My Stroke of Insight

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Dr. Jill is a dynamic teacher and public speaker who loves educating all age groups, academic levels, as well as corporations and not-for-profit organizations about the beauty of our human brain. She focuses on how we can activate the power of our neuroplasticity to not only recover from neurological trauma, but how we can purposely choose to live a more flexible, resilient, and satisfying life. When we are being compassionate, we consider another's circumstance with love rather than judgement... To be compassionate is to move into the right here, right now with an open heart consciousness and a willingness to be supportive.” Bolte Taylor was accepted as an undergraduate at Indiana University where she studied human biology. At the same time, she got a job at the Terre Haute Center for Medical Education. It was here that she worked as a lab technician in both the Human Anatomy Lab and the Neuroanatomy Research Lab. https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/keizer_w09.html Keizer, Bert, "Step to the Right", Threepenny Review, Winter 2009.

To experience peace does not mean that your life is always blissful. It means that you are capable of tapping into a blissful state of mind amidst the normal chaos of a hectic life.”

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After suffering a massive stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor turned the negative event into a positive stroke recovery story. Now she shares her wisdom. Before the stroke, I was climbing the ladder at Harvard. I wanted to teach and do research. I was interested in understanding, at a cellular level, the differences between the brains of people who would be diagnosed as neurotypical and the brains of people who would be diagnosed with a severe mental illness. After the stroke, I had to mourn the death of who I had been before — but it was never my ambition to grow up to be that person again or to do the things that she had done. At the time, I had been serving on the board of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That’s a brain-related network, so after my stroke, word spread that I was recovering and I started getting invitations to keynote about the brain and the ability of the brain to recover. At that point, doctors were still telling stroke patients that if they didn’t recover in three to six months, then forget it. It made me angry. If you’re told by your doctor, “Don’t even bother to try,” then nobody’s going to recover. My brain was still recovering six, seven, eight years after the stroke. Before the stroke, I had been an advocate for the mentally ill, and then after the stroke, I became an advocate for the ability of the brain to recover.

Most people know what a stroke is to some extent. It's commonly understood that it involves the brain, is dangerous and can be fatal. What's less well-known is that there are two types of strokes: ischemic and hemorrhagic. Taylor first noticed a headache upon waking, but soon found herself descending into an increasingly bizarre psychological state. She became a spectator of her own body which, unsurprisingly, led to trouble in moving around and performing ordinary activities. Five days after her stroke, the author was released from the hospital. In the months that followed, her mother stayed by her side and helped her recover from surgery. She had to learn how to talk, read, write and walk from scratch. As the morning continued, she felt increasingly disconnected from herself and her surroundings. The author experienced a peculiar feeling that gradually took over both her mind and body. She was oversensitive to light and sound and felt her cognitive function disintegrate as if she were observing rather than participating in her own life. Oh my God, no. I’m so grateful it happened. It took away all my stress circuitry. Who doesn’t want that? My left-brain emotional system went offline, and with that went all my negative judgment. It took away all my emotional baggage from the first 30 years of my life. And it set me on a new path of possibilities. The job I had before was fantastic, and I was prospering and winning awards and having a great time. But when that was all gone, I felt this incredible sense of relief because I was no longer juggling a billion details. Probably the biggest difference between who I am today and who I used to be is that I trust the details are going to fall in place as they’re supposed to fall in place with just a little direction from me. I don’t have to go out and try to control the world, which I can’t do anyway.

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When recovering from a stroke, it can be useful to break down large tasks into smaller ones. Key Takeaway 1: Health care providers should be more patient-centered in their care. Consequently, the author became interested in the way the human brain functions. She embarked upon intense academic training so that she could research the biological grounds for schizophrenia. New Yorkers Should Line Up Behind the City’s Janitors New Yorkers Should Line Up Behind the City’s Janitors Well, Taylor’s stroke experience suggests a different way of looking at mindfulness. If a sense of peace, wholeness, and calm simply comes from the right side of the brain, then mindfulness is actually within you all along. This stays true whether you’ve ever meditated or not, whether you’ve ever deliberately undertaken mindfulness exercises or not.

To the right mind, no time exists other than the present moment, and each moment is vibrant with sensation. Life or death occurs in the present moment. The experience of joy happens in the present moment. Our perception and experience of connection with something that is greater than ourselves occurs in the present moment. To our right mind, the moment of now is timeless and abundant.” If I am not persistent with my desire to think about other things, and consciously initiate new circuits of thought, then those uninvited loops can generate new strength and begin monopolizing my mind again. To counter their activities, I keep a handy list of three things available for me to turn my consciousness toward when I am in a state of need: 1) I remember something I find fascinating that I would like to ponder more deeply, 2) I think about something that brings me terrific joy, or 3) I think about something I would like to do.”

Success!

Yet Bolte Taylor not only recovered completely—a process that took eight years—but regards her stroke as a positive event that left her with a sense of peace, a less-driven personality, and new insight into the meaning of life. Bolte Taylor was intrigued that his view of the world was disparate from hers despite the fact that they were siblings so close in age. The way he processed information, and therefore his behavior, differed from hers. Most of us enjoy the luxury of a well-integrated brain. But, like Taylor, we must realize that our brains are actually complex entities, trying to fulfill a variety of hugely disparate goals. Evolution made the human brain this way, cobbling together lower and higher functions over time, and it shows. Lesson 3: You can opt out of many negative emotions and choose to feel mostly the positive ones instead. Fortunately, how we choose to be today is not predetermined by how we were yesterday...You and you alone choose moment by moment who and how you want to be in the world. I encourage you to pay attention to what is going on in your brain. Own your power and show up for your life.”