Throughout this series of blog posts, I’ve introduced you my Four Characters. I’ve also outlined Dr. Taylor’s strategy of The Brain Huddle and how it looks when I do it.
I shared all of this with you, because it struck a chord with me. As a medical speech-language pathologist, I have been fascinated with the brain for many years. I have poured over textbooks and anatomical models and drawings, learning about how human brains typically function. 🧠 With this base of knowledge, I then learned about what can happen when things go “wrong." I studied how lesions, injury, atrophy, or other anomalies might impact an individual’s function. I’ve sat in many uncomfortable chairs at nurses' stations in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities, perusing patients' medical charts and brain imaging. I’ve scrolled through slice after slice of CT and MRI imaging to better understand the locus of a lesion in order to better determine how I might best assess and treat a patient. In the brain, location matters! And with the brain, if you have a solid understanding of how the machinery operates, the help you can give is much more effective. If you know how your own neural machinery operates, maybe you can step in and help yourself (when it looks like you need it). In my experience, both for patients and for myself, it looks and feels like there’s some value in that.
All that being said, no intellectual model, regardless of how much scientific evidence there is to support it, is “The Truth.” I invite you to get really curious about what lies beyond the conceptual model of the Four Characters (or any framework). While I can do my best to point and guide, this thing called life seems to require your expressed participation to engage with it.
So, here are some questions that came up for me after reading Whole Brain Living:
❓Dr. Taylor contends that you have the power to choose which character you want to inhabit. Who is you? Who or what is it that has the ability to identify which character is showing up? Is there some sort of a “coach” that oversees these characters and calls the huddle? If you’re not aware of the fact that you’re inhabiting a character at all, how are you supposed to identify which one?
❓How much volitional control (if any) do we have over whether we’re aware of our thinking or not? How is it that sometimes it occurs to me to stop and observe my thinking and other times I’m completely oblivious that I’m thinking at all?
❓Regardless of which character is showing up, where does Thought itself even come from? How much say do I actually get in what pops into my mind at any given time, regardless of which character that thought energy is moving through?
❓It looks and feels like we have the power to choose or make decisions, doesn’t it? But do we really? What about all those times where I seem to act automatically and choosing never crosses my mind?
“Angie, these are interesting thought experiments, but I have a life to live. I’m busy, I have tons of stuff to do that needs my attention. I just don’t see how any of this applies to me or my goals in any tangible way."
I get that. I honor that. So, as always, take this, leave this, or allow it to percolate in the background somewhere.
But in my experience, diving as deeply as possible to get beneath the roots of our thought-created suffering has looked and felt more valuable than any bit of knowledge I’ve picked up along the way, including all of my professional training. I am living a human life and all that it entails. At the same time, I know that I am very simply the verb of experiencing; nothing more. It is beautiful, free, and limitless. Perhaps that is why I share...