Aug 04 2008
The Recovering Alcoholic Must Lose Their Ego To Find Serenity Part I
During their recovery one of the most difficult yet necessary things an alcoholic must do is willingly give up their ego. When an alcoholic admits defeat and loses the attitude their ego has nurtured, they will be humbled and become open and willing to change. In order to do this they must capitulate to their new life without alcohol and become physically and emotionally stable enough in their sobriety to accept and work positively with the new energy source they will inevitably find.
A Harvard trained neuro-anatomist named Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor has written a book titled “A Stroke Of Genius” that describes her near deadly experience with a left brain hemorrhage that as a well respected brain scientist she found fascinating or “cool” as she called it. Cool because she was able to study this emergency medical drama from the inside out as it were, while it was occurring to her.
I mention Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor and her incident because what she witnessed first hand as her brain began to shutdown was a feeling of euphoria and in her words “I was in Nirvana” even though she was slowly losing all of her senses and mobility. As she tried to call for help – a four hour drama with her in the center of it – she was amazed by her feeling of ecstasy as her left brain gradually lost its ability to process any information while her right brain continued to function.
As Bolte-Taylor puts it “Our left hemisphere is all about the past and all about the future. It thinks linearly. It is designed to make some sense of the wonderful collage of the right brain, picking out details and organizing all of these details based on our pasts and looks into the future determining our possibilities. Your left brain is the calculating intelligence that is always reminding you to do things.”
It also is the hemisphere that separates us from the energy flow around us, the same energy flow Bolte-Taylor was experiencing and describing as euphoric. The Left Brain is referred to as the “I AM” side of the brain and makes us individual rather than part of the collective consciousness. It is also where are ego comes from. What had happened was her brain injury literally shut down her left brain and along with her language skills, senses and mobility among other critical functions, her ego also becoming a casualty of the stroke.
What she was now experiencing was something many people search for and what many recovering alcoholics will describe as their miracle, rebirth or epiphany. A new found energy source that feels wonderful and gratifying. She realized that what was happening to her was something anyone could have and they didn’t need to suffer a stroke to achieve this feeling of contentment and personal well being.
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