The folks I talked to on Sunday recommended reading “My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven year old Harvard trained neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke that devastated the left side of her brain. Because of her training, she was uniquely able to observe as she lost the function of the rational, grounded, detailed and time oriented part of her mind leaving the intuitive, kenesthetic, and euphoric part of her mind in dominance. In the months ahead, as she slowly worked to recover walking, talking, reading, writing, logical thinking, detailed memory, she began to face the tradeoffs between the logical and intuitive functions. For example, as she began to recover, the critical and scolding part of her brain began to recover and she didn’t like it. She reports making a choice about how much dominance to allow it. Here is how she put it:
When my brain runs loops that feel harshly judgmental, counter-productive, or out of control, I wait for 90 seconds for the emotional/physiological response to dissipate and then I speak to my brain as though it is a group of children. I say with sincerity,
“I appreciate your ability to think thoughts and feel emotions, but I am really not interested in thinking these thoughts or feeling these emotions anymore. Please stop bringing this stuff up.”
Sounds an awful lot like the “without judgment or evaluation” part of awareness, doesn’t it? Maybe what we do in praticing awareness is letting the functions Jill describes as the right side of her brain have a chance to manifest. All we need is to turn down the volume a bit on the left side.
Here is another sample from her first day in the hospital:
“… my perception of my physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air. I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle. The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. Finer that the finest of pleasures we can experience as physical beings, this absence of physical boundary was one of glorious bliss. As my consciousness dwelled in a flow of sweet tranquility, it was obvious to me that I would never be able to squeeze the enormousness of my spirit back inside this tiny cellular matrix.”
Sound familiar? Pick any mystic.
I recommend this book as a graphic personal example of courage and observation. I have no idea whether it’s as simple as the physiology of right and left side; I kind of doubt it. But her experience rings true. It casts a new light on my meditation practice.
You can watch a remarkable video of Jill’s talk to TED. Don’t miss it.