Balancing our Perspective

Although some schools of psychotherapy (eg Internal Family Systems) recognize that each normal individual has multiple subpersonalities, these may all arise from one of two main sources: "left brain" or "right brain".

The perspective in which most of us are immersed, completely identified - "who I am" - is that of the left brain. Some aspects of this perspective are vitally important and very useful, however, the left brain perspective is entirely self-serving, and therefore strongly-biased. The left brain's egocentricity, by itself ("noisy ego"), is profoundly isolationist, unhealthy & unhappy.

For health, wholeness & true happiness, we need to intentionally balance this very narrow perspective by opening up to the big picture, via the right brain.

"The left brain is the thinking mind, the ego mind, it’s the location of our conscious self, and our ego functions of having an image, an idea about who we are, of managing our life, of coping. It’s the place most of us live most of the time, if not all of the time.

The right brain is the somatic brain. The right brain, the right cerebral hemisphere, is the place where all of the information that the body contains is received. Up until very recently, the right brain was undervalued, minimized, disparaged even. But in recent times, we’ve begun to realize that actually the right brain is part of an entire network of knowing in our body, of awareness.

So you have the left brain, which is the thinking mind, and you have the right brain which is the brain of direct, unmediated, nonconceptual experience of our life. It beholds things within a field of infinite space without any judgment or evaluation, without any processing at all.

Jill Bolte Taylor, the neuroscientist who suffered a massive left hemisphere stroke, says (in her book: "My Stroke of Insight." Penguin Books, 2009) that the right brain takes things as they are, and sees them in their immediacy & their fullness. But the right brain, interestingly and very important for somatic decent (body-based meditation), is not its own thing. The right brain is intimately linked with the limbic system, the emotional brain that all mammals have, with the brain stem – the so-called reptilian brain, with the heart and all of the knowledge of the heart, with the gut and all of the knowledge of the gut. In fact, rather than speaking of right brain, we should talk about “soma” meaning the vast interconnected network of awareness that runs through our whole body. We now know that even our cells are aware. There’s awareness in the cells. And that awareness translates up through a whole system in our body, of which the right brain is just a part. What does that system do? It sees things as they are. It experiences things with complete nakedness, complete directness. It is where we experience our human life. And it’s interesting that the experience of our human life that occurs in our soma, from the right brain all the way down to the awareness of the cells, is so different from the experience that we think we have when we run it through the processing of our conceptual mind.

Jill Bolte Taylor says, and I think with intuitive rightness, that the experience of the soma is what Buddhists mean by enlightenment, nirvana, liberation. So we have this very interesting situation in the modern world that we’re now beginning to realize: that our true human experience happens in our soma. The soma’s awake, it’s alive, it’s intelligent, and as you’ll see as we go through this program, it’s immensely aware."

Reginald A. Ray “Somatic Descent.” Sounds True, 2016. www.soundstrue.com/store/somatic-descent.html