Dealing with Wallops: Traditional Approach
Some days, it seems as if many of us are locked in mortal combat with physical imperfection. We guzzle fish oil like Kool-Aid; hire militant personal trainers; have our fat vacuumed out, new breasts implanted, skin sliced and spliced; attack all the issues that keep us from matching our cultural concept of beauty. If you're in the midst of fighting this war, I congratulate you on your courage and optimism and regretfully remind you that you're losing.
The problem with "fixing" our imperfect, damaged, or aging bodies is that we can't. We may win a few battles, but the war always goes to entropy. This is not something our society readily acknowledges. Our advertising shouts, "Here's how to fight aging!" not "You're going to die; get used to it!" But making peace with the enemy—totally accepting our physical condition at any given moment—is the only way to win the conflict. How do we do that? Conquer new territory in our brains.
View What's Left, or Choose What's Right
At the age of 37, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that damaged the left side of her brain. As she lost the linear, verbal thinking of the left hemisphere to the wordless sense-perception of her right brain, Taylor experienced something she later called Nirvana. "I felt enormous and expansive," she explained to the audience at a recent conference (you can see her talk online at ted.com). "My spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria."
Now, there have been times when I've felt "enormous and expansive…like a great whale," but this only caused me to diet obsessively. Like most people, I generally see my body through the critical, socialized judgments of my verbal mind. We modern folk call this left-brain perspective "reality." Before the stroke, Taylor the scientist knew herself as "a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you." But when her left brain shut down, she found herself part of a connected universe in which, she said, "we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful."
Wise people from every cultural tradition have experienced this euphoric awareness. But in our environment, their more subtle teachings tend to be drowned out by commercials shrieking, "Fifty's the new 40!" However, after a self-esteem wallop—in the moment we find a new varicose vein or notice that gravity is slowly pulling our faces right off our heads—we may tune our desperate ears to the words of the wise.
Related Resources
From the June 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
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