Several weeks ago, along with colleagues from the Turtle Island Project, I conducted a retreat entitled “The Last Mask of the Authentic Healer.” It’s an experiential workshop for people interested in expanding their therapeutic repertoire and effectiveness. Participants are generally a broad spectrum of health professionals, but it’s open to others interested in healing.

We utilize lots of ritual and ceremony, because we’ve found they provide a structure that allows people to get in touch with feelings. From trance induction, visualization, drumming, body movement, and the creation of sacred objects, we awaken the right side of our brains. The right brain is home to the unencumbered, intuitive, and spiritual parts of us. It is the place of imagination and dreams, where we are opened to a world beyond our physical boundaries.

One of the participants was a psychiatric colleague who has a hospital-based practice. Mary has had a life-long love of horses and has developed a capacity to communicate with them. Now if you’re a veterinarian and say you can talk to horses that’s one thing, but a psychiatrist who can channel animals arouses a different response. Mary wants to use horses as therapeutic allies in her work with patients and has taken some steps to make that happen. However, her community’s resistance to her unorthodox approaches to therapy concerns her.

During the workshop we do a mask-making ceremony, which is often an intense confrontation with one’s healing spirit. Participants are asked to decorate their masks with objects that they have gathered during a silent, meditative walk. People are asked to pick only those things that “speak” to them, and Mary found three stones that represented her mind, body and spirit. She would incorporate them into her mask to remind her to stay in balance and live her truth.

She glued the two smaller stones representing her mind and body onto the forehead and between the eyes. The last stone, which was quite large, she picked because she saw the silhouette of a horse in it that represented her spirit. She was trying to glue it over the mouth as I walked by. It was obvious the glue would not hold it in place so I said, “Maybe that big stone would hold if you opened up the mouth and wedged it in.”

Mary understood immediately, that unless she opened her mouth to say clearly the way she truly wanted to practice, she would never own her spirit and move beyond her ambivalences.

We made an opening in the mouth and as she stuck the stone in Mary said, “I’ve been waiting a long time to open my horse-woman mouth.” Change happens like a bolt of lightening when the mind is opened and the lips can speak the truth of your soul.

Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old neuroscientist working at Harvard when she suffered a stroke. I heard about her through an e-mail attachment and listened to her tell the story of her eight-year recovery. The story was so moving that I went out and got her book My Stroke of Insight (Viking, 2008). Dr. Taylor’s book is a poetic elegy on bliss, as well as an anatomically detailed description of brain function, and it moved me deeply.

At 7:00 a.m. on Dec. 10, 1996, Jill Taylor felt a piercing pain behind her left eye from a blood vessel that had just burst. A Ph.D. in Neuroanatomy, she was uniquely qualified to describe what happened within minutes after her left-brain injury. After the intense pain, she could feel her body disconnecting from her mind, and blending with the space around her. “My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air. I was enfolded in a blanket of tranquil euphoria….at one with the world and all its creatures, part of a magnificent field of shimmering energy….I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle”.

This euphoric nirvana was accompanied by a deterioration of her ability to walk, talk, read and write, and recall much of her life. Jill describes the impact of the damage to the left side of her brain—the rational, grounded, organized, analytic part, and what happens when the right side picks up the slack—that’s the artistic, unencumbered, spiritual side.

My Stroke of Insight is a great short read, written honestly like a prayer from the heart; it’s a healing journey that will inspire you. But let me also make clear that not all left-sided brain injuries lead to such blissful insightfulness. Some people sink into difficult moody states and can act out in problematic ways. For Jill Taylor, her stroke recovery meant choosing to live a more spiritual life. She makes clear that by saying spiritual life she doesn’t mean religion. Religion, she says, is a story that the left brain tells the right brain. The right brain feels that awesome awareness without having the need to define it.

Now fully recovered, she says she can get into her right brain self whenever she wants to. If she feels anger rising, Jill thinks about somebody, something, or some activity that brings her pleasure. She doesn’t need to meditate to prepare herself; she says you just have to believe that you can tame the left-brain mind. She now makes the time for her physical and visual passions (waterskiing, guitar playing, and stained glass making), believing that by exercising the right brain she promotes a consciousness that leads to a more peaceful, spiritual life.

There are areas of the brain that are hardwired for spiritual experience which allows us to move beyond our physical boundaries, time and space. But we tend to subordinate that part to our dominant, controlling mind. Here is a distinguished neuroscientist telling us we can feel greater peace in our lives, if we spend more time exercising our right brain.

I love this story! Feeling bliss is not just a drug-induced, altered state of consciousness, it is something we can create for ourselves anywhere. If we can get stroked into bliss, and maybe do it without blowing a blood vessel, then maybe we can even do it together as a planet…now that’s bliss.