about Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of Insight"
There is an amazing video everyone should watch, on Ted.com. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher, discusses her own stroke and its lessons. Go to www.ted.com for this very powerful 18 minutes. Her observations about right/left brain foci are so closely related to the burgeoning literature on "being in the now" a la Eckhardt Tolle.
"Focus on the now" is a tool I use with friends and colleagues to calm anxiety and encourage happiness. Where are you right now? There are no worries in the now. If you are fully in the now, it's possible to make choices based on gut instinct - because you can hear your gut speak (that brain in our intestinal tract...?). Beginning exactly where we are in the present allows us to make more realistic plans for reaching our goals. Appreciating what we have now allows us to be happy NOW, and continue to be so in the future - because the future is always now. It does work.
One thing fascinates me: Alcoholics Anonymous has a ton of sayings and tools to help people recover from active alcoholism and learn to live sober. One of the key slogans is "One Day at a Time," sometimes "one minute at a time." The core message is that it's possible to not drink for one 24 hour period, even if it's not possible to imagine not drinking for the rest of your life. As people stay sober, a day at a time, for longer periods, that message is applicable to every situation in life. The Al-Anon program for families of alcoholics has a little pamphlet called "Just For Today" that reminds readers that "just for today, I can handle almost anything" (a bad paraphrase). Basically, if you look at where your feet are today, right now, you're OK.
People only stop drinking when drinking stops working. Booze helps alcoholics be unselfconscious and comfortable in one's skin. It lessens one's shyness or self-criticism. Is alcohol then a mechanism to shut off the left brain? To allow one to lose oneself in the ethereal connectedness Jill Bolte Taylor describes?
Can it be that the tool "one day at a time" allows a recovering alcoholic to activate the right brain and achieve the same kind of release that alcohol once promised, sort of delivered on, and then ripped away?
"Focus on the now" is a tool I use with friends and colleagues to calm anxiety and encourage happiness. Where are you right now? There are no worries in the now. If you are fully in the now, it's possible to make choices based on gut instinct - because you can hear your gut speak (that brain in our intestinal tract...?). Beginning exactly where we are in the present allows us to make more realistic plans for reaching our goals. Appreciating what we have now allows us to be happy NOW, and continue to be so in the future - because the future is always now. It does work.
One thing fascinates me: Alcoholics Anonymous has a ton of sayings and tools to help people recover from active alcoholism and learn to live sober. One of the key slogans is "One Day at a Time," sometimes "one minute at a time." The core message is that it's possible to not drink for one 24 hour period, even if it's not possible to imagine not drinking for the rest of your life. As people stay sober, a day at a time, for longer periods, that message is applicable to every situation in life. The Al-Anon program for families of alcoholics has a little pamphlet called "Just For Today" that reminds readers that "just for today, I can handle almost anything" (a bad paraphrase). Basically, if you look at where your feet are today, right now, you're OK.
People only stop drinking when drinking stops working. Booze helps alcoholics be unselfconscious and comfortable in one's skin. It lessens one's shyness or self-criticism. Is alcohol then a mechanism to shut off the left brain? To allow one to lose oneself in the ethereal connectedness Jill Bolte Taylor describes?
Can it be that the tool "one day at a time" allows a recovering alcoholic to activate the right brain and achieve the same kind of release that alcohol once promised, sort of delivered on, and then ripped away?
posted by julieannerickson at 10:25 PM
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