Yoga, meditation and other ancient practices are often part of lifelong quests for spiritual enlightenment and inner peace. Yet, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was able to find that state of Nirvana in just one morning—unfortunately, it was while suffering a stroke. Oprah talks with Dr. Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, about her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, which details her stroke and the spiritual metamorphosis that followed.

The morning of December 10, 1996, changed Dr. Taylor's life forever. She awoke with a headache behind her left eye—it was the first sign of the hemorrhagic stroke that was about to shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. Dr. Taylor says she tried to exercise, take a shower and do other parts of her morning routine, but she felt strange and out of sorts. Soon, Dr. Taylor's training as a brain scientist came into play. "When my right arm went paralyzed … that was, to me, a clear a warning sign of stroke," she says.

As she struggled to summon for help, the hemorrhage continued growing and flooding the left hemisphere of her brain with blood. Soon, her left brain went silent, and Dr. Taylor completely lost her ability to talk, think and communicate with the external world. However, Dr. Taylor says the functions of her brain's right hemisphere remained strong. "[The right hemisphere] gives us the more subtle kinds of understanding—it's our intuition, it's our witness or our observer, it's our ability to experience deep inner peace," she says.

Dr. Taylor says she experienced the world in a different way through her right brain and reached a state of Nirvana. "I lost my ego. I lost the cells that said, 'I am,' because that is part of language, and so I did not exist anymore," she says. "What I gained was this incredible knowingness of deep inner peace—an excitement of realizing everything was inner connected—and I lost the boundary of my body. So, I felt that I was enormous, as big as the universe, because I no longer defined that this where I began and this is where I ended."

Eventually, after undergoing major brain surgery and years of recovery, Dr. Taylor says she's regained full function in her left brain. But, armed with the knowledge of what the right brain is capable of, Dr. Taylor says she is now more spiritual, creative and aware of the deep inner peace that exists at the core of the right hemisphere—and she's on a path to share her knowledge with others.