RSSThis Month In O Dec 2008 : Feed Your Right Brain
November 29, 2008
I love Oprah. Well, everyone loves Oprah.
I don’t watch the show, but then I watch no TV. I just like who she is and who she’s trying to be. I like the magazine more and more.
Those books in her book club… The fiction plots are suicidally dark. The spiritual guides seem completely without grounding, just floating around in the ether, holding on to nothing. I’ve tried wearing my tin foil hat, the one with the receivers at the ends of the antennae, but I still can’t get these Buddha-Lite books. Still, any woman with such awareness of her journey will find answers. She’s just following another of the many paths.
Right Brain matters
In this issue, Oprah is interviewing the author of the book I’m presently reading. It’s a book everyone should read if they want to be future-adapted. The book is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind : Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future.
Do many of us still belong to a generation that encourages our kids to be accountants, engineers, computer experts instead of cooks and bedsheet designers? I’d have to count myself in. I’m wrong and doing them harm with my 50 year old advice. Why encourage them to do jobs that machines and Asians already do faster and cheaper and that might not even exist on this continent in 15 years?
What cannot be done by anyone else, here or in Mumbai, is to add the particular stamp of creativity that is uniquely ours. It might be found in the design of the lipstick case, in the emotionally beautiful story that goes with the coat giving it meaning beyond all others, or in the story behind the computer game that gives it value beyond all others.
Right Brain practice
For those of us who are primarily Left Brainers, hope isn’t lost. To succeed in every sense of the word, we first will have to redefine “succeed”. Second, we’re going to have to learn to add some R Brain inputs to our usual L Brain output. In the book, Pink gives us six senses we can develop to get our R Brain cooking.
Every skillset is partially in the gene but can be learned and developed. If you’re not sure where opening up your R brain begins, have a look at Betty Edwards’ most fantastic books, Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and Drawing On The Artist Within. See what you can learn to see in a week. These are not books about changing how you draw, they’re about changing how you see, in a very literal sense. Begin with Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, the first book. Give yourself 7 days and nothing in your world will ever look the same to you unless you’re already an artist.
The basis of it all is that we’ve reached a point of guaranteed physical comfort. We now have the freedom to think more about what it all means. A candle isn’t light and heat anymore, it’s tranquility and uplifting fragrance. Our homes can’t hold our harvest of stuff. The pendulum is swinging away from accumulation for its own sake to owning less but having it symbolize more.
This has great implications all round. At last, we’re getting beyond what things look like. Hopefully, we’ll make the same progress where bodies and faces are concerned. Pink says that he predicts baby boomers are going to do something astonishing. There are so many of them, together with we stragglers, that our combined mental energies will find a way to give our lives reason and worth.
The new News
Every issue brings stories of how women are being empowered to look after themselves and their families, this time with making bracelets. The article on how women brought peace to Liberia, and the movie of the excellent name (Pray The Devil Back To Hell), also raises my head a little higher for all women.
I feel good reading Oprah when I see how humans are helping humans. A surgeon and his all-woman team travel to politically dangerous Zimbabwe to correct cleft lip/palate facial deformity in children. THIS is what should be on CNN every night. It makes you feel good for the right reasons. O is becoming the magazine for the News I want to know, not the horrors they force-feed us.
Does accepting stress help control it?
What I try to come away with and hold on to is the sense of not resisting everything all the time. So the tire was flat, the bank machine ate the card, you weigh 5 lbs more than you want, the window broke, you missed lunch. Why storm and rage? Why not accept and cope? I strive to be one of those people who is inwardly very calm, as Oprah seems to be. The outside may be busy but the center is still. (Those of you who know me can stop laughing. It’s mean and I really am trying.)
In the article on dealing with holiday pressure, and as we know already, it discusses powerlessness as the most destructive type of stress. I don’t know if it’s better to fight and resist all the time or accept. Is accepting a type of resignation and a sign that hope has been lost? The nurses on the surgical team in Zimbabwe notice that the Africans are more accepting of what life brings. Is resisting vs. accepting just a cultural difference or a symbol of our indefatigable belief that things CAN be made better? There were many connected ideas in this issue.
Music and family
With Oprah, Sissy Spacek, and Suze Orman wearing metallic gold, I was glad to see that they didn’t dress Dan Pink that way. Or Dr. Phil for that matter though a Yuletide tie might have been a festive touch.
Fascinating piece by neurologist Oliver Sacks on music’s ability to break through many forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. The comprehension of music penetrates and outlives what the disease has done to the brain tissue. Sometimes, this ability that music has to shine through the darkness even persists for long periods after the music was heard. Why is this not in commonplace use, I wonder? A short article but I found it rather amazing.
The best, best line in the whole magazine is where Oprah says “ I don’t know what I love more, my bathtub or my bed”. Why, I think we might be long-lost sisters (or it just proves that all women are long-lost sisters).
Our first outing together after our reunion really should be to go shopping. We’d go to Target and Mark’s Work Wearhouse. We’d discuss the fact that if someone spends $50 on me, I’d really rather not get a bookmark no matter how pretty and functional it is (from the gift suggestion articles). And the ball of 100 hair elastics for my kids… into the vacuum and the cat, one by one, after they’d thrown it at each other a few times.
Comments
6 Responses to “This Month In O Dec 2008 : Feed Your Right Brain”
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I’m 55 years old and started taking a class in September that was loosely based on Betty Edwards Drawing on the right side of the Brain principles. There are six of us in the class and dare I say I think we are all over 50. Every one of us are drawing well after just a few short lessons.
Here are my pre-instruction drawings and the latest post that shows our first attempt at drawing with an eraser (highlights and shadows).
http://vitaljourney.org/2008/10/25/learning-to-draw-at-age-54-update-2-preinstruction-drwaings/
http://vitaljourney.org/2008/11/25/learning-to-draw-at-age-54-update-10-shadows-and-highlights/
If you want to get in touch with your Right Brain (R-Mode), consider taking a Betty Edward’s styled class.
ALso read the book referenced in this post A Whole New Brain. Totally awesome!
“I don’t know if it’s better to fight and resist all the time or accept. Is accepting a type of resignation and a sign that hope has been lost? The nurses on the surgical team in Zimbabwe notice that the Africans are more accepting of what life brings.”
Just a comment from my readings on the above: Life certainly deals out challenges; however, these situations are as they are. It’s our thinking and thoughts about the situation that causes pain.
I believe it is better to yield to and accept the situation; resisting only strengthens it. In the U.S. we have a war on terror, a war on drugs, a war on crime, a war on poverty. These wars have only strengthened or increased poverty, crime, drugs, terror, etc. thanks for letting me comment!
Hi, Eric,
The improvement in your drawings is remarkable. I read Edwards’ books years ago and have to make a conscious effort to switch into that way of seeing that is needed to draw, but I still try to do it often. It was such a revelation to me, like there’s a whole world hidden inside the one I usually look at.
I particularly appreciated your articles on shifting from L to R brain – the first one is here
http://vitaljourney.org/2008/11/26/how-do-you-shift-from-left-brain-to-right-brain/
and the second links from there. You got some great responses. I enjoyed Tony’s Think vs. Feel. To put it in the context of what I do each day, it reminded of extracting teeth. You can think about “the root is here” or “the angle for the point of leverage is here” or you can just let your hand figure it out. Getting a needle into the vein of a 17 year old cat is much the same. It’s all feel.
Ann Marie,
Wonderful thoughts. I am by nature a resistor. I contest, I exert, I strive. All it serves to do is tire me out.
I completely agree with you that if you could just decide that you’re fine with whatever is happening, and hope the bad will pass soon, you can watch your life get easier.
If only we could stop fighting with ourselves.
Hi
Over the past year I have learned a lot about stress and how it has such a negative impact on your body and health. It took a health crisis for me to understand that I wasn’t doing a good job at handleing stress – In fact I was just about to implode with mental turmoil. I thought the reason that my mind was always racing was because i was a very busy person and that others were bothering me too much, or blocking me, or not understanding me. I thought was handling stress because I exercised regularily. I didn’t understand how much mental choas stress was causing me. Then of course things changed. I have had to learn a few very basic things:
1 – have relaxation time every day
2. control your thinking and if your thoughts start to race, use self talk to control it.
3. I get more done now because my mind is calm and can stay on task and complete a task, instead of running all over, frantic, freaking out about being busy, and wasting energy being stressed.
I am a true believer in the evils of stress. If I feel it sneaking in to my mind/thinking I immediately have to stop what I am doing and clear my mind to get back on track of being mentally present and not stressing.
Holly
Christine,
Thanks for the wonderful comments about my blog. I’ve had a chance to look at your blog, and while the focus is on women, much truth and inspiration for men can be gleamed from your blog as well. Thanks for sharing your heart and head with us!