Good news Friday: ‘Nirvana! I found Nirvana!’

Jill Bolte Taylor was thirty-seven years old, a brilliant neuroscientist, when she woke one morning with a strange pain in her head. This is her story.

In case you would like to see her words as well as hear them, following are the last few minutes of her talk, transcribed. She is speaking here of the moment when she surrendered to the change in her body, when she realized she was “no longer the choreographer of my life.”

My spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana! I found Nirvana!

And I remember thinking there was no way I would be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back into this tiny little body. But then I realized, I’m still alive! I’m still alive, and I have found Nirvana, and if I have found Nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana, and I pictured a world full of beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people, who knew that they could come to this space at any time, and that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemisphere, and find this peace.

I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a source of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.

...

So who are we?

We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are, I am: the life force power of the universe. I am the life force power of the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with All That Is.

Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the we inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be

I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

May each of you be well and deeply blessed, as deeply and as well as you desire.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.
All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.