My Stroke of Insight - Jill Bolte Taylor

Clip is 18:44 long. If you can not get video to run click here to access website and watch video from there.

I had a stroke back in 2000 and much of what Jill Bolte Taylor describes in this presentation, I too felt. However, one difference for me, throughout my experience, from the very onslaught through to the healing process, I felt safe, snuggled securely in God's Hands, never questioning the outcome, regardless of what that may have been. The intellectualizing of what had happened to me did not really kick in until I came face to face, or rather when my entire sensory system became over-whelmed by the shock of massive stimuli walking into the first large retail chain store during my recovery. I'll leave that story for another time.

It was during the intellectualizing period (seeing the phenomenon of my stroke) that my center of gravity really began to shift. To help put this into words I quote from Anthony J. Kelly's book, The Resurrection Effect:

"when the given phenomenon begins to be appreciated in its own right and in the conditions of its appearance, the intentionality of the all-competent rational subject is reversed... A critical and even contemplative reverence for the given phenomenon becomes primary, thus allowing it first of all to be received on its own terms. The preconceptions and fixed points of our routine perceptions and representations are called into question, and our whole mode of perceiving is reordered."

I feel that my studies in mimetic theory and Girardian thought had helped to prepare me for this gravitational shift - taking me from a perspective that was ego-centered to an outward contemplation of something more.

All this can get hard to explain, so I will let Jill Bolte Taylor take you on a journey that hopefully will help you step out of yourself.