Peace is just a thought away.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
Hi. Welcome to my world!
It is my personal goal to live a balanced life between my work and play, as well as live a healthy and joy filled life – regardless of my external circumstances.
I practice the tools of Whole Brain Living to obtain and retain my deep inner peace. I am sharing this neuroanatomically-based psychological paradigm with you, so you can live a more peaceful life too. We may not be able to choose the circumstances within which we find ourselves, but we have every say in how we let those circumstances impact our mental health.
Our deepest and wildest emotions of anxiety, fear, resentment, anger, sadness, and grief are not our enemies. They are important information from which we can learn and grow. Whole Brain Living is a wonderful roadmap that helps us hear rather than fear what our emotions are trying to tell us about ourselves and how we are wired. Whole Brain Living is a tool that trains us how we can sustain a peaceful heart and mind, even when we find ourselves emotionally triggered.
When we understand how our brain organizes information and we meet the Four Characters that drive our life, we gain the power to choose to step out of our emotional pain into the 75% of our brain that is not triggered. Allowing us to hear, hold, and heal ourselves from within.
In the following pages, I will share with you my personal journey and introduce you to my Four Characters, which we all share. Being willing to explore these Four Characters in yourself and others and learning to differentiate who is who inside of you is step one. Learning to bring all Four Characters of your brain into a diplomatic communication with one another empowers you to choose who and how you want to be in any moment.
We have so much more power over what is going on inside of our brain than we have ever been taught. I enthusiastically encourage you to take this journey into understanding your own mind.
“Peace is just a thought away, and all we have to do to access that peace is to purposely silence the voice of our dominating left brain.”
- Jill Bolte Taylor
My Story
I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who would grow up to be diagnosed with the brain disorder schizophrenia. As a child, I could tell that we were different, so I became captivated with understanding what is ‘normal’ and what is not. The subject of my postdoctoral research in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry, asked the question: ‘How does our brain create our perception of reality?’ I desperately wanted to understand at a biological/cellular level why it was that my brain was capable of connecting my everyday experience with reality such that I could make my dreams come true, but my brother’s brain could not make that connection and instead manifest hallucinations and delusions.
As irony would have it, in 1996 at the age of 37, a blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. This was a congenital arterio-venous malformation (AVM) that I was born with. On the morning of this rare form of stroke, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I became an infant in a woman’s body. It took eight years for me to completely rebuild my brain from the inside out, at which point I published my memoir, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientists Personal Journey. This book spent 63 weeks on the NY Times bestseller list in 2008 and continues to be a top seller in the Amazon marketplace. It offers great insight for anyone who is taking care of a stroke survivor.
“We have so much more power over what is going on inside of our brain than we have ever been taught.”
- Jill Bolte Taylor
Later in 2008, I was invited to give a TED talk. At that time, there were barely a handful of TED talks online, and my claim to fame is that my talk, My Stroke of Insight, was the first talk to go viral on the internet.
And then there was the blessing of Oprah’s Soul Series and TV show…
“Please take responsibility for the energy you bring into this space.”
- Jill Bolte Taylor
…and the blessing of being chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential in the World.
Here I am with my beloved mama G.G. who reared me twice…
But as much fun that fame, fortune, and world travel brought to my life, I wanted everyone to understand that “Peace is just a thought away”, not just for me, but for all of us.
So, in 2021, I tried again and the book Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life burst out of my brain and surged into the world.
I truly believe that our number one job in life is to love one another, and Whole Brain Living provides a simple roadmap for us to master our emotions and thoughts so we can live more peaceful lives.
In Whole Brain Living, I blend neuroanatomy with psychology to show how we can know the two emotional and two thinking parts of our brain and gain the power to call upon each of our characters in any moment.
Our emotional systems do not need to run on automatic or manifest as emotional reactivity. When we know our Four Characters and master bringing them into a BRAIN Huddle, we immediately gain the power to choose who and how we want to be – regardless of our external circumstances.
