flattened the cloud from above and the energy of the lake’s waters held it aloft. As a 13-year-old boy from Bronx, New York, on his first trip to the northern west, I was gripped by the scene. It was something mesmerizing – slanting shafts of light, reflections of reflections, a smooth leaden cloud and jagged peaks pricking the sky. The scene was crisply etched in my mind for years.

In April of 1992, I drove to San Francisco on a visit to my favorite city. On a lark I decided to visit the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park. Art never particularly interested me to a great degree being a heady engineer – too flimsy, unstructured. But I recognized the de Young as a noted museum, a San Francisco icon worthy of a visit. Like most museums, the de Young has galleries of differing sizes. The larger ones might house a show of a particular region, a specific style of art, or a noted artist’s work. I spied a directional sign leading a visitor to art of the American West – Remington, Swanson, Moran, Hill, that kind of stuff. As I entered a small gallery to my left, I was gripped by a five-by-nine-foot work painted by Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt appears to have painted this captivating scene from a vantage point on the gullied western slope of Sheep Mountain near what is now known as the Gros Ventre slide in Grand Teton National Park.

I was dumbfounded. Somehow, I knew I had personally seen this view in some other lifetime. There is no doubt in my mind. The chiseled Tetons in the west, the knobby Snake River plain, the shimmering reflected light of Snake River, the tipi, the two men on the north side of the gully, the entire topography. I stumbled backward, my knees finally catching the edge of a marble bench; I sat. Then I knew. I knew why the scene I saw 40 years before was so indelibly etched in my memory. I lived there. I was one of those Gros Ventre people. The two men were my friends.

The experience was at first very puzzling to me. My engineer’s mind could not fathom how such an event, another lifetime, could have occurred. That sort of matter was new age, airy fairy, the matters of crystal balls and white tables. I needed proof, QED stuff, not messages from another dimension. Three-dimensional rationale: that’s what I wanted.

One month after my de Young visit, I was invited to a Native American sweat lodge, my first, led by Tom Little Bear in the Ventana Wilderness near Carmel Valley, California. In inky darkness, writhing on the bare earth, suffering from the pain of heat, aching to breathe cool air, I found the answer. It was there all the time, from my birth on. It was buried under what nuns and brothers and priests had taught me, under the weight of western civilization’s values, under the denials of relatives, under the thick books of Berkeley-taught engineering. I somehow knew I was coming home.

This was the beginning of my transmutational journey from career engineer to shamanic practitioner.

If this personal transmutation can happen to me, once a deterministic military engineer, it can happen to many others less culturally encumbered. So, I chose to write this book to illuminate a growth path you might elect to explore and possibly follow. There’s a lot of stories in the book, a bit of process, and some suggestions of teachers and writings, signposts on a trail toward unbounded self-awareness. May the road rise to meet you.

Mt. Shasta, California

September 19, 2022

Part I

Awakening

Chapter 1

The Bronx NY

Tall Elm trees on Tenbroeck Avenue next to our house in the Bronx reached the sky. At least it looked like that to a skinny three-foot-tall boy. They seemed to know the weather, turning up their leaves’ silver sides when a squall was approaching off Long Island Sound. They forecast the seasons with their golds, yellows, reds and tenacious greens as Earth’s orbit tilted winter our way. Unforgettable fragrances arose from burning fall leaves. Low Solstice Sun brought snow, sledding on Seminole Avenue, icicles, digging out, meeting the challenges of winter travel. Somehow there was a mystery message in the lean bare branches of winter. I listened but heard no words.

Late winter buds foretold spring ahead of full thaw. Dogwood bloomed; Robins pecked at worms in barely green earth. There must be a message, I thought, but I can’t hear anything. Forsythia, Lilies of the Valley shooting out in spring’s warm light. Naked pink birds fallen from their nests gaping on the lawn surely said, Feed me now. I tried. Not much luck there.

High Solstice Sun brought warm days and warm waters, fireflies, snakes, tubular eels, flat flounders, side-striding blue point crabs, peeing clams, limited clothing, potatoes roasted right in the fire on the beach, marshmallows on a stick, gunpowder on the Fourth. These places and those sensations dominated my grade-school days.

The rest of what happened during those years seemed not to matter much. Nuns, Brothers, Priests – all doled out their punishments and guilt. The dogma was pure rote. Hail Mary, Our Father, I believe…eight beatitudes, ten commandments from the Christian God. Oh, then ten or so more from the Vatican. Quite a job for a seven-year-old to comprehend, yet I had to confess my sins at that age. Confessing was even harder. There had to be some sins.¹ So I made up some sins like putting salt in the sugar bowl. Now there was an actual sin; I could confess to lying. There sure was a lot of mystery about the Church but it seemed they made it up and kept it secret so they could have power over me.

I suppose many children had stuffed animals and invisible friends, as did I. Monkey Man was brown. He and I talked a lot and was my sleeping companion. He knew a lot of my secrets. I recall handcuffing him to my wrist when my mother kept trying to take him away from me as I grew up. Big boys don’t have stuffed animals. Anyway, they can’t hear what you are saying, Johnnie. I knew he heard me and must have provided some form of guidance as our friendship was mutual in my mind.

In 1944/5, I attended kindergarten and first grade in PS 108, the Bronx, New York. We had a Victory Garden in the southeast corner of the school yard. I distinctly recall telling my first-grade classmates, and the teacher, about using contour plowing to avoid erosion from rainfall runoff. How could I have known about that subject at age six?

There was even greater mystery in the woods, such as the woods were in the Bronx. The mystery drew me in to explore further in our neighborhood. Some school chums and I dug a deep hole in a vacant lot in the nearby woods and dragged an old garage door over it for a roof. For light we used one of those black spherical kerosene lanterns borrowed from Public Works. A constant cool breeze came out of an oval slit in the lower southwest corner of our redoubt. I spoke into it to see if there would be an answer. I believed there should be; none came. Something was there; I knew that. Today I would still speak and listen for the answer. Now I’ll bet I could hear it.

My paternal grandmother, Mary Ellen Norton, was born in Glengoole, Tipperary, Ireland. She would regularly ask me if I had seen the Little People while looking out the school bus window. Most of the time I saw nothing, but once in fourth grade I clearly recall seeing them running along the granite gutter and jumping into the storm drain. When I saw them, I shouted, Look, Little People, at my classmates; they hooted. I knew the Little People were there. I was shattered.

The Bronx was, and is today, a melting pot of ethnicities, religions, colors and geographies. We certainly had a wide spectrum of cultures on this one block of Tenbroeck Avenue between Rhinelander and Neill Avenues. One of my closest and most mischievous friends was Bobby Zacham, first son of a Jewish family. As I grew older, I became interested in his sister Rachel. At the time, I was attending All Hallows Catholic Boys School. We, of course, studied the Catholic religion every day. One day Brother Curtin, our 6th grade teacher, started talking about other religions. Discussing religious beliefs other than Catholic’s seemed out of the Catholic box. Brother Curtin announced that people of other religions would go to hell because they were not Catholics. At age 11 this seemed to be way off the mark, fabricated, hurtful. Bobby and I were the absolute best of friends. His sister Rachel was increasingly interesting. To have them go to hell was simply unfair, unkind, puzzling. But I dutifully accepted this as another truth from the Catholic Brothers, even though it seemed so wrong. My intuition knew what was just. However, my religious teachings said I had to accept what the dogma dictated. Some sort of spiritual hairline fracture may have begun to open up even at an early age.

I really don’t believe my mother’s religious devotion was fervent. Yes, she took me to church and confession, she said her rosary, we ate our Friday fish, but we didn’t do much more. When my maternal grandfather Charles Huss died in 1945, the adults started lighting votive candles in red glass containers in a rack