Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote in her book, “My Stroke of Insight” that the left side of the brain’s job is to take the least amount of information and weave the most plausible story.
What is so incredible to me is that most of us live solely on the left side and never once question the storyteller!
In fact we live life as a storyteller, but not as a reporter of reality.
The storyteller of our lives can create a fictional life while we are living nonfiction. The left side of our brains has to be our worst enemy.
It allows us to be in dangerous and painful places by selling us a story that collides with reality.
To live in unquestioned knowing is to live in the dark of your life.
My greatest enemy was this storyteller living in my head.
Dr. Jill also writes about the brain’s two sides.
“My Right mind is all about the richness of this present moment. It is filled with gratitude for my life and everyone and everything in it. It is content, compassionate, nurturing and eternally optimistic. To my right mind character, there is no judgment of good/bad or right/wrong, so everything exists on a continuum of relativity. It takes things as they are and acknowledges what is in the present. The temperature is cooler today than yesterday. It doesn’t care. Today it will rain. It makes no difference. It may observe that one person is taller than another person, or this person has more money than that person, but these observations are made without judgment. To my right mind, we are all equal members of the human family. My right mind does not perceive or give heed to territories or artificial boundaries like race or religion.
One of the greatest blessings I received as a result of this hemorrhage is that I had the chance to rejuvenate and strengthen my neurocircuits of innocence and inner joy. Thanks to this stroke, I have become free to explore the world again with childlike curiosity. In the absence of obvious and immediate danger, I feel safe in the world and walk the earth as though it is my backyard. In the consciousness of my right mind, we are laced together as the universal tapestry of human potential and life is good and we are all beautiful just the way we are.
My right mind character is adventurous, celebrative of abundance, and socially adept. It is sensitive to nonverbal communication, empathic, and accurately decodes emotion. My right mind is open to the eternal flow whereby I exist at one with the Universe. It is the seat of my divine mind, the knower, the wise woman, and the observer. It is my intuition and higher consciousness. My right mind is ever present and gets lost in time.
One natural function of my right mind is to bring me new insight in this moment so I can update old files that contain outdated information. For example, throughout my childhood I would not eat squash. Thanks to my right hemisphere, I was willing to give squash a second chance and now I love it. Many of us make judgments with our left hemisphere and then are not willing to step to the right (that is into the consciousness of our right hemisphere) for a file update. For many of us, once we have made a decision, then we are attached to that decision forever. I have found that often the last thing a really dominating left hemisphere wants is to share its limited cranial space with an open minded right counterpart!
My right mind is open to the new possibilities and thinks out of the box. It is not limited by the rules and regulations established by my left mind that created the box. Consequently, my right mind is highly creative in its willingness to try something new. It appreciates that chaos is the first step in the creative process. It is kinesthetic, agile, and loves my body’s ability to move fluidly into the world. It is tuned in to the subtle messages my cells communicate via gut feelings, and it learns through touch and experience.
My right brain celebrates it freedom in the universe and is not bogged down by my past or fearful of what the future may or may not bring. It honors my life and the health of my cells. And it doesn’t just care about my body; it cares about the fitness of your body, our mental health as a society, and our relationship with Mother Earth.
The consciousness of our right mind appreciates that every cell in our bodies (except for the red blood cells) contains the exact same molecular genius as the original zygote cell that was created when our mother’s egg cell combined with our father’s sperm cell. My right mind understands that I am the life force of the fifty trillion molecular geniuses crafting my form. (And it burst into song about that on a regular basis!) It understands that we are all connected to one another in an intricate fabric of cosmos, and it enthusiastically marches to the beat of its own drum.
Freed from all perceptions and boundaries, my right mind proclaims, “I am a part of it all. We are brothers and sisters on this planet. We are here to help make this world a more peaceful and kinder place.” My right mind sees unity among all living entities, and I am hopeful that you are intimately aware of this character within yourself.
As much as I obviously adore the attitude, openness, and enthusiasm with which my right mind embraces life, my left mind character is equally amazing. Please remember that this is the character I spent the better part of a decade resurrecting. My left mind is responsible for taking all that energy, all the of that information about the present moment, and all of those magnificent possibilities perceived by my right mind, and shaping them into something manageable.
My left mind is the tool I use to communicate with the external world. Just as my right mind thinks in collages of images, my left mind thinks in language and speaks to me constantly. Through the use of brain chatter, it not only keeps me abreast of my life, but also manifests my identity. Via my left brain language center’s ability to say, “I am,” I become an independent entity separate from the flow. As such, I become a single, a solid, separate from the whole.
Our left brain is truly one of the finest tools in the universe when it comes to organizing information. My left hemisphere personality takes pride in its ability to categorize, organize, describe, judge and critically analyze absolutely everything. It thrives on constant contemplation and calculation. Regardless of whether or not my mouth is running, my left mind stays busy theorizing, rationalizing, and memorizing. It is a perfectionist and an amazing housekeeper of corporation and home. It constantly says, “everything has a place and everything belongs in its place.” Our right mind character values humanity, while our left mind character concerns itself with finances and economy.
One the scale of doing, my left mind is a magnificent multi-tasker and loves performing as many functions as it can at the same time. It is a true busy bee and partially measures value by how many things it crosses of my daily to do list. Because it things sequentially, it is great at mechanical manipulation. Its ability to focus on differences and distinguishing characteristics makes it a natural builder.
My left brain is particularly gifted at identifying patterns. As a result, it is adept at processing large volumes of information quickly. To keep up with life’s experiences in the external world, my left mind processes information remarkably fast much faster than my right hemisphere, which in comparison tends to hoe-de-doe along. At times my left mind may become manic, while my right mind has the potential to become lazy.
The difference in speed of thought, information processing and output as thought, word and deed, between the two hemispheres, is in part linked to their unique abilities to process different type sensory information. Our right brain perceives the longer wavelengths of light. As a result, the visual perception of our right brain is somewhat blended or softened. The lack of edge perception enables it to focus on the bigger picture of how things relate to one another. Similarly, our right mind tunes in to the lower frequencies of sound that are readily generated by our body gurgles and other natural tones. Consequently, our right mind is biologically designed to readily tune in to our physiology.
In contrast, our left brain perceives the shorter wavelengths of light, increasing its ability to clearly delineate sharp boundaries. As a result, our left mind is biologically adept at identifying separation lines between adjacent entities. At the same time, our left hemisphere language centers tune in to a higher frequencies of sound, which help them detect, discriminate, and interpret tones commonly associated with verbal language.
One of the most prominent characteristics of our left brain is its ability to weave stories. This story-teller portion of the our left brain’s language center is specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us, based upon minimal amounts of information. It functions by taking whatever details it has to work with, and then weaves them together in the form of a story. Most impressively, our left brain is brilliant in its ability to make stuff up, and fill in the blanks when there are gaps in its factual data. In addition, during its process of generating a story line, our left mind is quite the genius in its ability to manufacture alternative scenarios. And if it’s a subject you really feel passionate about, either good or awful, it’s particularly effective at hooking into those circuits of emotion and exhausting all the ‘what if’ possibilities.
As my left brain language centers recovered and became functional again, I spent a lot of time observing how my storyteller would draw conclusions based on minimal information. For the longest time I found these antics of my storyteller to be rather comical. At least until I realized that my left brain full-heartedly expected the rest of my brain to believe the stories it was making up! Throughout this resurrection of my left mind’s character and skills, it has been extremely important that I retain the understanding that my left brain is doing the best job it can with the information that it has to work with. I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know. I learned that I need to be very wary of my storyteller’s potential for stirring up drama and trauma.
In the same vein, as my left brain enthusiastically manufactured stories that it promoted as the truth, it had a tendency to be redundant – manifesting loops of thought patterns that reverberated through my mind, over and over again. For many of us, these loops of thought run rampant and we find ourselves habitually imagining devastating possibilities. Unfortunately, as a society we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant and automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and or political manipulation.
The portion of my left mind 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. Frankly, I just didn’t like the way these attitudes felt physiologically inside my body. My chest felt tight, I could feel my blood pressure rise, and addition, I wanted 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 the pain from the past.
During the process of recovery, I found that the portion of my character that was stubborn, arrogant, sarcastic and/or jealous resided within the ego center of that wounded left brain. This portion of my ego mind held the capacity for me to be a sore loser, hold a grudge, tell lies, and even seek revenge. Reawakening these personality traits was very disturbing to the newly found innocence of my right mind. With lots of effort, I have consciously chosen to recover my left mind’s ego center without giving renewed life to some of those old circuits. Dr. Jill Bolte.
Left brain, Right brain, which is your dominant side, which one is leading the charge in your life?
I M Perfect lady 