Left Brain, Right Brain

I’ve been reading “My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. a Harvard-trained brain scientist and neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke when she was 37 years old. She documents her awareness of her symptoms: blinding headache, sudden sensitivity to light and loss of balance. She knew which neurons were going down as a massive hemorrhage tsunami’d her brain. What she did not know at the time was that 8 years later, she would write a book about it.

There are many publications about left and right brain functions, but for some reason, Dr. Taylor’s story activates an area of my own brain, giving me an “Aha! moment” that helps defines the experiences of the past three years of my life. I move through my day assigning my thoughts and actions as “that’s left brain, that’s right brain; here they are playing nicely together, but oh—there goes left brain being critical again” which it does all too often. You know: that little brain chatter that likes to point out your legion of weaknesses.

According to Dr. Taylor: “…the character of our right mind has been ridiculed and portrayed in an extremely unflattering light, simply because it does not understand verbal language or comprehend linear thought.” “In vast contrast, our left mind has routinely been touted as linguistic, sequential, methodical, rational, smart, and the seat of our consciousness.”

My left brain gives me language and the ability to form words and sentences. It instructs my fingers on the keyboard, but the spirit of what I want to write about are messages from the innocuous right brain. My challenge is to lasso the cloud of intuition and siphon it into a sentence that can be communicated and understood to connect to you, the reader of Oak in the Seed. The purpose of all this work is to create a bridge, a relationship with someone else in the universe that I will likely never meet in person. Left brain, right brain.

Left brain is suggesting I go shower now and clean the house. It is organizing the day and prompting me to get away from the computer. Right brain agrees—I need to move my body and enjoy the cool morning air. So, we are in agreement then.