Speaker 1: Are you stressed by the holidays? Many of us are.
Speaker 1: I recently hosted a community event where I taught a
Speaker 1: spiritual habit that will help you feel more at peace
Speaker 1: this time of year. You can access the free video
Speaker 1: at one you feed dot net slash Holiday. Expectations during
Speaker 1: the holidays can cause us so much stress, things like
Speaker 1: obligations to be with difficult family members, pressure to make
Speaker 1: everyone happy, loneliness because of little or no family to
Speaker 1: be with, or overspending on buying gifts. If any of
Speaker 1: that sounds familiar, go to one you feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash Holiday to get this free video teaching on how
Speaker 1: to experience more peace this holiday season. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true,
Speaker 1: and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter it takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Hey everybody, it's your
Speaker 1: pal Chris. Where's the opening quote? You might ask, Well, instead,
Speaker 1: you're getting me because I wanted to tell you about
Speaker 1: this episode. First of all, the guests are Jill Bolte Taylor,
Speaker 1: who you may remember from episode four nineteen not terribly
Speaker 1: long ago, who is the Harvard trained and published new
Speaker 1: anatomist who in had a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere
Speaker 1: of her brain and she lost the ability to walk, talk, read, write, etcetera. Well.
Speaker 1: Also another guest on this episode in addition to Jill
Speaker 1: is John Britton, who heard that episode and contacted Eric,
Speaker 1: and he is on because he was a former medical
Speaker 1: doctor who had a right brain injury. So this is
Speaker 1: a discussion between the two with Eric and Jenny as
Speaker 1: a special episode. The other thing I wanted to qualify
Speaker 1: is that there were some recording problems during this episode,
Speaker 1: so you may notice that everybody sounds very different compared
Speaker 1: to our normal episodes. But the content is great, so
Speaker 1: enjoy this episode with Jill Bolte Taylor and John Britton
Speaker 1: and extra special fancy pants interviewer Jenny Gay. Hello, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to a special episode of The One You Feed.
Speaker 1: I am joined here with Jinny who you know if
Speaker 1: you've listened to some of the recent episodes, Jill Bolte Taylor,
Speaker 1: who has been a guest on the show before, and
Speaker 1: John Britton, who is a former anesthesiologist who has had
Speaker 1: a brain injury at one point in his past. And
Speaker 1: why that's relevant will become clear in a moment. After
Speaker 1: we had Jill on the show, she talked about how
Speaker 1: she suffered an injury to her left brain, leaving her
Speaker 1: primarily function in her right brain. And after we aired
Speaker 1: that episode, John reached out to me and said, hey,
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, I had an injury to my right brain
Speaker 1: and it was sort of the opposite of the one
Speaker 1: that Jill had, and that got me thinking, wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be interesting to bring the two of them together to
Speaker 1: talk about right brain, left brain, whole brain, living with
Speaker 1: two different perspectives on injuries to each side of the brain.
Speaker 1: So that's what we are here to do. And to
Speaker 1: kick us off, I'm going to allow John to answer
Speaker 1: the parable of the wolf question, since Jill has already
Speaker 1: had a shot at it. There's a grandfather who's talking
Speaker 1: with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One
Speaker 1: is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
Speaker 1: bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandsonth stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So John would like to start off by asking you
Speaker 1: what that parable means to you in your life and
Speaker 1: in your work. You know, I've listened to the one
Speaker 1: you pad podcasts enough to have heard probably two responses
Speaker 1: to that parable. So I kind of asked myself how
Speaker 1: I'm respond to that parable. I think it's pretty easy
Speaker 1: for me right now. The bad wolf to me is
Speaker 1: my laft brain, where you know, it's sort of negative thoughts, judges.
Speaker 1: Negative thoughts are anxiety and anger and sadness. And to
Speaker 1: take carry newcomer song title, it can't sit without knowing.
Speaker 1: It's a defender of its space. At all costs, and
Speaker 1: in my experience, it's reluctant to allow the right brain
Speaker 1: to experience mindfulness in presence. It's a defender of its place.
Speaker 1: It doesn't allow feelings to be had. It defends itself,
Speaker 1: the right brain, which is my good wealth, which was
Speaker 1: very hard to get to and recovering from my brain injury.
Speaker 1: It's for me the place of awareness, uh, compassion and empathy,
Speaker 1: is a place of spontaneity, and it's a place of
Speaker 1: wisdom and love which to me needs equanimity. And that's
Speaker 1: a very special place that's really hard I think to
Speaker 1: get to. Thanks John, That's that's really really insightful, and
Speaker 1: I think you sent it up some of where we
Speaker 1: want to go. Yeah. I thought perhaps before we dive
Speaker 1: into each of your stories and your experiences of your
Speaker 1: traumatic brain injuries and recovery, which I'm fascinated by and
Speaker 1: can't wait to hear you share, Jill, would it be
Speaker 1: possible for you to share with us just a bit
Speaker 1: about maybe what the right brain represents its function and
Speaker 1: what the left brain represents and its function. I would
Speaker 1: also refer listeners back to episode for nineteen, which is
Speaker 1: Eric's interview with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, and she goes
Speaker 1: into great detail on this topic and in her book
Speaker 1: Whole Brain Living. So that is a wonderful precursor to
Speaker 1: the conversation we're about to have. But for the purposes
Speaker 1: of this episode, Jella wonder if you could maybe give
Speaker 1: us a brief overview. So I think John just kind
Speaker 1: of said it all because in and his answer was
Speaker 1: very similar to mine. Who's the good wolf? To me,
Speaker 1: it's the right brain because the right brain is right here,
Speaker 1: right now, It's in the present moment, experience, And the
Speaker 1: biggest difference to me between the two hemispheres is the timing.
Speaker 1: The left brain has a past and a future. It
Speaker 1: has linearity of thinking, and it focuses on me, the individual.
Speaker 1: The right hemisphere it's right here, right now, and it's
Speaker 1: it doesn't have me the individual as the focus. The
Speaker 1: focus becomes the we, the collective whole. So how do
Speaker 1: I exist in the present moment and experience all the
Speaker 1: same things that the left brain is going to experience,
Speaker 1: but it does it differently. For example, the right brain
Speaker 1: is going to hear language, but it's not going to
Speaker 1: focus on the words and the details and the linearity
Speaker 1: of that thinking, it's going to focus on the intonation
Speaker 1: of voice, the emotional content of the voice. The facial
Speaker 1: language doesn't match the body language does the big picture
Speaker 1: of how the person is communicating, does that fit together?
Speaker 1: And with that, because there's no true separation between me
Speaker 1: and others, I come forward with compassion and openness and expansiveness.
Speaker 1: And because I don't have the definition of right, wrong, good, bad,
Speaker 1: which is what part of what the left brain does,
Speaker 1: then I'm open to creativity, I'm innovative, and I'm I'm communal.
Speaker 1: I connect with others. So the right here, right now,
Speaker 1: the experience of the whole is the right brain. The
Speaker 1: left brain is details details, more details about those details.
Speaker 1: Take that big picture of the present moment and divide
Speaker 1: it up so that we can actually communicate about it.
Speaker 1: And we humans do that through this huge loop of language.
Speaker 1: And so we look at the big picture and we say,
Speaker 1: we're going to now define a boundary between what I'm
Speaker 1: going to consider pink and what I'm going to consider
Speaker 1: as read. And that way, then two of us who
Speaker 1: are separate from one another because we each now have
Speaker 1: an individualan and identity. Then the filter of the world
Speaker 1: goes to the individual, and there's a group of cells
Speaker 1: in that left hemisphere that actually defines the boundaries of
Speaker 1: where we begin an end, so that we perceive ourselves
Speaker 1: to not be a part of the whole, but separate
Speaker 1: from one another. So these two hemispheres are completely filtering.
Speaker 1: The left as it relates to me, the individual and
Speaker 1: I have linearity of time, a past in the future,
Speaker 1: and all those details right, wrong, good, bad. And then
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere is open and expansive and more connected
Speaker 1: to the present moment and the experience of we as
Speaker 1: a community. And so those two hemispheres they function very differently,
Speaker 1: but in a normal, healthy brain, they're connected and they communicate, right,
Speaker 1: They typically do have a bit of a synergistic effect.
Speaker 1: Would you say, yes, you have three hundred million axonal
Speaker 1: fibers going between the two hemispheres. So a group of
Speaker 1: cells in the right brain is communicating with the comparable
Speaker 1: set of cells in the left brain, and someone which
Speaker 1: group of cells is inhibiting the other cells. So there's
Speaker 1: always a group of cells in any ability that's going
Speaker 1: to be dominant, and that's how we gain focus. We
Speaker 1: have to be able to focus our brain on certain details. Now,
Speaker 1: if I'm having a thousand things going on in any moment,
Speaker 1: then I might have half of that going on in
Speaker 1: the right brain and half of that going on in
Speaker 1: the left brain, or I may have my perception completely
Speaker 1: skewed to the left where I'm in my left brain
Speaker 1: and I can't really access the experiences of the right brain,
Speaker 1: or vice versa. So the brain cells in both hemispheres
Speaker 1: are always functioning at the same time, So at any moment,
Speaker 1: I'm using both, but each ability is focused by a
Speaker 1: specific group of cells and over those fibers in that
Speaker 1: corpus colosum is inhibiting the cells in the opposite hemisphere
Speaker 1: in a normal brain. Yeah, I didn't interview with McGilchrist,
Speaker 1: which may or may not be out by the time
Speaker 1: we release this, but he has a way of describing
Speaker 1: these two ways of the brain working that I thought
Speaker 1: was really really helpful. And he said, imagine a bird
Speaker 1: sitting on the ground pecking it, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: get seed out of some gravel. The left brain is
Speaker 1: very focused in on all, right, that's gravel, that's a seed.
Speaker 1: Let me do this, let me do that. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, the right brain is perceiving the whole
Speaker 1: of its environment, so that it's watching, it's aware. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can't just be only focused on this pebble because
Speaker 1: I might get eaten. Right, So when they're working together,
Speaker 1: you see that sort of synergy there. Of I'm finding
Speaker 1: the food, I'm focusing on details, I'm keeping the whole
Speaker 1: in place. And I think be curious to see if
Speaker 1: you guys both agree with this, and Jenny too. I
Speaker 1: think that sometimes these conversations come across as saying the
Speaker 1: left brain is better than the right brain. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry that the right brain is better than the left brain,
Speaker 1: and I think that that's not the message I've taken
Speaker 1: or take. I think the message I would take is
Speaker 1: we have become increasingly left brain oriented as a society.
Speaker 1: That's where most of the focus is. So in the
Speaker 1: same way that you need to correct for a deficiency,
Speaker 1: we need to overcorrect towards the right brain so that
Speaker 1: we do get more of what Jill you call whole
Speaker 1: brain living. I agree completely. I think that you know
Speaker 1: the ultimate goal is we have these two magnificent machines
Speaker 1: inside of our head, and we need them both desperately.
Speaker 1: The human experiment is the evolution of human has been
Speaker 1: these emotional systems in both hemispheres and then added on
Speaker 1: tissue of thinking in both hemispheres, and so ultimately the
Speaker 1: goal is to use your whole brain. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's so funny because so often the conversation then goes to, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I'm more right brain, but my husband he's a left brain.
Speaker 1: So between the two of us we make a whole brain.
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, you know, opposites attracted in the
Speaker 1: beginning until they don't. And you know, when you look
Speaker 1: at the level of divorce, a lot of that is
Speaker 1: because that difference that attracted us in the beginning is
Speaker 1: now these are the points of contention. And so really
Speaker 1: developing the whole brain inside of your head and a
Speaker 1: whole brain inside of your partner's head ends up with
Speaker 1: now really conscious people having a conscious relationship using their
Speaker 1: whole brains. For me, I never allowed my right brain
Speaker 1: to be used. I use the example when I was
Speaker 1: in college going by the studio art department and saying,
Speaker 1: who would ever do that? I mean, you can't make
Speaker 1: any money doing that, And they're a bunch of hippies
Speaker 1: and they don't. They don't really like listening to this
Speaker 1: to this stuff I like to talk about so honestly,
Speaker 1: even before my brain injury, I never allowed my right
Speaker 1: brain to be used very much. Wasn't really until after
Speaker 1: that that I had to or what my right brain
Speaker 1: was all about. Well, and I think that's a great
Speaker 1: growth edge because you're right, you're an m D and
Speaker 1: m d's focus on left brain. I mean, even by
Speaker 1: definition of science and the scientific method, it's a left
Speaker 1: brain process. It's a method that needs to be done
Speaker 1: and repeatable and get the same results. And you know,
Speaker 1: I teach a medical school, and and I teach anatomy
Speaker 1: and gross anatomy and neuro anatomy and histology. I mean
Speaker 1: that's the details of the body. And you have to
Speaker 1: become a master of those details and do your job,
Speaker 1: uh and do your calculations in anesthesiastics and a thesiology.
Speaker 1: So so you have have you you know, you picked
Speaker 1: a grain profession for you. And then how lovely that
Speaker 1: after having lost what skill set you did have in
Speaker 1: that brain, it has now inspired you to explore, okay,
Speaker 1: well what is over there and what's it like now?
Speaker 1: Without that even for an extreme left brainer, and then
Speaker 1: what is the value of re engaging with those abilities.
Speaker 1: So I think you're a great story. So, speaking of
Speaker 1: that story, John, I'd love to turn it over to
Speaker 1: you and for you to tell us and listeners a
Speaker 1: little bit about yourself. Maybe let's start before your brain injury.
Speaker 1: Tell us a little about your life, the way you
Speaker 1: operated in the world, your profession. Just let us get
Speaker 1: to know you a little bit. Well, I grew up
Speaker 1: in a small town room and my father was an alcoholic.
Speaker 1: He was a slot. Uh, no other way to put it.
Speaker 1: And so how I interfacement with the external world was
Speaker 1: really important to me, and so I crossed over into
Speaker 1: my left brain really early. I wanted a different life
Speaker 1: or profession that people would respect me for, and so
Speaker 1: the right brain had no room. I couldn't give it space.
Speaker 1: So anyway, continued on for years that way. And then
Speaker 1: finally when I became in ants, I didn't mainly pediatrics
Speaker 1: and uh mainly or a lot of basic babies, and
Speaker 1: so you have to develop really detailed linear thinking because
Speaker 1: I had a progression of things I had to do
Speaker 1: how to use anxiety as a tool. Actually, the tool
Speaker 1: of anxiety got me through a lot of stuff because
Speaker 1: I couldn't back away and anxiety kept me there. The
Speaker 1: problem was when I had when I got sick, the
Speaker 1: anxiety became a weapon against me. But anyway, um left
Speaker 1: brain was was it all the way? And so then
Speaker 1: tell us a bit as much as you're comfortable sharing,
Speaker 1: tell us about what happened to your right brain. Well,
Speaker 1: I gotta hurt thee simplex type one infection from a patient.
Speaker 1: So it's actually pretty interesting medically. I think when I
Speaker 1: was a resident three or five years ago, I got
Speaker 1: a little infection of my finger, and back then universal
Speaker 1: per car just didn't exist. Really. I wasn't wearing gloves,
Speaker 1: I didn't have eye protection, I wasn't wearing a mask.
Speaker 1: So um, I put a breathing to been a young
Speaker 1: boy who was badly burned, and a couple of days
Speaker 1: later had an infection in my finger that was her
Speaker 1: petic infection and went away with oral anti viral medicines.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing about Herpes simplexes it lives forever
Speaker 1: in your trade geminal nerve, your fifth cranial nerve, which
Speaker 1: is a part of a bunch of nerves at the
Speaker 1: base of your brain that basically allows your head to function.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make it really simple here, but it
Speaker 1: lives there forever. I think most people know about the
Speaker 1: chicken pox virus that causes shingles, you know, because it
Speaker 1: chicken pox virus lives in your nervous system um in
Speaker 1: a different place than my my virus. But anyway, thirty
Speaker 1: years later it came back and it manifested itself as
Speaker 1: a bad brand infection or ensephalitis and be has My
Speaker 1: original infection was in my right finger. It just affected
Speaker 1: my right brain because that's where it hung out for
Speaker 1: thirty years. And my neurologist at Johns Hopkins said that
Speaker 1: there's a one in a thousand chants it'll come back,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't go away really and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: about a year ago did come back for a period
Speaker 1: of time and it went away with oral medicines. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that's how it happened. So, John, as this infection set
Speaker 1: in on your right brain, do you have a memory
Speaker 1: of the loss of function? What was that like for you? No?
Speaker 1: Actually I don't. I was visiting my mom who was
Speaker 1: undergoing cancer treatments in Vermont, and I was going to
Speaker 1: take her to a bunch of doctor's appointments and along
Speaker 1: the way I was arrested for driving under the influence
Speaker 1: to get to my mom. So I had an arrest record.
Speaker 1: I gave the small town cop twenty dollars and let
Speaker 1: me go. Took my car away and brought me to
Speaker 1: a bus depot and it took the us to the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere and got a cab, you know, in
Speaker 1: the middle of rural New England. I got a cat
Speaker 1: who took me to my mom's house. And then after
Speaker 1: that I don't really remember much. I remember going to
Speaker 1: her doctor's appointment and just feeling really weird. And that
Speaker 1: night I started behaving really abnormally. So my mom called
Speaker 1: her best friend, who was a retired English professor from
Speaker 1: the University of Vermont, who came over and just observed,
Speaker 1: and she wrote a copious notes like an English professor
Speaker 1: called her husband's he said, this is what John's doing
Speaker 1: and calling ambulance. This is He's really sick. And so
Speaker 1: they took me to this little hospital in Vermont, and
Speaker 1: luckily they had an ivy medicine called a cyclovirus, which
Speaker 1: saved my life and actually probably saved a lot of
Speaker 1: my brain, because otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you.
Speaker 1: And so I was in a coma for close to
Speaker 1: a week and UH step down intensive carried and then
Speaker 1: I was I went through a long brain rehabilitation process.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting during the brain rehabilitation process, my fellow
Speaker 1: brain rehab ees, I couldn't understand why I was there
Speaker 1: because I could talk, I had memories. When you have
Speaker 1: a right brain injury, it's different. People look at you
Speaker 1: and say, well, you seem like the same old person.
Speaker 1: You know. I don't really, I don't really get where
Speaker 1: your problem is. And that was a little interesting, and
Speaker 1: I must say to to say at least it because
Speaker 1: I wanted to say, like I'm a duck on water,
Speaker 1: I'm paddling like mad underneath, but you don't realize what's
Speaker 1: happening to me. And that's that's really difficult for people
Speaker 1: to understand left versus a right brain injury, because I
Speaker 1: could be really articulate. I could use language to describe
Speaker 1: things really well. So what was the difference to you?
Speaker 1: What did you feel was different poster injury. Well, there's
Speaker 1: some subtle things, like my spatial visual things were rock.
Speaker 1: I couldn't figure out where I was and even though
Speaker 1: I've been in places before, I would take the wrong
Speaker 1: turn of walking. I couldn't drive for a long time,
Speaker 1: and my short term memory was a little off, And
Speaker 1: I think cognitively, my kind of academic, kind of therapist
Speaker 1: Emily Gibson would say, your executive function was a little lot.
Speaker 1: My ability to make decisions about how I was going
Speaker 1: to run the day was a little lot. I don't
Speaker 1: know enough to know whether that's entirely right green or not,
Speaker 1: but but mainly it was my left brain hijacking things
Speaker 1: and just saying, you know, you've got things to do,
Speaker 1: and I really didn't have anything to do, but my
Speaker 1: lap brain said, you know, you've always had something to
Speaker 1: do during the morning, and why aren't you doing something.
Speaker 1: My right brain couldn't could modulate that, and that was different,
Speaker 1: completely unmodulated left brain, no ability to the right brain
Speaker 1: to help me out that way. That's interesting in that,
Speaker 1: you know, what Jill said earlier is that many of
Speaker 1: the neurons that connect the right and left brain are inhibitory.
Speaker 1: They are the right brain slowing down the left brain
Speaker 1: saying hold on, And you suddenly didn't have that. So
Speaker 1: what you had was sort of that left brain in overdrive.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering Jill if you have any questions from your
Speaker 1: perspective that you'd like to ask John about his experience.
Speaker 1: I think he's giving us a lot of information. He's saying,
Speaker 1: for example, there's a group of cells in the left
Speaker 1: brain that defined the definition of where I begin and
Speaker 1: where I end, and so I know the mass that
Speaker 1: is me because of my left brain. But then there's
Speaker 1: a group of comparable cells in the right brain that says,
Speaker 1: now that I can define me the individual, how do
Speaker 1: I move me in space appropriately? And so he's you know,
Speaker 1: in his description of not being able to have the
Speaker 1: spatial orientation that's one of the skill sets of the
Speaker 1: right brain. Left brain says this is me. Right brain says, now,
Speaker 1: this is how I moved me in the bigger picture
Speaker 1: in order to get me where I want to go.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing is that his left brain
Speaker 1: is saying, I'm busy, I've got things to do. Where's
Speaker 1: my to do list? But there's nothing on the to
Speaker 1: do list. But my left brain's got to do do
Speaker 1: do right, And that's what it does. It's in a hurry,
Speaker 1: and it's busy, and it's but it doesn't You have
Speaker 1: to have the bigger picture of your life in order
Speaker 1: to know, Okay, well if I'm not working from a
Speaker 1: very specific list of to do, because my whole brain
Speaker 1: has sat down and figured out, Okay, I'm gonna do this,
Speaker 1: and then I'm going to do that, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do this and that needs to be done, and so
Speaker 1: I'm actually doing things as opposed to just the sense
Speaker 1: of urgency which that left brain has. There's a level
Speaker 1: of acceleration if I gotta get it done. I got
Speaker 1: to go to the office, I got fifty things I
Speaker 1: gotta get done. I started, I moved into that level
Speaker 1: of speed, and I do do do, do do. But
Speaker 1: you have to be able to have the big picture
Speaker 1: in order to actually know how do I place myself
Speaker 1: in relationship to all those things so I actually accomplish anything.
Speaker 1: So as he speaks, my brain just thinks, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a factor of the left brain and the right brain.
Speaker 1: And I think another point that John made that was
Speaker 1: really important is that anybody with a brain trauma. Mine
Speaker 1: was in my left brain. It influenced my whole brain
Speaker 1: in the beginning. His was in the right brain. It
Speaker 1: influenced the whole brain from the beginning. Because the brain
Speaker 1: is still this one mass. And so whether you have
Speaker 1: a hemorrhagict trauma and you've got more fluid going in
Speaker 1: and swelling, or you have some type of viral infection
Speaker 1: and you have a lymphatics going in to clean up
Speaker 1: the mess and to try to stabilize. When you experience
Speaker 1: a brain trauma, the whole brain is involved, and it's
Speaker 1: like there's no clarity. It's like you're inside of this
Speaker 1: big cotton ball that extends out a few feet from you,
Speaker 1: and you kind of can sense things, but but there's
Speaker 1: no clarity. There's this lack of clarity, and unfortunately, you know,
Speaker 1: more often than not, as with John, he looks the same.
Speaker 1: He looks like John. I looked like Jill. Okay, well, Jill,
Speaker 1: once I get a little bit of language back, which
Speaker 1: John didn't lose too much of his language because of
Speaker 1: that left brain. People are looking at him saying, well,
Speaker 1: you seem okay, what are you doing in here? And
Speaker 1: that's really hard because if you've got a broken arm,
Speaker 1: people are sympathetic and compassionate and they assist you because
Speaker 1: they can visualize the physical problem. But people who experience
Speaker 1: brain trauma, Mamma, we look the same on the outside,
Speaker 1: and so people don't get No, you have no idea
Speaker 1: how hard I'm working simply to keep up with my
Speaker 1: life in this moment. And this is a common complaint
Speaker 1: of people with brain trauma because we look normal, we
Speaker 1: look the same, and we are so not and things
Speaker 1: be overwhelmedness. Just the light can overwhelmness. Walk into a
Speaker 1: grocery store, it can be overwhelming sensory stimulation. But I
Speaker 1: look normal. So there is this very unique way in
Speaker 1: which we feel isolated because people cannot visualize and see
Speaker 1: and understand the problem. One thing I would add in
Speaker 1: terms of my experiences that my left brain would not
Speaker 1: let me deal with feeling. In your book, Jill, you're
Speaker 1: talking about we feel before we think. My left brain
Speaker 1: defenditive space and wouldn't let my right brain experience dealing.
Speaker 1: And I think that's one therapy that was really important
Speaker 1: for me and rebuilding my right brain is doing something
Speaker 1: called focusing or body centered inquiry with a guy named
Speaker 1: Jonathan bows Too lives in the woods in northern Virginia
Speaker 1: with his wife tar Rock, who is internationally famous. But
Speaker 1: Jonathan invited me to do body centered inquiry and it
Speaker 1: was all about experiencing what am I feeling, Where am
Speaker 1: I feeling at, what's associated with it? Visually, shape wise, spatially,
Speaker 1: And afterwards there was an intense quietness. So I felt like,
Speaker 1: and you mentioned this in your book to Jill, that
Speaker 1: my left brain was quiet. It wasn't so much that
Speaker 1: my right brain had been to the gym and had
Speaker 1: a good workout, was feeling good. It was that my
Speaker 1: left brain was quiet. It was my right brain was
Speaker 1: being allowed to exist basically and have an experience of
Speaker 1: showing out the visual and a spatial that I was
Speaker 1: experiencing during the inquiry. Interesting, you know, because our perception
Speaker 1: of ourselves and relationship to ourselves. I mean, everybody thinks, well,
Speaker 1: this is me, this is me, you know right, this
Speaker 1: is me. I know me, And it's like, well, the
Speaker 1: only reason we know what me is is because we
Speaker 1: were getting messaging inside of the brain. And in order
Speaker 1: for me to be defined as a space, there are
Speaker 1: cells that are performing that function in order for me
Speaker 1: to have some kind of experiential awareness of my body
Speaker 1: and what's going on, that intuitive knowing of the relationship
Speaker 1: inside of my own body, what's my gut saying, what
Speaker 1: am I feeling? What is the experience uh to be me?
Speaker 1: What does it just feel like to be me? We
Speaker 1: these are things that we all take for granted because
Speaker 1: we don't have to think about them, because, of course,
Speaker 1: I know what it feels like to be me until
Speaker 1: those cells go offline and now you're not getting fed
Speaker 1: that in form nation and yes, Tara Brock, of course,
Speaker 1: and and the ability to shift out of that left
Speaker 1: brain and quieted enough so that you can actually sit
Speaker 1: in the experience of what what is this mass that
Speaker 1: we define as me? And what is my relationship now
Speaker 1: with that? And how do I communicate with it or
Speaker 1: how does it communicate with me at a level that
Speaker 1: can be meaningful because intuition of the right brain and
Speaker 1: medical intuition into our own bodies is essentially this relationship
Speaker 1: that the right hemisphere in the present moment has with
Speaker 1: all these cells making up our body. And so all
Speaker 1: of that we have to quiet that left brain and
Speaker 1: allow that gift of the right brain to come online.
Speaker 1: So that would be a tough one. I think the world,
Speaker 1: not just me who had a right brain injury. I
Speaker 1: think the world has problems with that is basically what
Speaker 1: am I feeling? Where? Where is it for me, anxiety
Speaker 1: lies between my eyes. You know, people otherwise experience and
Speaker 1: media in their heart or they're they're aving them. But
Speaker 1: but anyway, there's a there's a felt sense that people
Speaker 1: people don't tap into it that I think is really
Speaker 1: important and I think Dodson really helped me with that.
Speaker 1: And I'd like to really point out the difference between
Speaker 1: feeling and emotion, because emotions, we're gonna have emotions. You
Speaker 1: can have sadness, probably, you can still have anger. Can
Speaker 1: you get angry in your left brain? There? John? Can
Speaker 1: you do that? So the emotions we have an emotion
Speaker 1: in both an emotional system, but feeling to truly feel,
Speaker 1: what does it feel like? What does it feel like,
Speaker 1: the relationship between your skin and the clothing on your body?
Speaker 1: What does it feel like? What's the temperature of the air,
Speaker 1: what's the pressure of the air on your body? The
Speaker 1: feeling the speed orient of bringing in sensory information as
Speaker 1: defined as feeling. So I just wanted to point that
Speaker 1: out because your examples you use the word feeling, and
Speaker 1: I just want to clarify that it's the feeling the
Speaker 1: experience of you as that mass. No, we're not just
Speaker 1: talking about emotional feelings. So I'd love to contrast John's
Speaker 1: experience and his story of his trauma in his right
Speaker 1: brain with Jill. We've explored this in a previous episode,
Speaker 1: but just for the sake of this episode, would you
Speaker 1: take us through a little bit about what happened to
Speaker 1: you and what your experience was. Yes. So, I had
Speaker 1: a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain,
Speaker 1: and over the course of four hours, I had a
Speaker 1: blood clot grow to the size of a fist. And
Speaker 1: by doing so, it's shut down my language, my definition
Speaker 1: of me as an individual, and I essentially became an
Speaker 1: infant in a woman's body because I didn't have me
Speaker 1: the individual. I didn't have any of my academics. I
Speaker 1: had no relationship, all my relationships in the external world,
Speaker 1: they were wiped out, my relationship with my academics and
Speaker 1: my my verbal language training. Well, in medicine, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's one thing to know a stomach, but
Speaker 1: you need to know the different parts of the stomach.
Speaker 1: You need to know the name of the different kinds
Speaker 1: of cells in the different organs. I mean, so much
Speaker 1: of of my academics had been left brain terminology, so
Speaker 1: I lost all that, and I lost the concept of mother.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know what a mother was, much less
Speaker 1: who my mother was. So I essentially became an infant
Speaker 1: in a woman's body. But I had the experiential I
Speaker 1: became this massive ball of energy. I didn't have the
Speaker 1: division of me, the individual as self. So I became connected.
Speaker 1: I became adams and molecules in cellular organic life form.
Speaker 1: And it was like, oh my gosh, I didn't die
Speaker 1: that day, right, I didn't die. I was all but dead,
Speaker 1: but I was alive. And and so I was just
Speaker 1: like a picture, a big old microbe that that had
Speaker 1: an awareness of the difference simply between being alive, which
Speaker 1: is like this miracle that nobody can explain, and capable
Speaker 1: of receiving stimulation and having experiential around me. I became
Speaker 1: all experiential. So all the experiential that John lost, that's
Speaker 1: all I became. So I lost all the details and
Speaker 1: all the to do and all the individuation and and
Speaker 1: any of that. The external world was no longer important
Speaker 1: to me. I just became this massive energy ball. And
Speaker 1: then I It took eight years for me to rebuild
Speaker 1: my left brain skill sets using my rag brain abilities
Speaker 1: in order to kind of backtrack, Well, I used to
Speaker 1: be able to us speak, and now everybody speaks and
Speaker 1: I don't speak, and I don't want to speak, because boys,
Speaker 1: does that take a lot of energy and effort. And
Speaker 1: what's the point, you know, when I can exist in bliss.
Speaker 1: So so I had to pull myself out of this
Speaker 1: blissful euphoria of the experience of the present moment and
Speaker 1: painstakingly rebuild the road back to these natural left brain abilities.
Speaker 1: So did your left brain come back online or is
Speaker 1: your right brain compensating for this loss? No? I rebuilt
Speaker 1: skill sets. And so this is when I really became
Speaker 1: aware of the emotional group of cells, the limbics cells,
Speaker 1: and the for my emotional in linearity of time, and
Speaker 1: that part of me, that motherboard was wiped clean. And
Speaker 1: then the left thinking is that rational brain that can
Speaker 1: have linearity of time. And eventually it was two and
Speaker 1: a half weeks after the hemorrhage, and I had an
Speaker 1: absolutely silent mind, nothing going on, no static, no language,
Speaker 1: no nothing, just blissful euphoria of the experience of the
Speaker 1: present moment. Was really wonderful. And then the surgeons went
Speaker 1: in and they removed that blood clot and then for
Speaker 1: two and a half more weeks I sat in absolute silence.
Speaker 1: And then after the recovery of these cells got a
Speaker 1: little better. Then it was like static, literally a static
Speaker 1: tuning into a radio frequency, and it's like then a
Speaker 1: word would start popping into the frequency. And then it
Speaker 1: was like I had to relearn the language and reading
Speaker 1: was gone. I had to learn how to read again. Numbers.
Speaker 1: It took four years before I even knew what one was,
Speaker 1: much less, you know, how do you put one with
Speaker 1: another one? So all of those abstract ideas, because an
Speaker 1: A is a symbol, it's not an a, right, So
Speaker 1: that eventually came back online, and then I could remember, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: eventually I could learn had been an academic, had a
Speaker 1: doctor decree, and I thought, are they going to take
Speaker 1: away my degree? You know, I don't remember any of
Speaker 1: that any anatomy, you know, I mean, it was like wow.
Speaker 1: So so that all just it was a big miss
Speaker 1: in my new way of being. And then eventually I
Speaker 1: could remember, Yes, I could remember my graduation. I could
Speaker 1: picture that, but I didn't have any of the emotion
Speaker 1: attached to the past. So I could rebuild my past
Speaker 1: using school. I mean, what do we teach children in school?
Speaker 1: We teach left brain skill set. So I had the
Speaker 1: advantage that I could essentially go back to school and
Speaker 1: relearn because we have all these tools to retrain those circuits.
Speaker 1: And I had to start math from the beginning, and
Speaker 1: reading from the beginning, spelling and what a concept. You
Speaker 1: know that there's a right and wrong and a good
Speaker 1: and a bad. I had to learn all that, but
Speaker 1: I could learn it because that's what we teach our children.
Speaker 1: It's much harder if you've had a right brain problem
Speaker 1: to rebuild the skill sets of the right brain, because
Speaker 1: they're they're the subtle innuendows of the essence of what
Speaker 1: we are. So you know, someone like John now may
Speaker 1: have had more trouble understanding the intonation of my voice.
Speaker 1: So somebody might say that be really angry and say
Speaker 1: something to him in a really angry tone, and he
Speaker 1: might not realize they're angry because that's a skill set
Speaker 1: of the right brain. But we don't teach children that
Speaker 1: in school. So for me, I had the advantage of
Speaker 1: losing the left brain and then essentially going back to
Speaker 1: detail school. John had the disadvantage of that because he
Speaker 1: could now viigate the detail of the left brain. But
Speaker 1: how on earth do we train somebody to go bigger picture.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point. Because my left brain wouldn't
Speaker 1: allow me to do mindfulness. It started getting very defensive.
Speaker 1: You know, Um, it's hard to talk about the hensters
Speaker 1: of my brain. I'm gonna have to sort of sit
Speaker 1: back in an arm chair and just sort of watch anyway.
Speaker 1: So doing things like mindfulness were very difficult. I mean
Speaker 1: meditation my experience, it was very difficult at times because
Speaker 1: my left brain said, no, I need to take up
Speaker 1: that space with worries about tomorrow, bad memories about yesterday,
Speaker 1: things that I've got to get done. You can't really
Speaker 1: take up that space. And I'm not going to allow
Speaker 1: you to rehabilitate your right brain, which I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: a hog. And so I've been around a lot of
Speaker 1: people beginning my meditation, and the mind goes crazy. And
Speaker 1: it's because the left brain, in my opinion, doesn't allow
Speaker 1: the meditation to stay in the right brain. It just doesn't.
Speaker 1: And for me, meditation, you know, it was not really
Speaker 1: good anyway. So that's how I traveled to do focusing
Speaker 1: with Jonathan bows. It's just I needed to get jump started,
Speaker 1: and I needed a way to get my left brain
Speaker 1: quiet so that my right brain finally was allowed to
Speaker 1: be a piece. Another thing that you did, John, was
Speaker 1: you started exploring art as a way of rehabilitating your
Speaker 1: right brain. You want to share a little bit about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was recommended by actually Emily gives some of my
Speaker 1: cognitive therapy is a it is a problem solving way.
Speaker 1: It was also a way actually to experience some mindfulness
Speaker 1: because I had to concentrate on something very deeply, and
Speaker 1: the problem was your right brain. When you have visual
Speaker 1: spatial issues, even just drawing is a real workout. I
Speaker 1: felt exhausted just beginning dry. Then my left brain started judging.
Speaker 1: You know, it said, I'm not used to the experience
Speaker 1: of watching an incompetent thing. You know, I've always thought
Speaker 1: that be incompetent and not not doing anything unless you're
Speaker 1: really competent at it, because you haven't been incompetent at
Speaker 1: something for a really long time. And so you know,
Speaker 1: I had to again, you know, I had to build
Speaker 1: up my right brain to say, you know, I think
Speaker 1: this is cool stuff. It's a lot of good energy,
Speaker 1: good vibes. You know what's wrong with doing this stuff?
Speaker 1: So yeah, art was really I think of beneficial therapy,
Speaker 1: but I had to really duel with my left brain
Speaker 1: at times. Did your right brain come back online, so
Speaker 1: to speak, John, or again, is this your left brain
Speaker 1: in some way compensate eating for the loss of function
Speaker 1: in your right brain? Do you know? That's a really
Speaker 1: good question. I mean, I don't know, Jill. When do
Speaker 1: you know when your hemisphere is back the way you wanted?
Speaker 1: You know, I'm really envious of somebody that had the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere to themselves. You know. People always say when
Speaker 1: there's a stroke or something, you know, was it a
Speaker 1: left brain or a right brain? And they say, well
Speaker 1: can they speak? And it's like, yeah, they can speak,
Speaker 1: and they say, oh good. That means the trauma was
Speaker 1: in the right brain. And boy, if I had to choose,
Speaker 1: I would so choose the trauma in the left brain
Speaker 1: because the right brain is this beautiful experience of bigger picture. Again,
Speaker 1: we're trained their school to go to for left brain
Speaker 1: skill sets. So I do feel for you, Garland Um
Speaker 1: And at the same time, I I love what you
Speaker 1: said though, because mindfulness the left brain saying no this
Speaker 1: doesn't feel good to me. I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: And I think we all have that experience when we
Speaker 1: try to sit in meditation and everybody says, I can't
Speaker 1: get my left brain to be quiet, but yours is
Speaker 1: truly fighting for its identity, and the left brain thinks
Speaker 1: that it's the only one in the head that matters,
Speaker 1: and everything else is a waste of time. And because
Speaker 1: that left brain is so give me the to do list,
Speaker 1: and I've got to be busy, and I've got to
Speaker 1: be competent, and I've got to excel. And I thought
Speaker 1: it was really interesting because you had said earlier, you know,
Speaker 1: you would go by the art building and think, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, what are they doing? And there they're wasting
Speaker 1: their lives right there, They're wasting their time. And so
Speaker 1: now here you are saying to your own left brain, hey,
Speaker 1: I want to do a little drawing, and it's going, what,
Speaker 1: I haven't changed my opinion, you know, it's like it's
Speaker 1: still a waste of time, and I don't want to
Speaker 1: do it. There you're going, no, no, this is important.
Speaker 1: We're going to do it. So now you're trying to
Speaker 1: do it, and the left brain is going but we're
Speaker 1: no good at this and then and so this conversation
Speaker 1: now that you're having between the two halves, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's beautiful to me because now at least your right
Speaker 1: brain can show up and defend itself, right, yes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've learned the hard way the value of the right brain.
Speaker 1: And that's part of what I think is interesting. As
Speaker 1: you describe John being extremely left brained before the injury, right,
Speaker 1: then you have an injury that makes you even more so.
Speaker 1: And yet as part of the rehabilitation process, you start
Speaker 1: moving into right brain things, and you start finding a
Speaker 1: nuance and a beauty and a depth to life that
Speaker 1: you had not had before. Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: I hearkened to Jill's book and her character's character one.
Speaker 1: You know, is the thinking part of your laft brain
Speaker 1: character too, is the emotional part I think at times.
Speaker 1: You know, you talked to you about soft character one,
Speaker 1: and it's not as edgy as a hard character one. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a conversation that happened, especially before I went to
Speaker 1: see Jonathan Thoust said, you know, and this made me
Speaker 1: related to the art part too. You know, look character too.
Speaker 1: You know you're driving me crazy. Always come up with
Speaker 1: an anxious thing or um an angry thing, and I'm
Speaker 1: running out of solutions. I can't handle it anymore. You're
Speaker 1: just driving me crazy. So so what if you're scary
Speaker 1: about going to see Jonathan Pest And so what if
Speaker 1: you me runningto tar Rock. She's a nice person. Probably
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about what you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to say, you know. And hearkening to the art part,
Speaker 1: you know, look, this is another thing that may be
Speaker 1: that beneficial. This is character one today, you know, so
Speaker 1: try it. You know, I'm running out of solutions here,
Speaker 1: and uh, I don't want to go crazy. And you
Speaker 1: notice that as you're having that conversation with your character one,
Speaker 1: it's about the future, you know, a lot of us.
Speaker 1: I've got to make this phone call. What am I
Speaker 1: gonna say? Should I script it out? I repeat it
Speaker 1: in my mind, you know, And it's like, just make
Speaker 1: the phone call and trust, trust your right brain to
Speaker 1: show up in a positive, intelligent way, because it is.
Speaker 1: It is intelligent. It is. It is a new level
Speaker 1: of intelligence for us. And I love though, because you're
Speaker 1: that great edge between I was a left brain hemisphere
Speaker 1: dominant human being before, and I didn't have a value
Speaker 1: for the right brain. And it's kind of like, Okay,
Speaker 1: the universe is gonna say to you, John, We're gonna
Speaker 1: show you why you should value the right brain by
Speaker 1: taking it away, and then we're gonna make you extreme
Speaker 1: left brain and make you work your way back to
Speaker 1: your own level of sanity, because it is that whole
Speaker 1: balance they are very different from their skill sets from
Speaker 1: one another, and figuring out how to listen and how
Speaker 1: to manage. And I love that you were talking about
Speaker 1: really your character too. This is the part that is anxious.
Speaker 1: It's the part that worries. It's the part that says
Speaker 1: these negative things about me or but I don't want that,
Speaker 1: because that's I have to lay me down and let
Speaker 1: me rest in order for that part of me to
Speaker 1: open up. And as children in particular, who are listening
Speaker 1: to all these different parts and trying to figure out, well,
Speaker 1: what do I do do I grow up to be
Speaker 1: this thing? And then someone says, well, what do you
Speaker 1: want to be when you grow up? I want to
Speaker 1: be a doctor, Okay, well, then you've got to be
Speaker 1: a real character one. Or I want to be a sculptor. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: then you've got to be a real right brain. And
Speaker 1: it's like, no, we want to develop all of it,
Speaker 1: and we want to create healthy relationships between these different
Speaker 1: skill sets. I have to say that, um, just for
Speaker 1: a moment, I want to reflect a few things. The
Speaker 1: first is, I think you know, both of you, in
Speaker 1: your mirror image experiences of one another and what you've
Speaker 1: shared today, you've given us all a real gift in
Speaker 1: your extreme experience. We can sort of those of us
Speaker 1: that have not had a traumatic brain injury and we
Speaker 1: still have functioning two parts of our brain, you know,
Speaker 1: we really can take some some gifts from this. And
Speaker 1: and the first is I think that if we have
Speaker 1: full function of our brains, you know, we can really
Speaker 1: cultivate some balance and some interconnectedness that can really benefit
Speaker 1: us in in a way of how we moved through
Speaker 1: the world and how we experienced the world. I mean
Speaker 1: I I recently was at a retreat where we were
Speaker 1: cultivating a real, real embodied presence, so real connected us
Speaker 1: feeling into our bodies, having an awareness of and in
Speaker 1: our bodies in the present moment. And in that experience,
Speaker 1: I had a real uh experiential ah ha of thinking
Speaker 1: of this framework. I'm thinking it was a right brain awakening,
Speaker 1: which was I had this in the moment sort of knowing.
Speaker 1: I just had this access to sort of whatever internal
Speaker 1: wisdom people would refer to, or your internal knowing or
Speaker 1: you're just sort of deep seated in the moment presence,
Speaker 1: and it was through putting my awareness in my body.
Speaker 1: And I think about what John is saying about the
Speaker 1: work he did with Jonathan Faust, and it sounds like
Speaker 1: a lot of that was very sematical out of that
Speaker 1: was very connected to the body. And so I think
Speaker 1: about that experience I had and I was I'm like, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, these are real practical things that we can
Speaker 1: all do to look at where might we have some
Speaker 1: imbalance and then how can we kind of correct for
Speaker 1: that to bring us back into balance. Jill, I'll just
Speaker 1: end on this note here. As you said in the
Speaker 1: previous episode with Eric, something that I think sums up
Speaker 1: the other inspiring aspect of this, which is you said,
Speaker 1: you know, the brain is just cells and circuitry, and
Speaker 1: the beauty of cells and circuitry is that the more
Speaker 1: you run a circuit, the more powerful that circuit becomes,
Speaker 1: and it begins to run on automatic and it gets stronger,
Speaker 1: so it becomes a habit. And this is my mindfulness works.
Speaker 1: Mindfulness is choosing purposefully to run certain mindsets to strengthen
Speaker 1: them so they become our automatic response. I love the
Speaker 1: growth opportunity that's there for all of us. That's a
Speaker 1: great quote. I sounded pretty smart there. It is absolutely true.
Speaker 1: I mean, here, you have two brains that are made
Speaker 1: up of beautiful els, and we grew up to have
Speaker 1: pattern responses and for our own reasons, and then we
Speaker 1: both had something that happened that threw that out of
Speaker 1: out of normal balance, and then we had to choose
Speaker 1: what do we do with this? Do we stay where
Speaker 1: we are in our lack of ability, or do we
Speaker 1: use what we have, what cells we have, in order
Speaker 1: to build a more healthy brain as a whole brain. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you for sharing that quote. That was good. This
Speaker 1: is all really fascinating, you know. I told Eric I
Speaker 1: thought this would be really interesting to talk about my
Speaker 1: experience versus Jills sometime and it kind of took off
Speaker 1: to being recorded and having the session. So I think
Speaker 1: it's really cool. I think all those people who say, oh,
Speaker 1: those differences between the right brain and left brain from
Speaker 1: the seventies. That's all old science. I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: you might want to listen to this podcast. Indeed, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you both John, Jill and Jenny. I guess that's
Speaker 1: thank you. Thank you all three of you for helping
Speaker 1: make this a wonderful conversation and I'm so happy we
Speaker 1: could get us all together. Thank you. It's great. It
Speaker 1: was absolutely delightful. If what you just heard was helpful
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