Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight Sounds a Lot Like Yoga to Me

Over the past few years, I’ve dabbled in Vinyasa yoga — a practice that I’ve steadily deepened over the past eight months. The more serious I become about my practice, the more I find peace, insight, confidence, and compassion within myself. I’ve discovered that I have emotional and intellectual capabilities I used to envy in others. I’ve discovered that the most challenging — and sometimes the most counterintuitive — course of action is usually the healthiest one.

How did practicing yoga help me make this happen?

Yoga allows you to experience yourself in difficult situations — poses or “asanas” — that can challenge or soothe. Practitioners are encouraged to notice their reactions to difficulty and to ease. Some bodies will settle easily into downward facing dog, while others will struggle with pain in their wrists and shoulders and tightness in their hamstrings. The first challenge is realizing that there’s nothing wrong with your body if you can’t do something another person can do — that’s just your body as it is in this particular moment.

I am an overachiever. This makes yoga particularly difficult. I want to do every pose perfectly every time. At first, I would come to class and notice all the slim, lithe women twisting their bodies into complicated pretzel shapes. My own attempts were inelegant and clumsy by comparison.

The first lesson was realizing that doing yoga wasn’t about looking a particular way or executing a perfect pose. It was about noticing how my body felt in the pose, trying to create openness and length in myself, and noticing my emotional reactions to the poses. This takes a minute to realize and I doubt if I will ever master it fully. The joy is in the progress, both emotional and physical.

How does this relate to Jill Bolte Taylor?

Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist who suffered a stroke twelve years ago. She was able to observe from the inside out how the destruction of different areas in her brain affected her perception of herself and the universe. In the aftermath of the stroke, she says she found Nirvana:

After watching Dr. Taylor talk about her experience, I began to realize that yoga is all about stepping out of our left hemispheres — yogis call it the “monkey mind” — and into our right hemispheres for a time. If we can experience the world as it is, without all the chatter, baggage, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, we can act with more compassion toward ourselves and all other living things.

This is the goal of yoga, and it’s also what Dr. Taylor experienced when her brain imploded on itself. As she said:

I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through a see of silent euphoria. Nirvana, I found Nirvana.

I remember thinking, “there’s no way that I’ll be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.”

But then I reaized, “but I’m still alive. I’m still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana.”

And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people, who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their lefft hemispheres and find this peace.

…

Who are we? We are the life force power of the universe with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here, right now I can step in to the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are, I am the life force power of the universe. I am the life force power of the fifty trillion beautiful mollecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is.

Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. Where I become a single individual. A solid, separate from the flow, separate from the world. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the “we” inside of “me.”

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing from the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world. And the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

Namaste.