Of Two Minds

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

Disclosure: I like doing yoga. I don’t go for the workout. (I have running for that.) I don’t go for the women. (Though I met a woman in yoga whom I have married.) I go to explore the mindscape and the soulscape. That said, I have a request for all yoga teachers: Can you stop telling us to throw away the mind? You might know the type, the teacher who cranks up the volume on their shallow pop music and shouts over it, “You don’t need your brain – just listen to your feelings!” This instruction makes me want to puke, but I would have to use my brain to do that, so I guess it’s not allowed.

I’m thinking about this because I just saw a new documentary called “Enlighten Up!” It’s the story of a skeptic who tries to find out if yoga can change him. I experienced the story very much through the skeptic’s eyes because he wanted tangible proof of how yoga was working. I like that, because it speaks to the existential engineer in me. Seeking such proof involves the brain in the process of healing the body and the spirit. That’s good. Here’s why: You might already know that there are two parts of the brain and they work together. The left brain takes care of the sequential, analytical, logical stuff like doing your taxes and complaining about it. The right brain is non-linear, intuitive and big picture. It’s what we use to connect to the soul, interpret people’s facial expressions, dance with abandon and heal ourselves.

“The brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”
-Woody Allen

As Daniel H. Pink writes in A Whole New Mind, the left brain is bossy and tends to bully the right brain. This is why in meditation we’re asked to “quiet the mind.” It’s an oversimplified instruction – you really want to quiet the left brain — it’s analyzing how annoying it is to sit still — and try to listen to the right brain as it tells its subtle story. One great technique for this is to sit and hum loudly. It gets everything vibrating, clears the mind of extra thoughts and if you don’t go insane first or get evicted, you might discover something new.

I was amazed to learn from Daniel Pink’s book that for years scientists believed it was the left brain alone that “made us human” – our logical, analytical selves vaulted us above dumb animals who have never even attempted to write a novel. The mute, mysterious right brain was thought to be a vestige of a more primitive form of human. But as Pink points out, “We need both approaches in order to craft fulfilling lives and build productive, just societies.”

Works for me. Even when I gaze into my own past I see that my father is a lawyer whose default mode is analytical left brain rationality while my mother, who was an artist, was a devotedly holistic right brain person. Genetically, that’s my recipe. Whatever I am pursuing or pursued by these days is orchestrated by biology, biography and those two halves of the brain playing their symphony together.