Dr. Tammie’s April Book of the Month – Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive Our Life By Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD
Well WOW, I did not expect for one singular book to change my life in such a profound way. This is WHY we are bringing Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor to Pink Coat, MD this August to teach a live 4-part course to help all of us women physicians find inner peace and freedom!!
Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, former Harvard neuroscientist, New York Time’s Bestselling Author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey and TIME 100 Most Influential People, is one of the most important women and scientists of our generation. She is famous for having a full left-sided stroke in her mid-30s and living to tell the tale, and giving one of the top 25 TED Talks of all time My Stroke of Insight. Her book Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive Our Life is the culmination of her lifetime of work delving deep into the anatomy and science of WHY we experience the emotions and feelings – and have the thoughts we have – as human beings.
Whole Brain Living explains the science and the WHY behind why coaching, therapy, trauma healing, mindfulness and spiritual growth WORKS. I am a fan of Internal Family Systems and Dr. Richard Schwartz’s trauma work No Bad Parts about how there are no “bad” parts of us. Dr. Taylor’s work I found to be even more powerful and impactful, and frankly a whole lot easier to understand, as we only need to remember four characters!
“We are emotional beings who think,” as Dr. Taylor writes. Not the other way around. And once we understand this very fundamental aspect of how we exist, experience and function in the world, this changes everything.
We exist living, seeing and experiencing the world through our four internal characters: Character 1 – Our left sided thinking brain (critical thinking, achieving, execution), Character 2 – Our left sided emotional brain (fear, trauma, fight, flight), Character 3 – Our right sided emotional brain (love, joy, creativity), and Character 4 – Our right sided thinking brain (our higher, spiritual selves).
Once we can understand each of these four characters and parts of ourselves and begin to build awareness about which character we are inhabiting throughout each moment, THIS then becomes the key to our true freedom and inner peace.
As women physicians, we get it. We understand science, we understand anatomy. We have also lived our entire lives in the left side of our brain – our Characters 1 and 2 – because this is what we have strengthened throughout our lives and careers in medicine. Most of us probably started striving and achieving from a very young age. I know I certainly did. And letting go of this perpetual need to strive and achieve, to where I pushed myself repeatedly to extreme burnout and the brink of breakdown, has been the single greatest challenge of my own inner work and growth over the last several years.
The neurocircuitry of our striving, achieving and fear-based parts of our brains is so strong that we struggle to let go and unhook from our old, familiar, well-worn patterns, no matter how much we may want to let go.
To be able to live from the right side of our brains – Characters 3 and 4 – can seem like a distant, foreign, unreachable land. This book will show you how to get there.
As a coach, friend, mentor, and teacher, I rarely “tell” people they have to do something. But today, I’m going to urge you so strongly and tell you to go read this book!
Read it. Even better still listen to the audiobook as Dr. Taylor reads it herself. I know you will find some part of this that resonates for you, and will help you live a more whole, full and free life. I want this for you, Luisa wants this for you. All of us at Pink Coat, MD want this for you!
With all my love,
Tammie
Join us for our Virtual Live Whole Brain Living Course: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Your Life for Women Physicians with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor August 14 – September 4! Registration and more information at the link here.
