Our Person in Riyadh is Getting the Word Out to Saudi Women: Developing New Brain Skills is the Key to Personal Empowerment

Asma Fayyad is Brain Technologies' associate in Saudi Arabia. She often makes waves, and she's also been making news lately. Here is an article about her just out in The Saudi Gazette:

By Suzan Zawawi, The Saudi Gazette

RIYADH—Are you an impulsive shopper? Or can't get off of online chat rooms and stay there for hours on end? Do you find instant gratification in food? You Just can't get enough?

If any of the above is a definitive yes, then you're not alone. You are one of many women in the Arab world who suffer from stress, anxiety, or oppression.

All these methods are outlets Arab women engage in and are signs of oppression, stress and anxiety, said Asma Fayyad, a women's empowerment consultant and founder of The Imagecians Women's Solutions, an image and emotional freedom consulting firm.

Because of the self-improvement craze that has swept the world in recent years, many Saudis, and especially the women, have been seeking self-development courses and emotional and image consultation through programs based on brain function training.

Many Saudi women realize that they are miserable, and they are now searching for ways to get to the bottom of their problems through emotional consultations.

This rise of interest has not gone unnoticed by image and emotional consultants in the country. Fayyad alone has consulted 130 Saudi women on a one-to-one basis over the past three years.

And she's not into it only for the money. Fayyad is on a personal mission to empower women through image consultations, emotional freedom and brain makeovers.

"I want to tell women that help is here, it exists and they don't have to search hard for it," said Fayyad. Through her tools, She is able to define the root of her clients' unhappiness and help them overcome their fears and anxieties in order to reach their goals.

The major root of unhappiness is family problems and pressure.

"Women worldwide have a serious problem with self esteem, and Saudi women are not immune, Especially with the upbringing style," explained Fayyad and continued, "Our clients come to us when they are dissatisfied with their lives and are unhappy or confused. Dissatisfaction in one's life is a sign for the need to change."

Arab women also suffer from social pressure. Fear of the future, fear of losing wealth, a husband, or their careers is also very common.

Much of people's unhappiness starts by majoring in fields they are not interested in but were pressured into by their parents. As a result many people end up unfulfilled in their jobs.

They don't know what to do and most do not realize that their career path is the root of their unhappiness, said Fayyad. Lack of job opportunities for women also augments this unhappiness. Due to the shortage of diversity in job opportunities for women in the Kingdom, a computer science major might end up as a secretary or receptionist or even a teacher.

So many search for instant gratification in the shape of shopping, eating or social gatherings, explained Fayyad.

She discovers the client's inner type and enhance their brain map to match what they desire to do in life.

Another common problem among many unsatisfied Arab women is that they do not know what to do with their time. They haven t been guided properly and are not self reliant and self motivated, she said. Some finish university and probably sit at home waiting for the job to come to them. This results in young women spending time chatting for hours, watching TV all day long or roaming the malls.

What motivates Arab women is instant gratification because they can have control over what they can buy and eat, she explained:

Through special emotional freedom techniques, Fayyad also offers relief from physical pain.

Eighty percent of physical pain has an emotional root. Imagine you have been having daily headaches for 10 years, then it suddenly vanishes. That's how many of my clients say they feel after a session or two, she added.

Image consultations have also been very popular among Saudi women. Surprisingly while young Saudi women are more interested in improving their thinking and goal setting skills, older Saudi female clients are more interested in image consultations.

Fayyad offers image, appearance, behavior and communication consultations. Most of her clients are female royals or Saudi high-class professional women.

Middle Eastern women in general need an image make-over, explained Fayyad. They wear the wrong outfits with the wrong accessories, wrong color combination for their body shape and for the wrong occasions.

Fayyad consults her clients on how to dress, greet people, introduce themselves and on how to present themselves in different settings; business and social gatherings.

It's not about how much makeup you wear it s how you present yourself visually. explained Fayyad. She has written two books The Art of Public Speaking and Secrets to Influencing the Audience along with an audio of vocal exercises. The second book is on makeup secrets.

Currently, Fayyad is working on her third book targeting brides, which will be in the English language.

Different people find their relaxation through different means. While some resort to Reiki, yoga and emotional freedom techniques, others find it in praying. explained Fayyad.

Islamic prayer practices are full of relaxation techniques. The world Allah itself stimulates relaxation. By saying the name of God, Allah, you place the tip of the tongue at the back of the upper teeth on the top pallet, triggering an energy point, the mind/body connection (nerve) which induces relaxation.

The Prophet Mohammed (pbuh), advised his son-in-law Ali Bin Abi Talib to say Allah 33 times and say Allah Akbar on the 34th when Ali came to him complaining of being tired and wanting to hire a maid. The word Allah relaxes the body and helps the body become more productive and energetic, explained Fayyad.

Another Islamic relaxation technique is Tasbeeh using your fingers. By touching with your thumb each three ligament of your fingers and repeating Allah Akbar or any other prayer a person is touching each energy point in their fingers which induces relaxation.

By combining repeating Allah with the proper breathing technique an individual will reach total relaxation, reduce stress and even improve your voice, explained Fayyad.

Congratulations, Asma. You are a powerful role model not only for your clients but also for all of us working to get the word out about the great value in knowing more about how our brain functions.

You can reach Asma here: info@theimagecians.com

Posted on March 24, 2006

A Favorite Poem from a Poet One Reviewer Says "Breathes Poetry Like the Rest of Us Breathe Air. When She Exhales, the World Becomes Different. Better."

Carlos Salum of Charlotte, NC., shares one of his favorite poems, called "Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye:

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing the streets,
sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole,
not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

Thanks, Carlos. I'm not much of a poet (and know it) and not often a reader of poetry (and regret it). Your sending me the Nye poem sent me looking for more information about the poet. Turns out Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet many believe worth reading. More information here: "Naomi Shihab Nye”.

Posted on March 21, 2006

Yes, I'm Convinced That We Are Progressively "Evolving" How We Wire and Use the Wiring in Our Brains, But We Still Don't Any Means to Stand Back and Take a Good Look at How It All Works.

A visitor to the Brain Technologies office the other day requested a deeper understanding of the model of human thinking levels I explore in, among a number of places, my latest book, The Mother of All Minds.

For an author, what’s not to like about such a request?

So I sat my guest down in front of my computer screen. I summoned some hopefully evocative Power Point slides to help illuminate the way and plunged with gusto into a “straight from the horse’s mouth” explanation.

Apparently, the slides and the explanations were evocative and illuminative. Because there came a moment when my visitor suddenly performed a physical maneuver that writers of action books would probably describe as “she whirled around like a dervish” or some such and said, “But this is evolution! You’re saying that people’s brains are evolving!”

It was not a thought that pleased her, because the tone of her voice was a couple of notches off the accusatory scale.

Yes, I do believe I am saying that. That was also the assumption, I do believe, of the gifted brain whose work underlies great amounts of my lifework, the brain of the late psychologist Dr. Clare W. Graves.

My guest then added: “And you’re saying some people’s thinking is better than others!”

Oh, there’s no question of that. As more than a few very wise persons have observed, “Common sense really isn’t very common.” Most certainly, there are poor thinkers, average thinkers and superior thinkers. And many shades in between.

But that isn’t really the issue here.

What my visitor found offensive is the idea that some brains are equipped to improve their ability to perceive the world and do competent, suitable things in it and others aren't. And that the flowering of this faculty is developmental, incremental and temporal. It happens, if it happens, over time. Later stages are more diverse and contemporary than earlier stages. If one becomes marooned at an “earlier” stage, it can make trouble for an individual or a whole society.

We talked at length about all this. I’m not sure how much she finally bought into the idea. I am sure that she’s close to being ready to consider that all this is possible. “Being close” is closer than many will come, and perhaps as close as this person will come. It is not for me to say, or her, for that matter. What will be(come) will be(come).

If I get another chance and if I sense that she may be ready for the next installment, I’m going to trot out polymath Otto Neurath’s Ark. It’s the best way I know to convey the idea that whatever “stage” your brain happens to be thinking at, there’s enormous room for humility. While one stage, or kind, of thinking can be demonstratively be said to be much better suited for coping with the times in which a person is living than other stages, no brain can explain precisely any of this (the universe, or our presence in it, or the presence of our brain in it) and how it all works.

That was the point of Neurath’s boat example.

He likened science to a boat that, if it is to be rebuilt (improved, perfected), must be rebuilt plank by plank at a time while it is also keeping us afloat. There’s no way ever to dry-dock the boat. There’s no external place to plop it down and examine it objectively and start over from scratch, making it better.

I think of all our brains as being like Neurath’s boat. There’s no value in arguing that one brain is better than another because there’s no place where we can park any of our brains and get off and stare at them from a distant to gain a better perspective. There’s no getting out of our brains, taking a totally objective view and being able to get back in them, no matter how much yoga we practice or how much we slow our breathing rate. We can improving our understanding of our boat/brain. We can infer that we’ve got a more durable, responsive, better-equipped-to-cope boat-brain that we had before. We can encourage ourselves and others to make better choices and choices that encourage our brains to shift their wiring and wiring usage to produce more suitable ourcomes. But we have to accomplish all this while still in the boat.

So is the brain evolving, at least in the way it utilizes its information-processing capabilities? I think so. Dr. Graves thought so. Others think and have thought so.

That still doesn’t explain away the fact that no matter which of Dr. Graves’ levels of existence or Dudley's mind levels or someone else’s belief/value systems you now appear to be operating from, we are all still in the same boat, trying to improve it without sinking and without understanding how it really looked “first” and without all that good a sense—to be honest about it—of how it looks now.

One of the morals of this story: when you rock the boat, be prepared for a mutiny. You can make educated guesses, but there's really no way to tell how others are going to respond to the boat-rocking until the action starts.

(The first time I ever heard of Neurath’s boat was in a book by philosopher Ellen R. Klein. You’ll seldom find a philosopher who writes more clearly on the topic of what we can know and what we can't. For a copy of the book of hers that I read, go here: "Feminism Under Fire”.

Posted on March 04, 2006