Our Own Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained and published brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious neuroanatomist, she watched her mind completely deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Because of her understanding of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and an amazing mother, Jill completely recovered her mind, brain and body. In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, Jill shares with us her recommendations for recovery and the insight she gained into the unique functions of the right and left halves of her brain. Having lost the categorizing, organizing, describing, judging and critically analyzing skills of her left brain, along with its language centers and thus ego center, Jill’s consciousness shifted away from normal reality. In the absence of her left brain’s neural circuitry, her consciousness shifted into present moment thinking whereby she experienced herself “at one with the universe.”

Based upon her academic training and personal experience, Jill helps others not only rebuild their brains from trauma, but helps those of us with normal brains better understand how we can ‘tend the garden of our minds’ to maximize our quality of life. Jill pushes the envelope in our understanding about how we can consciously influence the neural circuitry underlying what we think, how we feel, and how we react to life’s circumstances. Jill teaches us through her own example how we might more readily exercise our own right hemispheric circuitry with the intention of helping all human beings become more humane. “I believe the more time we spend running our deep inner peace circuitry, then the more peace we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace we will have on the planet.”

This incredible story played a part in my personal when my mother read the book while recovering from a severe Brain Aneurysm. She was deeply inspired by Jill's experience, and it helped her refill her life with hope, happieness and meaning. My mother being a musician decided it was time to bring the creation of music back into her life. She wrote a heart felt song about her own enlighting journey through pain and strenght.

Almost a year later, my mother has been recovering miraculously, performing her music, including exercise in her everyday life, and living life to its fullest. She also found an amazing amount of ambition and decided to email the women who helped her fight through her near death expereince.

Recently in late October my mother performed her song, Colours of Me www.myspace.com/noniecrete , at a conference that Jill invited her too and made her wildest dream come true.