GODSTUFF

PEACE IS ALL IN OUR MINDS























It wasn't my finest moment.

As we filed into the theater and were shown to our seats at the top of the riser far away from the stage — the nosebleed section — I grumbled aloud about what a raw deal I was getting.

I was supposed to be in the VIP seats down in front. I was supposed to be getting special treatment. But there'd been a glitch, and there I was with the rest of the hoi polloi in the cheap seats.

The woman seated next to me was clearly overjoyed to be there in her cramped seat at the farthest end of the highest row in the theater. She was happy, bouncing a little bit as she waited for the show to begin.

"Hi, I'm Vivian," she said, smiling cheerily.

"Oh, hi," I said, folding my arms and frowning at the stage in the far distance.

"And you are?" she asked sweetly.

"Oh, yeah, Cathleen. Hi," I semi-growled, and turned away.

The show started and after a few minutes, the ire I'd been swimming in began to disappear, followed in quick order by a deep sense of remorse for having been such a pill to the kind woman next to me.

So I turned to her and apologized.

"I'm really sorry I was so prickly before," I said. "It wasn't fair of me to bring all that negative energy to you."

"That's OK," she said. "Isn't it just great to be here?"

Turns out Vivian had been waiting something like 20 years to get tickets to the show a friend had graciously given me a pair for only a few days before. She'd flown in to Chicago just to see it, all the way from her home in California.

Over the next two hours, Vivian's joyful energy — her blithe spirit — became infectious. I caught it and ended up having a delightful time up there in the cramped nosebleed seats.

Energy is a funny thing. We all have it. We all bring it with us wherever we go, and our energy — good or bad, light or dark — affects everyone around us.

I recently spent some time with a new book by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist (read: brain scientist) affiliated with the University of Indiana School of Medicine, who has told the story of her 1996 massive stroke and long road to full recovery in the memoir My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey.

Twelve years ago, when she was 37, Bolte Taylor awoke one December morning with a throbbing headache behind her eye. She jumped on her exercise machine and slowly began to realize something wasn't right.

When she lost her balance in the shower, it dawned on her that she was having a stroke. But she wasn't entirely afraid. As she has recounted in her book and in a viral video from this year's Technology Entertainment Design conference in California, she floated between the bliss state of feeling at one with the universe — unable to see where her hands ended and the molecules of the wall began a la "I (Heart) Huckabees" — and panic knowing she was in grave physical trouble.

"I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie liberated from her bottle," Bolte Taylor told the TED audience earlier this year. "Like a great whale floating through a sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I'd found Nirvana."

Bolte Taylor's stroke nearly wiped out her left brain, the part that controls language, keeps track of things we need to do and dwells entirely on the past and the future. "The storyteller," she calls it.

She was left, however, with her right brain intact — the part that lives in the here and now, that records feelings and images. It was a blissful state and she wanted to stay there. But she made a conscious choice to fight her way back to the physical world, in part so she could share her story.

"My left mind thinks of me as a fragile individual capable of losing my life," she wrote in Stroke of Insight. "My right mind realizes that the essence of my being has eternal life."

During the first few weeks of her recovery, when she could not understand or use language, she became acutely aware of people's energy. She could tell, she says, whether someone meant her harm or healing, whether someone was lying or telling the truth, by his or her energy.

Were they compassionate? Or were they in a rush? Did they look her in the eye or avert their gaze?

We are, all of us, Bolte Taylor says, responsible for the energy we bring to other people.

The bad mood you drape around you like a fox stole? It's your responsibility. The overwhelming joy that spills out of you like water from a pail? That's your responsibility, too.

"We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world," Bolte Taylor says.

She believes we are hard-wired to be able to access the kind of peace that the Bible says surpasses all understanding. It's there. In the right side of our brain. If only we'd access it.

Slow down, Bolte Taylor says. Be aware of this moment. Don't multitask. Breathe and observe how your body feels. When negative or painful thoughts come, let them go. Choose to be peaceful.

"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," she says. "And I thought that was an idea worth sharing."

So did I.