I'm
a TED Talk junkie. It's a self-proclaimed weakness, and I declare no
embarrassment about it. With each talk my thoughts give way to something new.
Not only while I'm sitting down to watch the talk, but also in the evening,
weeks, and months to follow. TED Talks plant seeds in my brain that flourish into
flowers of intellect and enlightened points of view.
Brain
scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, recently planted a couple of those seeds when I
sat down to watch her 2008 talk, "My Stroke of Insight". In the talk,
Jill delivers an animated recount of a stroke she experienced in 1996. She went
through a hemorrhage in her left brain that caused the hemisphere to shut off. She
became a human being operating solely on right brain capacity.
Both
sides of our brain have very different functions. They process information in
different ways, think and care about different things, and have their own view
of the world. Our right brain focuses on the present moment. It thinks in
pictures, learns kinesthetically, and experiences the world through an influx
of sensory information, or what Jill calls, energy. The left brain lives in the
past and the future. It takes the collage of energy brought in through our right
brain, picks out the details, associates them with what we’ve learned in the
past, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. The left brain
also thinks in words, where the right brain does not.
The
experience opened Dr. Taylor up to something new. As a right brain human, she
lived entirely in the moment. Anxiety, what I consider to be, “fear of what
could happen,” is an illness of the future. It was gone. Living in the moment,
she could feel her brain talking to the rest of her body, telling her muscles, “contract,
relax.” She looked down at her arm, and could no longer define the boundaries.
The atoms and molecules of her being blended in with the atoms and molecules of
the wall. Because she could no longer tell where she ended and where the outside
world began, she felt enormous and expansive. She was at one with all the
energy that was. She felt, euphoria.
One
can’t help but think of meditation and yoga when listening to Jill’s account. I
realized, all who are enveloped in the world of yogic spirituality are shooting
for one thing: to quiet their left brain hemispheres. The goal is to turn off
the chatter, the words, and just be. We leave the left hemisphere to sooth
anxieties of the future and calm remembrances of the past. So often you hear in
yoga class to, “notice how your body feels.” You pay attention to the breath
and how it moves through your entire body. By focusing deeply on physical
sensations we are able to live in the present moment. The rest of the world is
left behind, and it is just us on the yoga mat, at one with the music, the classroom,
and those in it. The yogic philosophies teach that we are all connected – to each
other and to the world around us. All of the mental abilities that we are
striving for in yoga and meditation are what Jill experienced during her
stroke. It takes mental exercise to learn how to get ourselves there, and that
is what meditation is.
But then Jill went on to
plant another seed in my brain. She ended her talk with a declaration that we
have the power to choose. Right here, right now, you can step into the consciousness
of your right brain or left. Perhaps, if more people spent more time choosing
the right (myself included), we could have a more peaceful world. So spread it
to all that you can. Take a deep breath, feel your body – the space around you –
and look at the world as a web of interconnections. It is the path to inner,
outer, and global peace.
Go give Jill's TED Talk a listen.
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