by Chris Zydel, MA

A few weeks ago I came across an astonishing lecture that was given by a woman named Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD. also known as The Singin' Scientist. The talk she gave was titled My Stroke of Insight and she presented it at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference that is held yearly in Monterey California. TED describes itself as "an invitation only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration."

TED itself is a remarkable gathering where well known people from various disciplines get together and give twenty minute presentations on everything from quantum physics to political and social theory to global warming to cutting edge creativity.  The talks are inspirational, informative and often very entertaining. Their tagline is "Ideas worth spreading" and one of the ways that they support their commitment to the belief that change begins with great new ideas is by making some of the best presentations from the conference available via public videos.

Jill Bolton is a neuroanatomist or in plain english, a brain scientist. About 10 years ago she had a stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left hemisphere of her brain, leaving her unable to perform basic left brain functions such as walking, talking, reading or writing . She also had very little recall of her life prior to the stroke. Jill's talk at TED was about her experience of the stroke itself and her subsequent 8 year recovery, where she struggled to heal and regain her lost cognitive functions. Her story was incredibly moving and powerful  and was the most talked about event at a conference filled with amazing presentations.

One of the most astounding aspects of her report was that as a brain scientist she was intensely curious about what was happening to her and tried to remember and document the entire phenomenon. Because her left brain almost completely shut down she was in the position to experience herself and the world from an almost purely right brain perspective.

The tale she told was of a person who all of a sudden found herself in a land (which she affectionately calls La-La land) where her dominant experience was that of being filled with an incredible sense of peace, tranquility and bliss. She opened up into a sense of herself as pure consciousness, with no boundaries and a profound connection with everything and everyone around her. She talks about how she lost her sense of herself as solid and separate and became "a fluid". The constant brain chatter that accompanies our every waking moment was gone and she became silent inside her mind. She knew, in no uncertain terms, that we are all one. In other words, she was having a bona fide mystical experience.

I burst into tears at the end of the video. Partly it was because her story and the way that she told it was so profoundly moving. But on an even deeper level I think that my tears were tears of relief.  For a long time now there has been a very deep split in our western culture between the left brain and the right brain, between logic and feeling, intuitive knowing and scientific evidence.

And that split has come with an implicit hierarchy. The world of hard reality, facts, logic and objective knowledge is seen to be more valuable than the world of soul, spirit, emotion and intuition. The world of internal experience has been marginalized and trivialized, treated as if it were a second class citizen and often not even considered to be real. So here was a mainstream scientist giving a talk to a roomful of left brain intellectual types, and she was speaking my language! And the people in the audience were responding in an overwhelmingly positive way.

Her essential idea was that we are not just linear, rational,cognitive beings, but also beings of light and heart and spirit. We have two brains, the right and the left, the cognitive and the intuitive brain, the planning brain and the presence brain, the judging, fearful brain and the brain that knows that we are always safe and always loved, and that both these brains are essential to our survival and to who we are as human beings. Her message was that this right brained way of being in the world is very real and necessary if we are going to rise to the monumental challenges being presented to us in this 21st century.

We are living at a threshold time, a time of great transition where much of what we have known and trusted to be true is changing and morphing into something quite different and unfamiliar. This is not necessarily bad news, but it is stressful, and we need tools and techniques to help support us through this passage with some semblance of sanity and grace.There are no maps of this new terrain. More than ever we are going to be called upon to make it up as we go along, to create novel and original responses to rapidly unfolding and unfamiliar scenarios.

We are going to need unlimited access to our creativity and our intuition, two qualities that are uniquely suited for journeys into the unknown. We are also going to need a solid trust in spirit, whether it is trust in the human spirit or the Great Spirit. The old ways are no longer working. Something new needs to be born. And that new thing can only come out of a new way of being.

We are only operating with half of who we are. As we face the need to solve the problems of things like global warming, environmental devastation, over population, and a changing economic structure we need the complete set of all our capabilities. We can't afford to be half beings any longer.

We are a people who like to get things done. Whether it's losing 20 pounds, making a million dollars or finding a cure for cancer we thrill to that capability of focusing the will,  climbing the mountain, hauling our butts out of the ashes and ending up triumphant and successful.This is what we value in this 21st century western culture. Our gods are organization, focus, efficiency and manifestation. We admire and revere people who can make up their minds to do something and then actually do it. There is an Air Force motto that kind of says it all "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer."

And we are terrified to let go of that sense of control, of efficacy, of potency, and sense of separateness for even the least little bit. Once we get that bit of personal power in our teeth we don't ever want to stop running headlong into the constantly expanding future.

But this is exactly what our creativity and the intuitive painting process is asking for us to do. It's asking for us to take that bit out of our teeth, just for a little while. To entertain the idea that there are times when it is necessary and skillful, appropriate even, to lay our burdens down and to let go of our need to be totally in control. Not " Just do it", but "Just let it be". That there is wisdom and healing and magic in being able to tap into that larger energy of presence and unconditional love.

Before we go rushing off to make something happen we need to learn how to get quiet inside, to reconnect with spirit and  to make contact with what Jill Bolton calls the peace channel.

We need to be able to set goals and take action, but we already know HOW to do that. That skill set is very highly developed. But we also need, more than ever, to learn how to surrender to our internal guidance and get a sense about the direction that we need to go in so that we can then put our highly developed manifesting skills to good use. We have a great deal of untapped genius lurking inside our hearts and our intuitive selves and it is time that we opened the door and claimed those treasures.

And that, as Jill Bolte Taylor says, is an idea worth spreading!

Copyright © Chris Zydel 2008

If you would like to see the video of her talk, and I highly recommend that you check it out, you can find it here: Jill Bolte Taylor