Welcoming Back (Some of) the Left Brain

The last few chapters of Jill Bolte Taylor's book, My Stroke of Insight, are the real payoff.  She has talked about her very deliberate process in choosing to recover some but not all of the life she previously had in her left brain.  She was quite intentional about pieces of her former self that she wished to leave behind.

"The portion of my left mind I that I chose not to recover was the part of my left hemisphere character that had the potential to be mean, worry incessantly, or be verbally abusive to either myself or others...In addition, I want to leave behind any of my old emotional circuits that automatically stimulated the instant replay of painful memories.  I have found life to be too short to be preoccupied with pain from the past" (page 144).

I identify with so many elements of that paragraph.  I also have rebelled against returning to and/or recovering elements of my previous life that would lead me back into some of the same miserable and self-destructive ways of living.  I am more self-conscious in the sense of being more self-aware.  I have a perspective now from which to view myself and to choose my responses to life.  It's been a difficult path to this point, but I feel more alive, more grown up, and more mindful than at any time I can remember.

The element of Bolte Taylor's account that rings the most bells with me is her discussion of how she can now choose her responses to life.  She is able, as I hear from my friends in recovery, to take life on life's terms.  She finds that she is able to step back from her responses of the instant and make healthy, life-giving and peaceful choices about how to feel and act.

"It is so easy to get caught up in the wiring of our pre-programmed reactivity...that we live our lives cruising along on automatic pilot.  I have learned that the more attention my higher cortical cells pay to what's going on inside my limbic system, the more say I have about what I am thinking and feeling.  By paying attention to the choices my automatic circuitry is making, I own my power and make more choices consciously.  In the long run, I take responsibility for what I attract into my life" ( page 146).

I have learned so much in the last eighteen months about making choices about how I feel, react, and respond to life.  I am learning how to choose my way out of depression, darkness and despair.  Recently I was asked if I was happy in a work situation.  For the first time in my life, I didn't quite understand the question.  My happiness no longer depends on the things that happen outside of me.  More and more, I make choices to be grateful, open to the experience, teachable and honest.

What Bolte Taylor has learned to embrace and enjoy is humility.  I'm not talking about humiliation.  I'm talking about the willingness to love ourselves as we really are.  Humility is about embracing our gifts and our flaws with equal appreciation.  It is about treating life as a learning experience and being open to what our days have to teach us.  It is about taking life as it comes rather that demanding that life meet our specifications.  It is about thinking and feeling without having to judge those thoughts and emotions.

The mindfulness of humility has been key to my journey of recovery so far.  I've found a kindred sister in this stroke survivor and life embracer.  Of course, I am blessed to have a life partner now (my beloved Brenda) who was teaching me all of this long before I read the book.  She's the one who prepared me to see what was happening to Bolte Taylor.  I have a very, very good teacher.

The opposite of such mindful humility is the debilitating practice of rumination.  More on that in a future post.