I wish I was clever enough to come up with that title on my own, but My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey is a book I have read several times that continues to be a source of inspiration and frankly serves as the framework that allows me to contextualize what I used to call "spritual" experiences.

Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist who was working for Harvard when she had a stroke on the left side of her brain. As the functions of her left-brain shut down, she was thrust into seeing the world through her right-brain eyes. The effects were fascinating. She became very sensitive to tone of voice (she couldn't really comprehend words at first) and she had an overwhelming sense of peace and could no longer see a division between herself and everything else. She felt at one with everything. She said it took her five years to understand the difference between her hand and the chair. She thought of herself as a bag of water.

It's a fascinating look into the functions of the brain from the perspective of someone who studies the brain for a living. The book gave me a framework for understanding the language that Buddhists use about experiences they have with meditation. I've had many experiences that didn't fit in the box of Christianity that I had been given when I was younger. I was unable to articulate the experiences and couldn't really make sense of them. When I left Christianity behind, I still cherished those experiences but was at a loss for an explanation as to whether they were God talking to me, or just me being crazy or what. Now I can enjoy the experiences of compassion, peace, intuition and unity that come from my right brain awareness without having to resort to "God did it" to explain it. I couldn't be more grateful for this book.

I was originally introduced to Jill Bolte Taylor in this talk she gave at TED: