Wisdom Lesson #4: I am responsible for the energy I bring.

Credit: NASA Web site

On Super Soul Sunday (OWN) this morning Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series interview of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor re-aired. During the interview she described her stroke experience and the profound awareness she learned in the process.The story is beautifully chronicled in her book A Stroke of Insight.

Essentially she had a massive hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain, the side that controls thought, learning, rote functions and all of the egoic thoughts with which we ordinarily identify. What remained was the intuitive, emotional, sensory “big picture” functioning of the right hemisphere of her brain. [more info on how the brain works]

She was aware that she was alive and connected; both a part of and wholly made of a loving, cooperative system of organisms working together for her good, her peace, her existence.

In fact, she was reborn! She had to re-learn a “self” because the “37-year old doctor and daughter self” she was “pre-stroke” had passed away in a mere 4-hour time span and no longer existed. Why and how? As a result of the stroke she lost her emotional baggage, memories of hurts, slights, pains, history, education and her “story” of who she was seen through the lens of a lifetime of events and relationships. She got a fresh start; she was indeed reborn again.

Wisdom in the Whisper™ Lesson #2: What I learned from Tom Shadyac’s I AM

WITW™ Lesson #2 – 1/1/2012: Learned while watching I AM! The Film, by Tom Shadyac

Although there are competitive aspects to nature, it is largely a cooperative and democratic system, an ecosystem (defined as a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment).

 

One of the fundamental laws of nature is that nothing in nature ever takes more than it needs to survive and thrive. When it does it, becomes subject to this law and dies off as unnatural. For example, a single redwood tree doesn’t take ALL of the soil in its vicinity, only what it needs to grow. In the same way, a lion doesn’t kill ALL of the gazelle at the watering hole, only what it needs for sustenance and to support the pride.

 

We have a term for something in the body that takes more than its share to the detriment of everything else that surrounds it. We call it… CANCER.

 

January 1, 2012

Today I yawned, stretched and opened the shades to invite the beautifully warm sunlight to baptize my room. I woke up content with the way I ushered in the New Year and eager to do everything and nothing, depending on where intuition led me.

Then I remembered it was Sunday! And not just any Sunday, but Super Soul Sunday on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. An all new episode was airing. I remembered how much I wanted to see this episode but couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was about!

I went to the kitchen to get my coffee started, then turned on the TV and fired up my laptop to live tweet with the other Super Soul Sunday fans. I’d already missed the beginning of the show, but I jumped right in ready to social network & blog my way through the morning.

Tom Shadyac’s brilliant film, I AM! was on. Instantly I remembered why I was supposed to be watching at 8 AM sharp!!

This film is so full to overflow with wisdom it’s a challenge to take it all in or distill it into a single blog post or sound bite. But I’ve attempted to paraphrase one of the essential threads of wisdom that connect the various swatches of insight in today’s WTIW Lesson.