Healing Meditation

A friend of mine has suffered for about 20 years from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to having been a victim of violent crime.  She recently went to a therapist who used a technique called "EMDR" to help her recall the crime and process her feelings about it.  After just one ninety minute session, my friend felt she had experienced significant healing and may not even need more EMDR therapy sessions.

Intrigued, I decided to learn more about EMDR.  EMDR stands for "Eye Movement Desentization & Reintegration".  The technique was invented in 1996 by Francine Shapiro, author of EMDR The Breakthrough Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma".  Shapiro was trying to find more effective therapies for chronic stress when she noticed her own tendency to move her eyes rapidly from left to right when thinking about stressful memories.  She noticed that these eye movements made the traumatic memories become less stressful, as if they helped her "get through" the events an move on.  Over time she developed EMDR.  This therapy is now considered perhaps the fastest and most effective method for a person to work through painful memories ranging from minor stresses (public humiliation, unkind words from parents) to major traumas (being a victim of a violent crime or seeing friends die in combat).

Given my interest in left and right brain research, I'm interested in the fact that the technique involves shifting attention rapidly back and forth from left to right.  This can involve moving the eyes from left to right, but it can also involve listening with headphones to recordings in which tones alternate rapidly between the left ear and the right ear.  Shapiro admits to not understanding why EMDR works this way.  She discovered by accident that stressful memories are dealt with much faster when the attention shifts back and forth from left to right.  She speculates that this might have something to do with left brain and right brain differences and that it is similar to rapid eye movement in sleep.  I suspect it is a way in which the brain ensures that it deals with stressful memories using all of it's best talents:  the logic of the left brain and the intuition of the right.

I've started experimenting with EMDR as a form of meditation.  I found some EMDR recordings by Liborio Conti on iTunes.  Her "EMDR Meditations" album has beautiful instrumental pieces, each of which has sounds alternating rapidly from left to right.  I haven't had horrible traumas in my life (at least not yet), but have some issues with harsh disapproval.  So I've tried at times to listen to Conti while bringing to mind some of the most unpleasant times I can remember in which I've had harsh criticism from an authority figure.  I'm not sure yet if this is having an effect, but I'm hoping it makes me a bit less sensitive to harsh criticism in the future.

Shifting to the Right

In her book, My Stroke of Insight , Jill Bolte Taylor describes how her life threatening stroke in 1996 forced her to see the world through the eyes of the only part of her brain that could still function at the time:  her right brain.  As she explains in her book, this is the half of the brain that lives in the moment.  It has no sense of past and future.  It tells no stories.  It has no worries or obsessions, no plans or responsibilities.  It does not see any difference between the inner world and the outer world, between human body and surroundings.  It only sees all of reality as it is right now, accepting everything that is exactly as it is right now, at peace and filled with wonder.

According to Taylor, this type of awareness is available to all of us.  It is part of being human.  It is a basic fact of brain science that the left side of the brain is verbal, that the left side is logical, that it tells the stories of past and future, that it is the side of the brain that distinguishes between self and other.  It is also known that the right brain is intuitive, that it just sees the present moment without connecting the now to the past and the future in a timeline, and that the right brain blurs the boundaries between self and universe.  But the left brain dominates most of our awareness.  The mental chatter doesn't stop for more than a few seconds at a time.  Thoughts of past and future constantly jump into our brains.  Peaceful, carefree, silent absorption in the current moment, feeling connected to everything, is an ecstatic spiritual state we read about but can feel outside of our grasp.

How can we shift our awareness to our right brains as Taylor did without getting there as she did, by suffering a hemmorrhage or blod clot that shuts down the rest of our brain?

I don't think it's that hard to give the left brain a rest and shift to the right.  This is what meditation is all about.

Effective meditation is all about setting up conditions in which the left brain takes a vacation.  And when the left brain lets go, the right brain naturally rushes in to fill the void.  Here are some of the things that I've found will help me deepen my daily meditations:

1. Always give myself permission to stop DOING anything until the meditation is over.  I always need to tell myself that I'll get back to my work, my family, and my home later.  In the long run, everyone will benefit if I stop pushing all those agendas ahead for 20 or 30 minutes while I meditate.  I can't possibly shift to my Right Brain if I don't do this because, as long as there is work to be done, my Left Brain is going to insist on being in charge.
2. Keep conversations short.  As many meditation guides suggest, it's way too much to expect NO thoughts to creep in, to beat yourself up because you remember something you ought to do next time your at work, or a bad memory pops up.  But I always start my meditations with the intention of limiting these conversations.  Notice them when they arise.  But don't run with any particular train of thought.  Remind myself that this is not the time, that I can get back to that topic later.
3. Always relax my body.  A relaxed body and the Left Brain don't mix.  The Left Brain is about action, effort, fight, or flight.  When the body relaxes, the Right Brain settles in.
4. Focus on something fluid.  Anything that is fluid--a candle, a river, the wind in the trees, or my breath--has no rigid boundaries.  The flame starts at the wick, continues into the visible flame, continues into invisible hot gas, and ends in smoke dispersing everywhere.  Where does the flame start and end?  Similarly, when I inhale, is the breath inside my lungs "me"?   When I exhale, has part of "me" left?  Focusing on anything fluid during meditation is a great reminder that there are no clear boundaries between my inner world and the outer world.  And because this is how the Right Brain already thinks, when I focus on these things during meditation, I encourage my Right Brain to take control.

Brain Dance

Both sides of the human brain can see, hear, smell, taste, think, feel, remember and communicate.  But how each half sees, hears, tastes, thinks, feels, remember, and communicates is completely different from the other half.

The left half of the brain takes information it receives from the senses and uses it to separate the world into different things.  It defines the borders between beings or objects so that each "thing" can be dealt with as a separate entity.  It names things.  It listens to words, thinks in words, speaks in words.  All because it is driven to get things done, to control the situation--exactly what we need much, but not all, of the time.

The right half of the brain starts with the same information, but seeks to see things as they are.  The whole picture.  No boundaries between self and others.  No words or names to represent reality.  Instead, absorb reality in all its raw, unfiltered complexity. 

In her book, "My Stroke of Insight", Jill Bolte Taylor, describes brain scans showing that both sides of the brain are active most of the time.  In a conversation, the left brain will interpret the words and the right brain will interpret the sneer that shows the words are sarcastic.  They work together to achieve more than either could alone, but the left brain usually dominates our awareness.  As a result, we have two minds but are usually see things mostly from the left brain's perspective.

It's as if the two sides of our brains were in a dance.  Most of the time, the left brain leads the dance.  The couple could not be more different in personality, priorities, and character.  But if they agree on who will lead the dance, they can appear as one.

The Perfect Stroke for the Perfect Victim

We are all so lucky that, in 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor had a life threatening stroke.  It took her 7 years to regain all her mental capacity.  I wouldn't wish this on anyone, but--if it had to happen to someone--we're fortunate that it happened to her.

This was the perfect combination of stroke and victim.  The stroke was unusual in that it shut down the entire left hemisphere of her brain and did no damage to her right hemisphere.  As a result, Jill was able to see the world purely from the point of view of her right brain.  This right brain can't speak, but it is a master of non-verbal communication.  It can't reason, but it is the source of intuition.  It can't imagine the past or the future, but it dwells in the eternal present.  It has no concept of "self"; it doesn't know the words "I am".  Instead, it sees no separation between itself and its surroundings.  To the right brain, all reality is interconnected.  It has no goals, but it is therefore carefree.  In her book, "My Stroke of Insight", Jill describes the 2-1/2 weeks that she was wide awake but unable to think or understand the spoken word as Nirvana.  Peace.  An exhilarating mystical connection with everything in life.  Complete absorption in the eternal now.

What made Jill the perfect victim for this perfect stroke was her background and her personality.  She was a brain scientist--a nueroanatomist at Harvard University.  She already was an expert, region by region, on the differences between the left brain and the right brain.  She already knew that the left brain was verbal and was the location for all ideas such as "I am a brain scientist.  My name is Jill.  My body ends here and then the rest of the world starts."  She already knew that the right brain was the source of emotional intelligence, intuition, creativity, and that the right brain has no concept of past and future.  So she had the expertise to explain to us in her book exactly what was going on in her brain when her consciousness shifted to the right and during her 7 years of recovering left brain functioning.

Her personality also made her the perfect victim for this stroke.  In the riveting chapter where she describes the first 4 hours of her stroke, she recalls when she first realized that she was having a life threatening stroke.  She said,

Oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke!  I'm having a stroke!  Wow, this is so cool!  Wow, how many scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain function and mental deterioration from the inside out?

The real question is: how many scientists would realize they could die and would find it "cool" and fascinating?  Jill's enthusiasm and passion for understanding what is happening to her even during the stroke and the years of painstaking recovery are characteristics of her personality that made her the perfect victim for this perfect stroke.  Nobody else could have given us the gift of the story she tells us in her book.  Only she could have experienced this and come back to teach the rest of us so much about how our minds work.