2021-05-13
1 小时 5 分钟So in 2008, my guest today, Jill bolted, gave the first ever TED talk to go massively viral.
A Harvard trained neuroscientist, she told the story of her stroke that largely wiped out the entire left hemisphere of her brain.
A horrifying experience.
And yet the entire time, as her left hemisphere was shutting down, it was also observing and analyzing the process in a way that a scientist might wondering at the moment by moment changes.
She shared this deeply moving story and her ability to observe with one side of her brain that was slowly turning off what was coming online on the other side, along with the eight year journey it took to rebuild and bring her left half back online, enough to step back into her career and stand on maybe the most intimidating stage in the world and leave her audience spellbound, captivated and yearning, in an odd twist of circumstance, to experience even a glimpse of the profound, expansive connectedness and bliss that Jill described as her right hemisphere took the reins and all but eliminated any sense of otherness, separateness, self or separation.
And despite the stunning success of her talk and the book that followed that talk, Jill still viewed them in this odd way, as a bit of a failure.
Her ultimate goal was to invite people to explore, reconnecting with that same sense of spaciousness and joy and empathy and compassion, to activate and embrace all parts of their brains, not just the heads down, individualistic, achievement oriented parts.
People wanted to, but there was no clear roadmap.
So she spent years deconstructing the process and distilling it into a powerful, insight packed call to action in her new book, whole Brain Living, where she reveals the four characters living in your brain and how to harness them to live an extraordinary, intentional and present life.
So enjoyed learning all about the deeper experience and also going into these four characters and understanding better how to put them to work in our lives.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.
It seems like we have a couple of similarities then, because we both grew up by water.
My dad was a psychologist for his entire career, and it sounds like your dad started out in one but then really ended up making the focus of his work, psychology.
Mostly on the clinical side.
Exactly, yes.
He told me that he chose to be a man of the cloth because he felt that people felt safe to share with people with men of cloth, and so he thought that that was an advantage to helping people help themselves.
Oh, that's so interesting.
So he ends up really pursuing working with people to try and elevate them in a lot of different ways.
In a clinical setting, in other settings.