There is one single fact that makes this kind of experience so productive for healing and change, something finally being confirmed by the hard sciences in the last twenty years: neuroplasticity. Up until now our understanding of the brain was that it was largely “hard wired”—the term we’ve been using up to this point. The hard wired brain is like a computer—that is, the software might change but the structure remained the same. Neuroplasticity turns this idea on its head and suggests that we can actually change both the software and the hardware. This means that the same kind of experiences which “wire in” patterns of movement when we are children are possible to repeat as adults. In reality, we are not hard wired, we are “soft wired.” And this makes us capable of change in ways that psychologists one hundred years ago never thought possible.
