20 minutes is nothing to your right brain… Anna McDonnell

I am going to start my first post by inviting you to watch an amazing video. If you are compelled, after watching, to spend a little time in meditation, prayer, yoga, or any contemplative ritual that suits, I will understand if you don’t come back. I’ll miss you, but I’ll understand.

It is a twenty minute talk - fair warning, it is a little slow to get started, but oh my heavens please do yourself a favor and watch until the end - by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a brain scientist who was inspired to study the brain by her brother, who has schizophrenia. If you have ever spent time with someone with schizophrenia, you know that they often struggle to hold fast to a line you and I probably take for granted, the one between what is normally considered reality and something other.

Jill Bolte Taylor watched herself have a stroke. She knew enough to know what was happening as, little by little, the left side of her brain, the part that keeps track of the past and the present, of how to dial 911, of the meaning of the little scratches of black on white on this screen, was taken offline by a whopping cerebral hemorrhage.

The right side of her brain, like an often overshadowed younger sibling, took over when given the chance. This is the part of the brain that knows nothing about division, nothing about separateness, nothing about this and that, yes and no, me and you. It knows nothing about what is real, and everything about what is.

Watch while she describes what it means to lose consciousness and gain awareness.

Last week, for an hour, Mate, Youngest and myself turned off the lights and disconnected ourselves from our respective electronic tethers. We had each been in a different part of the house: Mate was writing in his tiny office off our bedroom, I was writing in my tiny office in the pantry, and Youngest was, as is his wont, simultaneously IMing, video chatting, talking on the phone and yes, texting in his room. All evening long, we had been stuck in separate realities. All night long, we sent ourselves outward to others, ignoring the possibility for connection that waited, like the right brain, for a chance to shine.

Once the lights were out, we gathered in the candlelight. The idea of staying in our separate spaces without our umbilical electronic connections was unthinkable. We sat in the living room and played poker in the dark. We laughed and leaned against each other. We wrangled about the legality of borrowing from the bank and who had forgotten to ante. For an hour, the separateness was an illusion.

I want my little family to take some time each week to step, as Bolte Taylor says, to the right of our left brains. I want us all to spend more time in that other space, where differences dissolve and the light glows from the inside out.

Crossposted, kinda, where I, in reality, am at most of the week: The End of Motherhood?