Jill Bolte Taylor used to label herself as a brain scientist. An unexpected stroke when she was 37 led her to explore deep consciousness and rediscover insight to sustain inner peace. Within four hours, she could no longer walk, talk, read, write, could not recall any of her life or mentally-process information. Then, over a period of eight years, she experienced a profound journey that resulted in a complete recovery. In her book, she shares 50 tips and things she feels were necessary (and not needed) to heal.
As it happens, her book, My Stroke of Insight, was a festive gift to me from an eighty-four year old friend who has lived his own small strokes. He inspires me to encourage people to stop asking what may be wrong with them so they move beyond the education that keeps them thinking as they do. Consider these 5 tips to reframe your own reality;
1) Welcome the opportunity to transcend your normal perceptions. Illness often has one of two main effects on people--it causes them to focus on the ego mind of the left hemisphere, which continues to believe they are invincible and dramatic incapacity is irrelevant or, the right hemisphere influences them to completely transform how they think and behave to nurture states of joy. You may experience one, both or neither.
2) Recognize your information processing system creates you external reality. You choose to divide your moment-by-moment experience into past, present and future based on brain directives that may lie beyond your conscious scope. When you step outside the anticipated limits of time, or find yourself in a state where temporality is gone, then you begin to dissolve self-created boundaries. How you frame our perception expands. You redefine processing through more than visual, sensory and pattern association.
3)Realize you can move beyond analytical judgment. When the left hemisphere is dominant, it distracts the mind from thoughts of peace, serenity, security, intuition and universal inter-connectedness linked to the right hemisphere. Standard perception and behaviour result from constant exchanges between hemispheres. People are generally right or left brain dominant. To achieve greater balance requires a decision to raise awareness and shift gears. To move beyond judgment is the path to enlightenment.
4) Consider illness could appear as a form of biological evolution. In order to evolve into a more highly-oganized form, human genetic material takes advantage of opportunities to adapt and transform. From a biological view, human beings are like a species-specific mutation of the earths genetic code. We are related to everything and constantly evolving in ways we do not always anticipate, grasp or readily explain.
5) Consciously evoke your own waves of clarity. Regardless of your own mental or physical state, you can choose to view it as a blessing in disguise. You can choose to ask questions like, "Who am I?" and What am I doing?" You can take steps to reconnect with spiritual forces, to better understand your attachments to your body and life as you perceive it. Choose to move beyond worry and live each moment the best you can.