Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and John Britton on Right Brain Injury vs. Left Brain Injury

be with, or overspending on buying gifts. If any of that sounds familiar, go to one you feed dot net slash Holiday to get this free video teaching on how to experience more peace this holiday season. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen

or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter it takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hey everybody, it's your

pal Chris. Where's the opening quote? You might ask, Well, instead, you're getting me because I wanted to tell you about this episode. First of all, the guests are Jill Bolte Taylor, who you may remember from episode four nineteen not terribly long ago, who is the Harvard trained and published new anatomist who in had a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain and she lost the ability to walk, talk, read, write, etcetera. Well.

Also another guest on this episode in addition to Jill is John Britton, who heard that episode and contacted Eric, and he is on because he was a former medical doctor who had a right brain injury. So this is a discussion between the two with Eric and Jenny as a special episode. The other thing I wanted to qualify is that there were some recording problems during this episode, so you may notice that everybody sounds very different compared

to our normal episodes. But the content is great, so enjoy this episode with Jill Bolte Taylor and John Britton and extra special fancy pants interviewer Jenny Gay. Hello, everyone, welcome to a special episode of The One You Feed. I am joined here with Jinny who you know if you've listened to some of the recent episodes, Jill Bolte Taylor, who has been a guest on the show before, and John Britton, who is a former anesthesiologist who has had a brain injury at one point in his past. And

why that's relevant will become clear in a moment. After we had Jill on the show, she talked about how she suffered an injury to her left brain, leaving her

primarily function in her right brain. And after we aired that episode, John reached out to me and said, hey, interestingly enough, I had an injury to my right brain and it was sort of the opposite of the one that Jill had, and that got me thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to bring the two of them together to talk about right brain, left brain, whole brain, living with two different perspectives on injuries to each side of the brain.

So that's what we are here to do. And to kick us off, I'm going to allow John to answer the parable of the wolf question, since Jill has already had a shot at it. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandsonth stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So John would like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. You know, I've listened to the one you pad podcasts enough to have heard probably two responses to that parable. So I kind of asked myself how

I'm respond to that parable. I think it's pretty easy for me right now. The bad wolf to me is my laft brain, where you know, it's sort of negative thoughts, judges. Negative thoughts are anxiety and anger and sadness. And to take carry newcomer song title, it can't sit without knowing. It's a defender of its space. At all costs, and in my experience, it's reluctant to allow the right brain to experience mindfulness in presence. It's a defender of its place.

It doesn't allow feelings to be had. It defends itself, the right brain, which is my good wealth, which was very hard to get to and recovering from my brain injury. It's for me the place of awareness, uh, compassion and empathy, is a place of spontaneity, and it's a place of wisdom and love which to me needs equanimity. And that's a very special place that's really hard I think to get to. Thanks John, That's that's really really insightful, and I think you sent it up some of where we

want to go. Yeah. I thought perhaps before we dive into each of your stories and your experiences of your traumatic brain injuries and recovery, which I'm fascinated by and can't wait to hear you share, Jill, would it be possible for you to share with us just a bit about maybe what the right brain represents its function and

what the left brain represents and its function. I would also refer listeners back to episode for nineteen, which is Eric's interview with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, and she goes into great detail on this topic and in her book Whole Brain Living. So that is a wonderful precursor to the conversation we're about to have. But for the purposes of this episode, Jella wonder if you could maybe give us a brief overview. So I think John just kind of said it all because in and his answer was

very similar to mine. Who's the good wolf? To me, it's the right brain because the right brain is right here, right now, It's in the present moment, experience, And the biggest difference to me between the two hemispheres is the timing. The left brain has a past and a future. It has linearity of thinking, and it focuses on me, the individual. The right hemisphere it's right here, right now, and it's it doesn't have me the individual as the focus. The

focus becomes the we, the collective whole. So how do I exist in the present moment and experience all the same things that the left brain is going to experience, but it does it differently. For example, the right brain is going to hear language, but it's not going to focus on the words and the details and the linearity of that thinking, it's going to focus on the intonation

of voice, the emotional content of the voice. The facial language doesn't match the body language does the big picture of how the person is communicating, does that fit together? And with that, because there's no true separation between me and others, I come forward with compassion and openness and expansiveness. And because I don't have the definition of right, wrong, good, bad, which is what part of what the left brain does, then I'm open to creativity, I'm innovative, and I'm I'm communal.

I connect with others. So the right here, right now, the experience of the whole is the right brain. The left brain is details details, more details about those details. Take that big picture of the present moment and divide it up so that we can actually communicate about it. And we humans do that through this huge loop of language. And so we look at the big picture and we say, we're going to now define a boundary between what I'm going to consider pink and what I'm going to consider

as read. And that way, then two of us who are separate from one another because we each now have an individualan and identity. Then the filter of the world goes to the individual, and there's a group of cells in that left hemisphere that actually defines the boundaries of where we begin an end, so that we perceive ourselves to not be a part of the whole, but separate from one another. So these two hemispheres are completely filtering.

The left as it relates to me, the individual and I have linearity of time, a past in the future, and all those details right, wrong, good, bad. And then the right hemisphere is open and expansive and more connected to the present moment and the experience of we as a community. And so those two hemispheres they function very differently, but in a normal, healthy brain, they're connected and they communicate, right, They typically do have a bit of a synergistic effect.

Would you say, yes, you have three hundred million axonal fibers going between the two hemispheres. So a group of cells in the right brain is communicating with the comparable set of cells in the left brain, and someone which group of cells is inhibiting the other cells. So there's always a group of cells in any ability that's going to be dominant, and that's how we gain focus. We

have to be able to focus our brain on certain details. Now, if I'm having a thousand things going on in any moment, then I might have half of that going on in the right brain and half of that going on in the left brain, or I may have my perception completely skewed to the left where I'm in my left brain and I can't really access the experiences of the right brain,

or vice versa. So the brain cells in both hemispheres are always functioning at the same time, So at any moment, I'm using both, but each ability is focused by a specific group of cells and over those fibers in that corpus colosum is inhibiting the cells in the opposite hemisphere in a normal brain. Yeah, I didn't interview with McGilchrist, which may or may not be out by the time we release this, but he has a way of describing these two ways of the brain working that I thought

was really really helpful. And he said, imagine a bird sitting on the ground pecking it, you know, trying to get seed out of some gravel. The left brain is very focused in on all, right, that's gravel, that's a seed. Let me do this, let me do that. But at the same time, the right brain is perceiving the whole of its environment, so that it's watching, it's aware. Okay, I can't just be only focused on this pebble because I might get eaten. Right, So when they're working together,

you see that sort of synergy there. Of I'm finding the food, I'm focusing on details, I'm keeping the whole in place. And I think be curious to see if you guys both agree with this, and Jenny too. I think that sometimes these conversations come across as saying the left brain is better than the right brain. Well, I'm sorry that the right brain is better than the left brain, and I think that that's not the message I've taken

or take. I think the message I would take is we have become increasingly left brain oriented as a society. That's where most of the focus is. So in the same way that you need to correct for a deficiency, we need to overcorrect towards the right brain so that we do get more of what Jill you call whole brain living. I agree completely. I think that you know the ultimate goal is we have these two magnificent machines inside of our head, and we need them both desperately.

The human experiment is the evolution of human has been these emotional systems in both hemispheres and then added on tissue of thinking in both hemispheres, and so ultimately the goal is to use your whole brain. And you know, it's so funny because so often the conversation then goes to, oh, well, I'm more right brain, but my husband he's a left brain. So between the two of us we make a whole brain. And it's like, well, you know, opposites attracted in the

beginning until they don't. And you know, when you look at the level of divorce, a lot of that is because that difference that attracted us in the beginning is now these are the points of contention. And so really developing the whole brain inside of your head and a whole brain inside of your partner's head ends up with now really conscious people having a conscious relationship using their whole brains. For me, I never allowed my right brain

to be used. I use the example when I was in college going by the studio art department and saying, who would ever do that? I mean, you can't make any money doing that, And they're a bunch of hippies and they don't. They don't really like listening to this to this stuff I like to talk about so honestly, even before my brain injury, I never allowed my right brain to be used very much. Wasn't really until after that that I had to or what my right brain

was all about. Well, and I think that's a great growth edge because you're right, you're an m D and m d's focus on left brain. I mean, even by definition of science and the scientific method, it's a left brain process. It's a method that needs to be done and repeatable and get the same results. And you know, I teach a medical school, and and I teach anatomy and gross anatomy and neuro anatomy and histology. I mean

that's the details of the body. And you have to become a master of those details and do your job, uh and do your calculations in anesthesiastics and a thesiology. So so you have have you you know, you picked a grain profession for you. And then how lovely that after having lost what skill set you did have in that brain, it has now inspired you to explore, okay, well what is over there and what's it like now?

Without that even for an extreme left brainer, and then what is the value of re engaging with those abilities. So I think you're a great story. So, speaking of that story, John, I'd love to turn it over to you and for you to tell us and listeners a little bit about yourself. Maybe let's start before your brain injury. Tell us a little about your life, the way you operated in the world, your profession. Just let us get

to know you a little bit. Well, I grew up in a small town room and my father was an alcoholic. He was a slot. Uh, no other way to put it. And so how I interfacement with the external world was really important to me, and so I crossed over into my left brain really early. I wanted a different life or profession that people would respect me for, and so the right brain had no room. I couldn't give it space.

So anyway, continued on for years that way. And then finally when I became in ants, I didn't mainly pediatrics and uh mainly or a lot of basic babies, and so you have to develop really detailed linear thinking because I had a progression of things I had to do how to use anxiety as a tool. Actually, the tool of anxiety got me through a lot of stuff because I couldn't back away and anxiety kept me there. The problem was when I had when I got sick, the

anxiety became a weapon against me. But anyway, um left brain was was it all the way? And so then tell us a bit as much as you're comfortable sharing, tell us about what happened to your right brain. Well, I gotta hurt thee simplex type one infection from a patient. So it's actually pretty interesting medically. I think when I was a resident three or five years ago, I got a little infection of my finger, and back then universal

per car just didn't exist. Really. I wasn't wearing gloves, I didn't have eye protection, I wasn't wearing a mask. So um, I put a breathing to been a young boy who was badly burned, and a couple of days later had an infection in my finger that was her petic infection and went away with oral anti viral medicines.

And the interesting thing about Herpes simplexes it lives forever in your trade geminal nerve, your fifth cranial nerve, which is a part of a bunch of nerves at the base of your brain that basically allows your head to function. I'm trying to make it really simple here, but it lives there forever. I think most people know about the chicken pox virus that causes shingles, you know, because it chicken pox virus lives in your nervous system um in

a different place than my my virus. But anyway, thirty years later it came back and it manifested itself as a bad brand infection or ensephalitis and be has My original infection was in my right finger. It just affected my right brain because that's where it hung out for thirty years. And my neurologist at Johns Hopkins said that there's a one in a thousand chants it'll come back, because it doesn't go away really and uh, you know, about a year ago did come back for a period

of time and it went away with oral medicines. But anyway, that's how it happened. So, John, as this infection set in on your right brain, do you have a memory of the loss of function? What was that like for you? No? Actually I don't. I was visiting my mom who was undergoing cancer treatments in Vermont, and I was going to take her to a bunch of doctor's appointments and along the way I was arrested for driving under the influence to get to my mom. So I had an arrest record.

I gave the small town cop twenty dollars and let me go. Took my car away and brought me to a bus depot and it took the us to the middle of nowhere and got a cab, you know, in the middle of rural New England. I got a cat who took me to my mom's house. And then after that I don't really remember much. I remember going to her doctor's appointment and just feeling really weird. And that

night I started behaving really abnormally. So my mom called her best friend, who was a retired English professor from the University of Vermont, who came over and just observed, and she wrote a copious notes like an English professor called her husband's he said, this is what John's doing

and calling ambulance. This is He's really sick. And so they took me to this little hospital in Vermont, and luckily they had an ivy medicine called a cyclovirus, which saved my life and actually probably saved a lot of my brain, because otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. And so I was in a coma for close to a week and UH step down intensive carried and then I was I went through a long brain rehabilitation process.

But it's interesting during the brain rehabilitation process, my fellow brain rehab ees, I couldn't understand why I was there because I could talk, I had memories. When you have a right brain injury, it's different. People look at you and say, well, you seem like the same old person. You know. I don't really, I don't really get where

your problem is. And that was a little interesting, and I must say to to say at least it because I wanted to say, like I'm a duck on water, I'm paddling like mad underneath, but you don't realize what's happening to me. And that's that's really difficult for people to understand left versus a right brain injury, because I could be really articulate. I could use language to describe things really well. So what was the difference to you?

What did you feel was different poster injury. Well, there's some subtle things, like my spatial visual things were rock. I couldn't figure out where I was and even though I've been in places before, I would take the wrong turn of walking. I couldn't drive for a long time, and my short term memory was a little off, And I think cognitively, my kind of academic, kind of therapist Emily Gibson would say, your executive function was a little lot. My ability to make decisions about how I was going

to run the day was a little lot. I don't know enough to know whether that's entirely right green or not, but but mainly it was my left brain hijacking things and just saying, you know, you've got things to do, and I really didn't have anything to do, but my lap brain said, you know, you've always had something to do during the morning, and why aren't you doing something.

My right brain couldn't could modulate that, and that was different, completely unmodulated left brain, no ability to the right brain to help me out that way. That's interesting in that, you know, what Jill said earlier is that many of the neurons that connect the right and left brain are inhibitory. They are the right brain slowing down the left brain saying hold on, And you suddenly didn't have that. So what you had was sort of that left brain in overdrive.

I'm wondering Jill if you have any questions from your perspective that you'd like to ask John about his experience. I think he's giving us a lot of information. He's saying, for example, there's a group of cells in the left brain that defined the definition of where I begin and where I end, and so I know the mass that is me because of my left brain. But then there's a group of comparable cells in the right brain that says, now that I can define me the individual, how do

I move me in space appropriately? And so he's you know, in his description of not being able to have the spatial orientation that's one of the skill sets of the right brain. Left brain says this is me. Right brain says, now, this is how I moved me in the bigger picture in order to get me where I want to go. And then the other thing is that his left brain is saying, I'm busy, I've got things to do. Where's my to do list? But there's nothing on the to do list. But my left brain's got to do do

do right, And that's what it does. It's in a hurry, and it's busy, and it's but it doesn't You have to have the bigger picture of your life in order to know, Okay, well if I'm not working from a very specific list of to do, because my whole brain has sat down and figured out, Okay, I'm gonna do this, and then I'm going to do that, and I'm gonna do this and that needs to be done, and so I'm actually doing things as opposed to just the sense of urgency which that left brain has. There's a level

of acceleration if I gotta get it done. I got to go to the office, I got fifty things I gotta get done. I started, I moved into that level of speed, and I do do do, do do. But you have to be able to have the big picture in order to actually know how do I place myself in relationship to all those things so I actually accomplish anything. So as he speaks, my brain just thinks, well, yeah, that's a factor of the left brain and the right brain. And I think another point that John made that was

really important is that anybody with a brain trauma. Mine was in my left brain. It influenced my whole brain in the beginning. His was in the right brain. It influenced the whole brain from the beginning. Because the brain is still this one mass. And so whether you have a hemorrhagict trauma and you've got more fluid going in and swelling, or you have some type of viral infection and you have a lymphatics going in to clean up

the mess and to try to stabilize. When you experience a brain trauma, the whole brain is involved, and it's like there's no clarity. It's like you're inside of this big cotton ball that extends out a few feet from you, and you kind of can sense things, but but there's no clarity. There's this lack of clarity, and unfortunately, you know, more often than not, as with John, he looks the same.

He looks like John. I looked like Jill. Okay, well, Jill, once I get a little bit of language back, which John didn't lose too much of his language because of that left brain. People are looking at him saying, well, you seem okay, what are you doing in here? And that's really hard because if you've got a broken arm, people are sympathetic and compassionate and they assist you because

they can visualize the physical problem. But people who experience brain trauma, Mamma, we look the same on the outside, and so people don't get No, you have no idea how hard I'm working simply to keep up with my life in this moment. And this is a common complaint of people with brain trauma because we look normal, we look the same, and we are so not and things be overwhelmedness. Just the light can overwhelmness. Walk into a grocery store, it can be overwhelming sensory stimulation. But I

look normal. So there is this very unique way in which we feel isolated because people cannot visualize and see and understand the problem. One thing I would add in terms of my experiences that my left brain would not let me deal with feeling. In your book, Jill, you're talking about we feel before we think. My left brain defenditive space and wouldn't let my right brain experience dealing.

And I think that's one therapy that was really important for me and rebuilding my right brain is doing something called focusing or body centered inquiry with a guy named Jonathan bows Too lives in the woods in northern Virginia with his wife tar Rock, who is internationally famous. But Jonathan invited me to do body centered inquiry and it was all about experiencing what am I feeling, Where am I feeling at, what's associated with it? Visually, shape wise, spatially,

And afterwards there was an intense quietness. So I felt like, and you mentioned this in your book to Jill, that my left brain was quiet. It wasn't so much that my right brain had been to the gym and had a good workout, was feeling good. It was that my left brain was quiet. It was my right brain was being allowed to exist basically and have an experience of showing out the visual and a spatial that I was experiencing during the inquiry. Interesting, you know, because our perception

of ourselves and relationship to ourselves. I mean, everybody thinks, well, this is me, this is me, you know right, this is me. I know me, And it's like, well, the only reason we know what me is is because we

were getting messaging inside of the brain. And in order for me to be defined as a space, there are cells that are performing that function in order for me to have some kind of experiential awareness of my body and what's going on, that intuitive knowing of the relationship inside of my own body, what's my gut saying, what am I feeling? What is the experience uh to be me?

What does it just feel like to be me? We these are things that we all take for granted because we don't have to think about them, because, of course, I know what it feels like to be me until those cells go offline and now you're not getting fed that in form nation and yes, Tara Brock, of course, and and the ability to shift out of that left brain and quieted enough so that you can actually sit in the experience of what what is this mass that we define as me? And what is my relationship now

with that? And how do I communicate with it or how does it communicate with me at a level that can be meaningful because intuition of the right brain and medical intuition into our own bodies is essentially this relationship that the right hemisphere in the present moment has with all these cells making up our body. And so all of that we have to quiet that left brain and allow that gift of the right brain to come online. So that would be a tough one. I think the world,

not just me who had a right brain injury. I think the world has problems with that is basically what am I feeling? Where? Where is it for me, anxiety lies between my eyes. You know, people otherwise experience and media in their heart or they're they're aving them. But but anyway, there's a there's a felt sense that people people don't tap into it that I think is really important and I think Dodson really helped me with that. And I'd like to really point out the difference between

feeling and emotion, because emotions, we're gonna have emotions. You can have sadness, probably, you can still have anger. Can you get angry in your left brain? There? John? Can you do that? So the emotions we have an emotion in both an emotional system, but feeling to truly feel, what does it feel like? What does it feel like, the relationship between your skin and the clothing on your body? What does it feel like? What's the temperature of the air,

what's the pressure of the air on your body? The feeling the speed orient of bringing in sensory information as defined as feeling. So I just wanted to point that out because your examples you use the word feeling, and I just want to clarify that it's the feeling the experience of you as that mass. No, we're not just talking about emotional feelings. So I'd love to contrast John's experience and his story of his trauma in his right

brain with Jill. We've explored this in a previous episode, but just for the sake of this episode, would you take us through a little bit about what happened to you and what your experience was. Yes. So, I had a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain, and over the course of four hours, I had a

blood clot grow to the size of a fist. And by doing so, it's shut down my language, my definition of me as an individual, and I essentially became an infant in a woman's body because I didn't have me the individual. I didn't have any of my academics. I had no relationship, all my relationships in the external world, they were wiped out, my relationship with my academics and

my my verbal language training. Well, in medicine, it's like, you know, it's one thing to know a stomach, but you need to know the different parts of the stomach. You need to know the name of the different kinds of cells in the different organs. I mean, so much of of my academics had been left brain terminology, so I lost all that, and I lost the concept of mother. I didn't even know what a mother was, much less who my mother was. So I essentially became an infant

in a woman's body. But I had the experiential I became this massive ball of energy. I didn't have the division of me, the individual as self. So I became connected. I became adams and molecules in cellular organic life form. And it was like, oh my gosh, I didn't die that day, right, I didn't die. I was all but dead,

but I was alive. And and so I was just like a picture, a big old microbe that that had an awareness of the difference simply between being alive, which is like this miracle that nobody can explain, and capable of receiving stimulation and having experiential around me. I became all experiential. So all the experiential that John lost, that's all I became. So I lost all the details and all the to do and all the individuation and and any of that. The external world was no longer important

to me. I just became this massive energy ball. And then I It took eight years for me to rebuild my left brain skill sets using my rag brain abilities in order to kind of backtrack, Well, I used to be able to us speak, and now everybody speaks and I don't speak, and I don't want to speak, because boys, does that take a lot of energy and effort. And what's the point, you know, when I can exist in bliss.

So so I had to pull myself out of this blissful euphoria of the experience of the present moment and painstakingly rebuild the road back to these natural left brain abilities. So did your left brain come back online or is your right brain compensating for this loss? No? I rebuilt skill sets. And so this is when I really became aware of the emotional group of cells, the limbics cells, and the for my emotional in linearity of time, and

that part of me, that motherboard was wiped clean. And then the left thinking is that rational brain that can have linearity of time. And eventually it was two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, and I had an absolutely silent mind, nothing going on, no static, no language, no nothing, just blissful euphoria of the experience of the

present moment. Was really wonderful. And then the surgeons went in and they removed that blood clot and then for two and a half more weeks I sat in absolute silence. And then after the recovery of these cells got a little better. Then it was like static, literally a static tuning into a radio frequency, and it's like then a word would start popping into the frequency. And then it was like I had to relearn the language and reading was gone. I had to learn how to read again. Numbers.

It took four years before I even knew what one was, much less, you know, how do you put one with another one? So all of those abstract ideas, because an A is a symbol, it's not an a, right, So that eventually came back online, and then I could remember, Okay, yeah, eventually I could learn had been an academic, had a doctor decree, and I thought, are they going to take away my degree? You know, I don't remember any of that any anatomy, you know, I mean, it was like wow.

So so that all just it was a big miss in my new way of being. And then eventually I could remember, Yes, I could remember my graduation. I could picture that, but I didn't have any of the emotion attached to the past. So I could rebuild my past using school. I mean, what do we teach children in school? We teach left brain skill set. So I had the advantage that I could essentially go back to school and relearn because we have all these tools to retrain those circuits.

And I had to start math from the beginning, and reading from the beginning, spelling and what a concept. You know that there's a right and wrong and a good and a bad. I had to learn all that, but I could learn it because that's what we teach our children. It's much harder if you've had a right brain problem to rebuild the skill sets of the right brain, because they're they're the subtle innuendows of the essence of what

we are. So you know, someone like John now may have had more trouble understanding the intonation of my voice. So somebody might say that be really angry and say something to him in a really angry tone, and he might not realize they're angry because that's a skill set of the right brain. But we don't teach children that in school. So for me, I had the advantage of losing the left brain and then essentially going back to detail school. John had the disadvantage of that because he

could now viigate the detail of the left brain. But how on earth do we train somebody to go bigger picture. That's a really good point. Because my left brain wouldn't allow me to do mindfulness. It started getting very defensive. You know, Um, it's hard to talk about the hensters of my brain. I'm gonna have to sort of sit back in an arm chair and just sort of watch anyway.

So doing things like mindfulness were very difficult. I mean meditation my experience, it was very difficult at times because my left brain said, no, I need to take up that space with worries about tomorrow, bad memories about yesterday, things that I've got to get done. You can't really take up that space. And I'm not going to allow you to rehabilitate your right brain, which I'm gonna be a hog. And so I've been around a lot of

people beginning my meditation, and the mind goes crazy. And it's because the left brain, in my opinion, doesn't allow the meditation to stay in the right brain. It just doesn't. And for me, meditation, you know, it was not really good anyway. So that's how I traveled to do focusing with Jonathan bows. It's just I needed to get jump started, and I needed a way to get my left brain quiet so that my right brain finally was allowed to

be a piece. Another thing that you did, John, was you started exploring art as a way of rehabilitating your right brain. You want to share a little bit about that. Yeah, I was recommended by actually Emily gives some of my cognitive therapy is a it is a problem solving way. It was also a way actually to experience some mindfulness because I had to concentrate on something very deeply, and the problem was your right brain. When you have visual

spatial issues, even just drawing is a real workout. I felt exhausted just beginning dry. Then my left brain started judging. You know, it said, I'm not used to the experience of watching an incompetent thing. You know, I've always thought that be incompetent and not not doing anything unless you're really competent at it, because you haven't been incompetent at something for a really long time. And so you know, I had to again, you know, I had to build up my right brain to say, you know, I think

this is cool stuff. It's a lot of good energy, good vibes. You know what's wrong with doing this stuff? So yeah, art was really I think of beneficial therapy, but I had to really duel with my left brain at times. Did your right brain come back online, so to speak, John, or again, is this your left brain in some way compensate eating for the loss of function in your right brain? Do you know? That's a really

good question. I mean, I don't know, Jill. When do you know when your hemisphere is back the way you wanted? You know, I'm really envious of somebody that had the right hemisphere to themselves. You know. People always say when there's a stroke or something, you know, was it a left brain or a right brain? And they say, well can they speak? And it's like, yeah, they can speak, and they say, oh good. That means the trauma was

in the right brain. And boy, if I had to choose, I would so choose the trauma in the left brain because the right brain is this beautiful experience of bigger picture. Again, we're trained their school to go to for left brain skill sets. So I do feel for you, Garland Um And at the same time, I I love what you said though, because mindfulness the left brain saying no this doesn't feel good to me. I don't want to do that.

And I think we all have that experience when we try to sit in meditation and everybody says, I can't get my left brain to be quiet, but yours is truly fighting for its identity, and the left brain thinks that it's the only one in the head that matters, and everything else is a waste of time. And because that left brain is so give me the to do list, and I've got to be busy, and I've got to

be competent, and I've got to excel. And I thought it was really interesting because you had said earlier, you know, you would go by the art building and think, oh, you know, what are they doing? And there they're wasting their lives right there, They're wasting their time. And so now here you are saying to your own left brain, hey, I want to do a little drawing, and it's going, what, I haven't changed my opinion, you know, it's like it's still a waste of time, and I don't want to

do it. There you're going, no, no, this is important. We're going to do it. So now you're trying to do it, and the left brain is going but we're no good at this and then and so this conversation now that you're having between the two halves, I mean, that's beautiful to me because now at least your right brain can show up and defend itself, right, yes, yes, yeah, you've learned the hard way the value of the right brain.

And that's part of what I think is interesting. As you describe John being extremely left brained before the injury, right, then you have an injury that makes you even more so. And yet as part of the rehabilitation process, you start moving into right brain things, and you start finding a nuance and a beauty and a depth to life that you had not had before. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I hearkened to Jill's book and her character's character one.

You know, is the thinking part of your laft brain character too, is the emotional part I think at times. You know, you talked to you about soft character one, and it's not as edgy as a hard character one. Anyway, there's a conversation that happened, especially before I went to see Jonathan Thoust said, you know, and this made me related to the art part too. You know, look character too. You know you're driving me crazy. Always come up with an anxious thing or um an angry thing, and I'm

running out of solutions. I can't handle it anymore. You're just driving me crazy. So so what if you're scary about going to see Jonathan Pest And so what if you me runningto tar Rock. She's a nice person. Probably you don't have to worry about what you're gonna have to say, you know. And hearkening to the art part, you know, look, this is another thing that may be that beneficial. This is character one today, you know, so try it. You know, I'm running out of solutions here,

and uh, I don't want to go crazy. And you notice that as you're having that conversation with your character one, it's about the future, you know, a lot of us. I've got to make this phone call. What am I gonna say? Should I script it out? I repeat it in my mind, you know, And it's like, just make the phone call and trust, trust your right brain to show up in a positive, intelligent way, because it is. It is intelligent. It is. It is a new level

of intelligence for us. And I love though, because you're that great edge between I was a left brain hemisphere dominant human being before, and I didn't have a value

for the right brain. And it's kind of like, Okay, the universe is gonna say to you, John, We're gonna show you why you should value the right brain by taking it away, and then we're gonna make you extreme left brain and make you work your way back to your own level of sanity, because it is that whole balance they are very different from their skill sets from one another, and figuring out how to listen and how to manage. And I love that you were talking about

really your character too. This is the part that is anxious. It's the part that worries. It's the part that says these negative things about me or but I don't want that, because that's I have to lay me down and let me rest in order for that part of me to open up. And as children in particular, who are listening to all these different parts and trying to figure out, well, what do I do do I grow up to be this thing? And then someone says, well, what do you

want to be when you grow up? I want to be a doctor, Okay, well, then you've got to be a real character one. Or I want to be a sculptor. Okay, Well, then you've got to be a real right brain. And it's like, no, we want to develop all of it, and we want to create healthy relationships between these different skill sets. I have to say that, um, just for

a moment, I want to reflect a few things. The first is, I think you know, both of you, in your mirror image experiences of one another and what you've shared today, you've given us all a real gift in your extreme experience. We can sort of those of us that have not had a traumatic brain injury and we still have functioning two parts of our brain, you know,

we really can take some some gifts from this. And and the first is I think that if we have full function of our brains, you know, we can really cultivate some balance and some interconnectedness that can really benefit us in in a way of how we moved through the world and how we experienced the world. I mean I I recently was at a retreat where we were cultivating a real, real embodied presence, so real connected us feeling into our bodies, having an awareness of and in

our bodies in the present moment. And in that experience, I had a real uh experiential ah ha of thinking of this framework. I'm thinking it was a right brain awakening, which was I had this in the moment sort of knowing. I just had this access to sort of whatever internal wisdom people would refer to, or your internal knowing or you're just sort of deep seated in the moment presence, and it was through putting my awareness in my body.

And I think about what John is saying about the work he did with Jonathan Faust, and it sounds like a lot of that was very sematical out of that was very connected to the body. And so I think about that experience I had and I was I'm like, wow, you know, these are real practical things that we can all do to look at where might we have some imbalance and then how can we kind of correct for that to bring us back into balance. Jill, I'll just

end on this note here. As you said in the previous episode with Eric, something that I think sums up the other inspiring aspect of this, which is you said, you know, the brain is just cells and circuitry, and the beauty of cells and circuitry is that the more you run a circuit, the more powerful that circuit becomes, and it begins to run on automatic and it gets stronger, so it becomes a habit. And this is my mindfulness works.

Mindfulness is choosing purposefully to run certain mindsets to strengthen them so they become our automatic response. I love the growth opportunity that's there for all of us. That's a great quote. I sounded pretty smart there. It is absolutely true.

I mean, here, you have two brains that are made up of beautiful els, and we grew up to have pattern responses and for our own reasons, and then we both had something that happened that threw that out of out of normal balance, and then we had to choose what do we do with this? Do we stay where we are in our lack of ability, or do we use what we have, what cells we have, in order to build a more healthy brain as a whole brain. So, yeah, thank you for sharing that quote. That was good. This

is all really fascinating, you know. I told Eric I thought this would be really interesting to talk about my experience versus Jills sometime and it kind of took off to being recorded and having the session. So I think it's really cool. I think all those people who say, oh, those differences between the right brain and left brain from the seventies. That's all old science. I'm going to say, you might want to listen to this podcast. Indeed, Well,

thank you both John, Jill and Jenny. I guess that's thank you. Thank you all three of you for helping make this a wonderful conversation and I'm so happy we could get us all together. Thank you. It's great. It was absolutely delightful. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members

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