Buddhism and the right brain

About 10 years ago when I first started getting into yoga, some trippy things happened to me. It wasn't like I had to practice intensively to have these experiences or to go to some sacred place or remote retreat, either. It was like yoga just opened up my mind to the trippiness that was there all along, apparently (according to Jill Bolte Taylor's book A Stroke of Insight) in the right hemisphere of my brain.

In 1999, I was stressed-out, bored and lonely in my first teaching job at Hamilton College in Clinton NY, a tiny college town with one coffee shop, one artsy gift shop, and one restaurant serving the worst Chinese food I ever had in my life. The weekly yoga class I happened into was held above the gift shop in a bare room decorated with industrial carpeting and not much else. My yoga teacher, Nathan, was just an ordinary sensitive-new-age-guy who had been trained at the Kripalu Center in Lennox, MA, which meant that his method was informed by Vedic (Hindu) spirituality and emphasized a gentle, contemplative style of movement. This was the first time that yoga had worked for me: my body didn't have to struggle with the poses and as my breathing and movement came in sync, my mind relaxed and opened up to new insights.

That year, I began to free myself from many of the thoughts that were making me miserable by testing Buddhist theories about the nature of reality and the self. For me, one of the great appeals of Buddhist philosophy is that it is very pragmatic and empirical. As my Tricycle Magazine Twitter feed reminded me today, the Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense." And so, what I want to relate here is an experience that I understand through reason and common sense, but I don't expect you to believe what I believe unless you have experienced it yourself. You might want to believe Dr. Taylor, the neurologist, though!

Nathan invited another teacher to join his class one night, and at the end of yoga practice, when we were all breathing full breaths, when our bodies were relaxed and our minds were calm, the guest teacher had us lie down on the floor. As we concentrated on our breathing and being present in the moment, her fingers traced a line on the floor all around our bodies. Nathan had warned us that this teacher had a powerful spiritual energy and that we might have some sort of unusual experience, but I was skeptical of anything that smacked of mysticism.

However, as an empiricist, I would of course try the exercise, and what I perceived was that those fingers were erasing my ego as they traced around me. Then when the circle was complete, the instant her fingers again reached the top of my head, I had an out-of-body experience. Not the kind where I was floating and looking down on myself, but one where suddenly I was pure consciousness, detached entirely from the material world. Part of me was aware that this wasn't really happening, but at the same time, another part of me knew that I was tapping into some other kind of truth that was just as real as what normally comes from my physical senses.

At first, I giggled to myself and wondered what other spirits were out here that I could zoom off and encounter, but then I realized that there were no "others" and in fact, my lingering sense of self was in fact a false belief left over from my many years of material existence. Having lived for so long with an ego, this total loss of identity then felt a little scary and I made my way back into the physical, wiggling my toes and fingers with glee. However, those physical sensations were just as concrete to me as the realization that beyond our physical existence, we are all inseparable parts of a dancing cosmos.

It seems that what this exercise did was to allow me to give some screen time to my normally suppressed right brain. This is what happened to neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor when she had a stroke that gradually disabled much of the functioning of her left brain. Her sense of time, causality, and identity started flickering in and out, and she was awash in a blissful sense of oneness with the universe. As I read descriptions of her "stroke of insight" last week, they strongly recalled my own experience that evening in yoga class. Taylor writes:

My entire self-concept shifted as I no longer perceived myself as a single, a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me. I understood that at the most elementary level, I am fluid. …Everything around us, about us, among us, within us, and between us is made up of atoms and molecules vibrating in space. …My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea. For many of us, thinking about ourselves [this way] slips us just beyond our comfort zone. But without the judgement of my left brain saying that I am a solid, my perception of myself returned to this natural state of fluidity.

This sense of fluidity extended to Jill's physical perceptions as well: without the discernment of her left brain, she was unable to distinguish colors, distance, edges, sounds, or differences of many kinds, such as a perception of time or of a sense of loss, which almost killed her. Fortunately, her left brain retained enough functioning to raise the alarm and keep her thinking linear enough to call for help. So although Jill's experience of reality through her right brain was pleasurable and liberating, clearly we need both sides of our brain in order to survive.

My goal during this process of recovery has been not only to find a healthy balance between the functional abilities of my two hemispheres, but also to have more say about which character dominates my perspective at any given moment. I find this to be important because the most fundamental traits of my right hemisphere personality are deep inner peace and loving compassion. I believe the more time we spend running our inner peace/compassion circuitry, then the more peace/compassion we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace/compassion we will have on the planet. As a result, the clearer we are about which side of our brain is processing which types of information, the more choice we have in how we think, feel, and behave not just as individuals, but as collaborating members of the human family.

The way Jill describes how she exercises the circuitry of her right brain bears a strong resemblance to the language Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han uses to describe how one can cultivate peace and compassion in daily life:

We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We realize that, at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending on the strength of these seeds within us. 

When the seeds of anger, violence, and fear are watered in us several times a day, they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding in us every day, those seeds will become stronger, and the seeds of violence and hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of anger, violence, and fear in us, we will lose our peace and our stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us. With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace.

Buddhist practice is about exercising the right brain. Makes sense to me.