Jill:

Yeah, you know, that's how we are connected. I’d listened to various things that Hedy does simply because I value who and what she is in the world so much. I tend to not do interviews but, you know, this is one that has appeal. This is a good, a good format for me. 

Belinda:

Oh good.

Jill:

I'm guessing that you have your own hero's journey.

Belinda:

Yes I do. I have not recorded it yet though.

Jill:

I mean, it's clear that you do so, you know, we are all waiting with bated breath for that to happen. 

Belinda:

(Laughs) And it keeps morphing. I'm sure yours does as well, right? 

Jill:

Yeah, you know, the journey continues, doesn’t it?

Belinda:

Yes. Yes. Okay, so what was your ordinary world like before things changed? 

Jill:

So I was teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School. I was a trained and published neuroanatomist. So my area of specialty was the anatomy of the brain.  And I studied the brain because I have a brother who's only 18 months older than I who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder schizophrenia.  And as a child I recognized that he was very different from me in the way he perceived the world and chose to interact with the world. So I had dedicated my career to anatomy and research of the brain.  And I was having a wonderful time, I was performing this research and teaching but at the same time, I was advocate for the mentally ill and this was the way that I, I was of service to my brother. 

[MUSIC: “brainbolte” by Jeff Lams]

Narrator:

Jill got her call to adventure on the morning of December 10, 1996, when she was awakened by a screaming headache.

Jill:

I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. And I watched my circuits go offline one at a time.

Narrator:

It was a major hemorrhage in her left hemisphere caused by a malformation in the blood vessels of her brain.

Jill:

My left hemisphere, which connects me to the external world, it’d work for a little while. And then I would get myself a little bit closer to trying to help myself and then it would go offline and I would shift out into the expansive open magnificence of the right hemisphere experience of being at one with all that is.  And then, that would shut down and I would shift back into the left brain.  It would come back online and it was a quite the challenge. And at the same time, through the eyes of a scientist, it was fascinating to watch my circuits shut down, one at a time. 

Narrator:

This on again off again experience continued for the next 4 hours. During that time, the right side of Jill’s body became paralyzed. She barely managed to dial a colleague who sent for help. Upon arrival at the hospital, it was determined that Jill had had a stroke, the hemorrhage in her left hemisphere was stopped, and a surgery was planned for 2 ½ weeks later. 

As a brain scientist, Jill knew a lot about strokes from the outside, but now she was inside this mysterious experience and it wasn’t anything that she imagined.

Jill:

I experienced no language inside of my brain at all. I existed in a completely silent mind.  And in the absence of language, all I perceived was the magnificence of the present moment.  And I was aware that language no longer was there and that ultimately, success in healing and recovery would require that I bring language back online in my brain. 

Language is a tool that our brains use to take the magnificence of the present moment experience and to minimize it into a word that we can then use to describe it, so we can communicate with one another. But that's like saying that a sunset was magnificent.  What actually was the sunset? And in the absence of worrying about calling the sunset a title or a name or, or using any words, I just got to be the experience of the sunset. And when I was in the right hemisphere, I did not have the boundaries of my body or the perception of where do I begin and where do I end. And so, I perceived myself as this life force ball of energy with no boundary.  I was as big as the universe, because energetically there was no separation between the energy of what I am versus the energy of what is, is around me.

And, and so that's what life was like. It was, it was rich and full and complete and there was a sense of blissfulness and a euphoria of just being.  And in that, there was a state of gratitude and contentment of being all of that, not distracted away from that present moment by a language which communicates and memories that put me into my past, or ideas that put me into the future. So I had an existence that was right-here-right-now. And during those five weeks of absolute silence, it was a truly holy experience and really magnificently beautiful for me.

Narrator:

Was this experience calling Jill to her death or calling her to recovery?  And did she have a choice in the matter?

Jill:

There was just this conscious awareness of hold on, hold on, hold on. And I kept thinking to myself, what am I holding on to? Who's doing the holding and what am I holding on to? And I didn't know.  All I knew was I was holding on to my life.  And I believed that if I let go, consciously let go, that I would be so far detached from this body that I would never — even if I survived — I would never be able to get the body to move again because I was so detached away from it.

But at the same time I didn't die. So I was still here. And I was stuck in this condition of detached from being able to get the mass of me to do anything because it felt like a ton’ o lead. There were moments there when it was a realization of Oh my gosh, what do I do with this? I'm essentially dead and yet I'm not. I'm suspended, I'm suspended in nothingness. I'm attached to a body that is going to be completely vegetative.

Belinda:

[MUSIC: “Erwin” by Jeff Lams]

I’m Belinda Lams and this is The Moment When…Today we’re talking with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor about the massive stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain and her astonishing ability to observe the whole experience… Her story continues.

Narrator:

Jill was suspended in a world between holding on and letting go. 

Jill:

Everything around me was energy. I was energy big as the universe and I remember thinking there was no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. How on earth would I ever get my tiny little toes to move again? How could I ever infiltrate this body so completely and thoroughly that I would ever have control over my muscles? I had a mind that was organically no longer capable of normal conscious thought because of the wound in my left hemisphere. I was aware that this was not a good situation.  And because I let go, I consciously was aware that I had let go and yet, I'm still here. So I perceived that moment as energy and the energy bustling about me like a beehive and I was in that beehive.  And then, I remember passing out and I went to sleep. 

[MUSIC: “brainbolte” by Jeff Lams]

Narrator:

The moment when… is a pivotal moment that shifts the course of one’s life. For some, it comes as quiet insight. For others, it comes as a stormy circumstance. For Jill, it came as an awe-inspiring revelation.

Jill:

You know, everybody's mourning, people are grieving, people are unhappy, people are crying, people are devastated.  And I'm not. I'm just in this condition of being big as the universe; feeling love and compassion and openness, and realizing that I have found this incredible blissful euphoria and yet I am not dead. I'm alive. And what that said to me was this is circuitry, because everything for me always goes back to the cells in the circuitry. It's just ingrained in my, my filter of how I perceive everything as a neuroanatomist and has my entire life. So, for me that meant I am running a circuit that is blissful euphoria and what that means is that everyone is capable of running the circuitry. The circuitry is always running.  

It's kind of like the Sun is always shining whether there are clouds or not in the way of it.  And to me the clouds are that, that left brain consciousness that hooks us into the past, and our fears and pains of the past, and our future, and our fears and pains of the future, and linear time, which is, you know, emotional relationships and jobs and stress and all  that circuitry.  And in the absence of all of that — those are the clouds — there's still this magnificent, Oh my God, I'm alive. 

[MUSIC: “brainbolte” by Jeff Lams]

And I thought to myself, I don't know if I could ever get anything back, but if I could get back enough to communicate this to people, and they knew that they could find their own blissful euphoria, then to me, that would be worth the effort that it would take in order for me to recover, in order to communicate that to them, in order to live in a better humanity. And so that was what I decided to do.  

Narrator:

Jill had surgery to remove a golf ball sized blood clot from her brain. Then she began the hard work of recovery.

Jill:

I've always been very athletic and taken good care of my body so I thought, you know, I can exist in a vegetative state for, you know, at least twenty years, thirty years. I'd worked with patients and people who were in this kind of a condition. I found this population fascinating, because I always believed that they were in there and it was our job to try to figure out how to come find them. And now ironically, here I am, the one in that condition. And here, I had a whole half-brain to work with because it was completely offline and it was my job then to figure out what did my brain need in order to recover step by step by step by step by step, with absolutely no guarantee that I would get anything whatsoever back. 

I had to make the decision a thousand times a day that I was willing to face and endure the agony of recovery.Because recovery meant trying to make sense out of nonsense, and how to create order where there was no order inside of my brain. Which meant I had to pay incredible amounts of attention. I had to put in an amazing amount of effort. And I had to support all of that with sleep.

Narrator:

In the Hero’s Journey, the Hero meets allies who support them in the new world. Jill needed tremendous help in the long process of healing. One very important ally was her own mother.

Jill:

I was very blessed that my mother was my hero who protected me and supported me during this journey and she recognized that I needed to sleep. I would learn and I would grow and I would try and then I would be exhausted and then I needed to sleep.  And she protected my sleep. And in our society, we do not honor the healing power of sleep. So that was one of the biggest differences between my recovery and what happens with other people who experience stroke or brain trauma. 

Belinda:

Oh, that is incredible knowledge. So good to know. Did your  mother know that intuitively or did she know that physiologically? 

Jill:

(Laughs) No, my mother was, she was an academic, she was a mathematician.  But she believed that my brain knew better than anyone else could possibly know what it needed in order to support itself in recovery. She believed in my brain's ability to do its best to recover.  And she, she noticed early on that if I got tired, I could not learn anymore. And she thought, why keep her awake and keep subjecting her to stimulation? Let her go to sleep and let her integrate everything that she has learned and then I would and then I would wake up fresh and then she would feed me and take me to the restroom and then she would teach me until I was tired and exhausted and then she would let me sleep until I woke up again.  She was magnificent; really truly magnificent in how she followed her instincts intuitively to get the organ to recover to its best.

Narrator:

Another significant ally was Jill’s neurologist, Ann Young, at Mass General Hospital, who opened the door of possibility when she offered these powerful healing words:

Jill:

“Jill, we have no idea how you're going to recover.  We have no idea what you're going to get back.  We have no idea what you're not going to get back.  But we won't know anything for two years. So give yourself the time to recover your brain slowly.” And because she said that, that took all the pressure off of, if I don't have it back inside of three months, forget it.  And thank goodness, because at three months, I had gained a lot of ability, but boy I had no large world perception and I had no fluidity to movement and I had no real understanding and my brain was still pretty infantile.  And it's a process. So, so I was blessed that somebody who I respected in my immediate environment told me, “It'll be at least two years, we have no idea; just go do your work, just go do your work.” 

Narrator:

Since Jill couldn’t work at her job, her peers at Harvard offered their support in an extraordinary way.

Jill:

They loved me and they donated their time off with pay so that I could have time to recover and not feel incredible stress about needing to support myself financially. And that was an enormous gift because there's no way that I could have supported myself at that level of disability. And what that did was that took the pressure off.

Belinda:

That’s beautiful.

Jill:

It was really a tremendous gift to be able to then simply be. My boss told me my job now was for me to recover my mind and I took that very seriously. And I paid very close attention and I was very determined.  I was very grateful and I slept when I needed to sleep which was an enormous amount of time.

Belinda:

[MUSIC: “Erwin” by Jeff Lams]

You’re listening to The Moment When…

We are a fan-funded podcast. If you derive value from these shows, then join our group of supporters by becoming a Patron. Just go to Patreon.com/Belindalams to become a monthly supporter. For as little as $5/month, you can make a huge difference. Links are in the show notes.

Today we’re exploring the brain’s miraculous ability to recover from trauma…with my guest Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.

Narrator:

So, Jill took the road back to her ordinary world. With the strength of her will to recover, the courage to face the enormous challenges, the support of her relationships, and the revelation of her profound experience, she learned what it would take to regain wholeness once again.

Jill:

Healing and recovery is about paying attention to what do the cells need. If you're experiencing any kind of trauma whether it's a trauma in the body or trauma in the brain, what that means by definition is that the cells that are performing some function are no longer able to perform that function for some reason. And then, it's a matter of Okay, how do I set myself up so that I can help those cells experience their own healing? And once the cells then heal, then they can begin to form their function again. And when it came to neurological trauma, first of all, it was common for the medical community in those days, a mere 22 years ago, to say, “You know, if you don't have an ability back after three to six months, forget it.  You're never going to get it back.” 

And part of my journey back for me has been really being a loud advocate that that is not true. And neuroplasticity is very real and it is moment by moment by moment learning of the cells. So if the cells are traumatized, they still are learning. They're still creating new connections through their own neuroplasticity.

And time made no sense to me, because I'm capable of learning when I'm 90. If I'm capable of learning something new when I'm 90, then that means those cells are constantly rearranging who they're communicating with and in that new communication, they are actually gaining new ability. What would make me think that simply because I had a trauma, that tendency of those cells is no longer going to happen?

So it doesn't matter if it's ten years post-trauma, 50 years post-trauma, the brain is alive.  The cells are alive.  They're rearranging.  Who are they communicating with?  And under the right circumstances, we can set our brains up for success of healing and we can also set ourselves up for failure. 

Narrator:

In the Hero’s Journey, the hero brings back the elixir to offer others. Through her 8-year journey to complete recovery, Jill brings back the good news of her revelation, a wealth of knowledge, and a treasure trove of wisdom. 

Jill:

My journey now is really to educate the public and the world that the brain is capable of recovering throughout a lifetime and throughout a trauma, but we have to continue to try. And I think that one of the greatest problems that happens in our society is when the officials say, “It’s three months, it’s six months, you haven't learned it, you're not going to learn it anymore.” So I stop trying, my family stops supporting me in my efforts. The insurance companies say, “Well you've reached a plateau, you're done learning. We're going to take away your physical or whatever type of rehabilitation that we have to offer.” And I think that that's just exactly wrong. 

Instead of recognizing that this is a magical time when the brain is integrating and you're mastering a certain level, you have to do that before you can attain new information, they take the rehabilitation away right at the wrong time and then people digress in their ability.  And that's the end of that. 

So, you know, one of the things I tell people all the time when they call me up and they say, “Oh my god were in trauma.”  It's like, it will be a month before you know anything. It will be a month because the brain is in trauma. So don't keep saying “Squeeze my hand.” I mean for God's sake, they can't make sense out of nonsense. They can't create order because the brain cells cannot communicate with one another.  And then, what you're training that person is that they cannot, they are ill, they are sick, they are failing, you're constantly asking them to fail and that's not what you want. You want to cheer them on. You want to be the head cheerleader for the cells.  You want to be the head cheerleader for the ability of that brain to find what it needs to do in order to get to a stage where once the trauma is done, once the swelling's done, all the inflammation is gone, the cells can regain health. Who's in there now and how do we guide them into a new neural circuit in order to create order out of the disorder once again? And that in my book is recovery. 

So I think we're learning. You know, I think that we're learning and we're growing and it's experiences like this that open people's eyes and minds to Well, maybe the brain works a little bit differently than we thought it did. 

Belinda:

One thing that's very notable to me is the way that you are with yourself and with your body. I don't know if that came through that experience or you've always been that way.  But I know myself, other people, that if something goes wrong, there is a tendency to reject that part of the body or be against it rather than – like you saw that the cells were something that needed to be worked with. To me it translates as a form of self-love;  that you loved yourself, you've loved your life, you loved your body into healing in a way. Whereas I know other people that have had strokes and they'll say, “Oh, my stupid arm!”  And I've heard that. I've seen it out right first hand. So I just am so touched by your spirit that way.

[MUSIC: “brainbolte” by Jeff Lams]

Jill:

Thank you. I learned early that it was important that I stay out of my own way emotionally.  And if I came online and that part of my brain that said, “Oh, woe is me, I'm pathetic. I just fell off the Harvard ladder, I'm nothing, my arm’s paralyzed, I'm worthless, I have no value.” If I moved into that circuitry, all that did was get in the way of my recovery.  And so I decided early that that wasn't, you know, a voice that I was going to listen to at all.  Fortunately that was silenced because that was in my left brain.  And instead, I was filled with glee. I was filled with gratitude. And people would say,  “How could you still be content and happy when you were in such a pathetic condition?” And I say, “I did not die that day.” It was not the end of my life. It was a new beginning with new possibilities. And I could still have eyes that could see, and I could still hear, and I, I  had a life. I had something to do. I had these cells to help recover through loving them and supporting them.

We are amazing. Life is this amazing experience and when we remember to have gratitude for the fact that we actually are this collection of cells capable of breathing, capable of seeing or speaking or whatever your ability or disability, doesn't matter. We're still this living ball of energy and our time here is limited and fragile and precious.

Belinda:

Bless you, you're a rock star. We need you. We need you.

Jill:

Well I, I, I did not die that day and I got a full-force dose of what are you going to do now? And so I'm full-force doing whatever I'm going to do now. 

Belinda:

Thank you for doing that. Thank you for committing to that and choosing that.

Jill:

[MUSIC: “Moment’s End” by Jeff Lams]

Yeah, thank you. And thank you for providing a platform for people to share the journey of their best piece of who they are, beyond who they are as a person, but who are they as a human being.

Belinda:

You can learn more about Dr. Jill and her work as well as pick up a copy of her book “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey” at drjilltaylor.com.

Dr. Jill and I also had a little off-the-record conversation musing about the meaning of life and death. I am making this bonus clip available to my very wonderful Patreon supporters as a bit thank you for sponsoring this show every month. If you would like to hear it too, all you have to do is become a Patron of the Podcast for as little as $5/month. Just go to Patreon.com/belindalams and sign up.

THE MOMENT WHEN IS PRODUCED BY SOULMINE PRODUCTIONS. MUSIC IS COMPOSED BY JEFF LAMS. 

 This episode was sponsored by these generous patrons: John & Karen Ferraro.

 You can listen to other episodes at themomentwhen.me and your favorite podcast platforms. 

We welcome your social media love by following and liking us on instagram and facebook.  You can find all those links in the show notes. 

Stay tuned for more fantastic episodes, coming out each month for your inspiration and transformation. Until next time…I’m Belinda Lams.