Jill grew up
studying the brain because she had a brother with a brain disorder,
schizophrenia. As a sister and as a
scientist she wanted to understand why she could connect her dreams to her
reality and make them come true. At the
same time, she wanted to know what it was about her brother’s brain and his
schizophrenia that he could not connect his dreams with a common and shared
reality so they instead became a delusion.
She
dedicated her life’s work to research and study severe mental illnesses. She worked at the Harvard Department of
Psychiatry, and her function there was to look at the biological differences
between someone who has what we would consider “normal” control as compared to
the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizo-affective, or
bipolar disorder. Essentially, they were
mapping the micro-circuitry of the brain.
Jill had a
very full life. She was working on
something she was passionate about, she was spending her weekends supporting a
non-profit organization she was deeply committed to, and so her life was
fulfilled. Yet, on the morning of
December 10, 1996, she woke up to discover she had a brain disorder of her
own.
A blood
vessel exploded on the left side of her brain.
She had a major hemorrhage. In
the course of 4 hours, she watched her brain completely deteriorate in its
ability to process all information. She
could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Essentially she became an infant in a woman’s
body.
If you have
ever looked at a human brain, most of us have, (you can find on the internet
pictures of what the human brain looks like), you will notice that there are two
cerebral cortices that are actually completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers,
the right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor while our left
hemisphere functions like a serial processor.
The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus
callosum. Other than that, the two
hemispheres are completely separate.
Our
hemispheres process information differently.
They each think about different things and care about different
things. Our right hemisphere is all
about the present moment, this present moment.
Right here. Right now. It thinks in pictures and it learns
kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in
simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into
this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present
moment smells like, tastes like, what it feels like, and what it sounds
like. We are all energy beings connected
to the energy all around us through the consciousness of our right
hemispheres. We are connected to one
another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family,
right here, right now. Those of you who
are reading this blog, we are brothers and sisters on this planet here to make this
world a better place. In this moment, we
are perfect, we are whole, we are beautiful, and we are magnificent.
Our left
hemisphere is very different. It thinks
linearly and methodically. Our left
hemisphere is all about the past, and all about the future. It’s designed to take this enormous collage
called the present moment, and it starts to pick out details, lots of details,
it then categorizes and organizes all that information, and then associates it
with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future
all of our possibilities. Our left
hemisphere thinks in language. It’s our
on-going brain chatter that connects our internal world with our external
world. It’s that little voice that
reminds you of things to do, but more importantly, it tells you who you
are. It tells me, ‘I am’. As soon as my left hemisphere says ‘I am’, it
separates me, you, us, from the energy flow around us and keeps me separate
from you; and you from me. This is the
portion of the brain Jill lost on the morning of her stroke.
She woke up
to a pounding pain over her left eye. It
was this caustic pain, like when you eat too much ice cream, and it would grip
her then release her, and then it would grip her again, and release her. She noticed it, but she didn't think too much
of it at the time. She ended up jumping
on to her cardio-glider; it’s this full body exercise machine. As Jill was working out on this, she noticed
that her hands looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. It was as though her consciousness had
shifted away from her normal perception of reality where she was a person on
the machine having this experience, to some esoteric space where she was
witnessing herself having this experience.
Jill walked across the living room floor and she noticed everything in
her body had slowed way down. Every step
was rigid and very deliberate; there was no fluidity to her movement. There was a constriction in her area of
perception so she was only focused on her internal systems.
Jill
attempted to get into the shower and she ended up losing her balance and was
propped up against the wall. As she
looked down at her arm, she realized she could no longer define the boundaries
of her body, where she began and where she ended, because the molecules and
atoms in her arms blended with the molecules and atoms of the wall. All Jill could detect was this energy. Energy was all around her. She tried to figure out what was going
on. The chatter in her left hemisphere
suddenly went silent. She was captivated
by the energy around her, and because she could no longer identify with the
boundaries of her body, she felt this enormous and expansive feeling. She felt at one with all the energy around
her, and she felt it was beautiful.
Jill’s left
brain comes back on and tells her she’s got a problem. But then she drifted back into this beautiful
energy and expansive consciousness. It
was just too beautiful there. Now,
imagine if you can what it would be like to be totally disconnected to the
brain chatter that connects you to the external world. This is what it felt like: all stress and
concerns, traumas, relationships, problems, issues connected to the external
world were gone. This is the freedom she
felt. She felt lighter in her body and
felt this incredible sense of peace.
Just imagine what it would be like to let go of a lifetime of emotional
baggage! This is what Jill felt like –
it was euphoria!
Her left
brain comes back on and says she needs to get help. Jill starts walking around the apartment
attempting to get ready for work. And
she keeps asking herself, ‘Can I drive? Can I drive? Can I drive?’, and just
then, her right arm went totally paralyzed by her side. Suddenly she realized she was having a
stroke. So the next thing her brain says
to do is ‘This is so cool! How many
brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brains from the inside
out?!’
Jill then
tries to call work to get some help. She
remembers she has a business card in her office with her numbers on it. She goes into her office and pulls out a
stack of business cards, and even though she knows she could see clearly in her
mind’s eye what her business card looked like, she couldn't tell if what she
was looking at was her card or not because all she could see were pixels. All the pixels of the pictures, words,
background and numbers were blended together.
Then Jill would wait for what she described as a wave of clarity, and in
that moment she could reattach to her normal reality and then she could tell
which card was hers or not. It took Jill
45 minutes to get down one inch inside the stack of cards to find
hers.
In the
meantime, her hemorrhage is getting bigger.
Jill didn't understand numbers, or the telephone, but that was the only
plan she had. She put the phone pad and
her card next to each other and she starts matching the shapes of the squiggles
of the phone card to the squiggles on the phone pad. However, she would drift back out into la-la
land, and then she would come back and not remember which numbers she had
dialed. This went on for a while. Eventually the whole number gets dialed, and
her colleague gets on the phone and all she hears is this ‘woof woof woof’ on
the other end, similar to the sound the teacher would make in the Charlie Brown
cartoons. And she thought to herself,
‘he sounds like a golden retriever.’
What Jill didn't know was that she couldn't speak or understand language
until she tried. Her colleague
fortunately figured out she needed help and called the paramedics.
On her way
to the hospital in the ambulance, Jill curled up into a little fetal ball –
like a balloon that had just a little bit of air – and she felt her energy lift
and felt her spirit surrender. In that
moment, Jill knew she was no longer the choreographer of her life, and either
the doctors would rescue her body and give her a second chance at life, or this
was her moment of transition.
When she
woke up later that afternoon, Jill was shocked to discover she was still
alive. When she felt her spirit
surrender, Jill had said goodbye to her life.
Her mind was suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. With stimulation coming in through her sensory
systems, it felt like pure pain, light burned her brain, and sounds were so
loud and chaotic she couldn't pick out a voice from the background noise. Jill wanted to escape. At the same time, because she couldn't
identify her body in space, she felt enormous, expansive. Her spirit soared free in a silent
euphoria. She found nirvana.
Jill
remembered thinking there was no way she could squeeze this enormousness of
herself back into her tiny little body.
But then she realized, ‘I’m still alive, I’m still alive! And I have found nirvana! And if I am still alive then everyone who is
alive can find nirvana.’ She pictured a
world of beautiful, loving, peaceful, compassionate people who knew they could
come to this plane at any time. They
could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find
this peace. Then she thought to herself,
‘what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this
could be to how we live our lives.’ And
it was this insight that motivated Jill to recover.
2 ½ weeks
later, the surgeons removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball pushing up
against her language centers. It took
Jill over 8 years to completely recover.
What were
Jill’s insights from her experience?
Jill discovered as a consequence of her stroke that we are the life
force power of the universe with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we get to choose moment by moment who and
how we want to be in this world. We can
step into the consciousness of the right hemisphere where we are, you are, I
am, the life force power of the universe.
The life force power of 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that
make up our form, at one with all that is.
Or, we can choose to step into the consciousness of our left hemisphere
– a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, I separate from you,
and you separate from me. These are the
worlds inside of us. Now which would
you choose? Which do you choose? And
when?
Jill Bolte
Taylor says at the very end she believes the more time we spend choosing to run
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.
This, I
believe, is definitely an idea worth spreading.
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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.' He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com
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