Left? Or Right?

How's your brain?

There are hypotheses floating about that our left brain is some evil usurper who seduced humanity into an addiction to among other things, language, analysis, planning and basically, civilization. Somewhere in the mists of time, humans apparently lived a blissful, right brain existence, in the eternal present, unconcerned about naming things, cultivating food, or planning for the future. In this blissful time, the energy was female, wholistic, warm and fuzzy. In Leonard Shlain’s book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, he blames male, apparently left brained energy for the institution of, well, institutions that suppressed the intuitive, embracing female energy of the right brain.

In his book The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist suggests that the emergence of language and the alleged supremacy of the left brain led to our male dominated, female suppressed present. And while it’s great fun to blame men for anything that goes wrong (ask my husband!) I have to take exception with the notion that men can take the credit for language, cataloging and planning.

I had an epiphany the other day while hiking in the woods. As I sauntered, I delighted in the flaming azaleas, the exuberant penstemons, the delicate lavender spiderwort, and the magenta Japanese spirea exploding all over the mountainside. But I was equally delighted by the act of encountering and then naming them. Rolling the word “penstemon” over my tongue, greeting the spirea by name, felt like calling out to a friend. I growled at the poison ivy, I respectfully sidestepped the multiflora and her grasping thorns, each time acknowledging them by name. It was women who gathered the herbs and roots to make potions and lotions. It was the women who calculated the recipe for beer. In order to pick the right herbs, they had to name them. In order to bake the bread, they had to measure. They surely didn’t say hand me some of this sort of green, berry things so I can mix them with this brown stuff. They named. They measured. They calculated. They planted. They planned. It’s not about blaming men. Or our left brain.

Besides, what fun is living in the eternal present? There’s no anticipation of a coming event. You miss out on the fun of choosing a travel itinerary, of shopping (although some of the things my husband comes home with make me wonder if perhaps he relied solely on his right brain at the store), of writing a book and planning to share it.

Our two brains need each other: for balance, perspective and ultimately, for true creativity. So let’s stop bashing that “male” left brain, and get that corpus callosum online to bring our parts together.

Of course, movement is a perfect way to unite the two sides of the brain. I love this Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson that crosses the midline in multiple ways

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