c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It wasn’t my finest moment. As we filed into the theater and were shown to our seats in the nosebleed section, I grumbled aloud about what a raw deal I was getting.

I was supposed to be in the VIP seats down front. I was supposed to be getting special treatment. But there’d been a glitch, and there I was _ with the rest of the hoi polloi in the cheap seats.

The woman seated next to me was clearly overjoyed to be there, bouncing a little bit as she waited for the show to begin.

“Hi, I’m Vivian,” she said, smiling cheerily.

“Oh, hi,” I said, folding my arms and frowning at the stage in the far distance.

“And you are?” she asked sweetly.

“Oh, yeah, Cathleen. Hi,” I semi-growled, and turned away.

The show started and after a few minutes, the ire I’d been swimming in began to disappear, followed by a deep sense of remorse for having been such a pill to this kind woman next to me.

So I turned and apologized.

“I’m really sorry I was so prickly before,” I said. “It wasn’t fair of me to bring all that negative energy to you.”

“That’s OK,” she said. “Isn’t it just great to be here?”

Turns out Vivian had been waiting something like 20 years to get to the show for which a friend had given me a ticket only a few days before. She’d flown to Chicago from California just to see it.

Over the next two hours, Vivian’s joyful energy became infectious. I caught it and ended up having a delightful time up there in the nosebleed seats.

Energy is a funny thing. We all have it. We all bring it with us wherever we go, and our energy _ good or bad, light or dark _ affects everyone around us.

I recently spent some time with a new book by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist affiliated with the University of Indiana School of Medicine. He memoir, “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey,” details the massive stroke that hit her in 1996, and the long road to full recovery.

Bolte Taylor awoke one morning at age 37 with a throbbing headache behind her eye. She jumped on her exercise machine and slowly began to realize something wasn’t right.

When she lost her balance in the shower, she realized she was having a stroke. But she wasn’t entirely afraid. As she has recounted in her book, she floated between a state of bliss and sheer panic.

“I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie liberated from her bottle,” Bolte Taylor said earlier this year. “Like a great whale floating through a sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I’d found Nirvana.”

The stroke nearly wiped out her left brain, the part that controls language, keeps track of things we need to do and dwells entirely on the past and the future. “The storyteller,” she calls it.

She was left, however, with her right brain intact _ the part that lives in the here and now, that records feelings and images. It was a blissful state and she wanted to stay there. But she made a conscious choice to fight her way back, in part so she could share her story.

“My left mind thinks of me as a fragile individual capable of losing my life,” she wrote in her book. “My right mind realizes that the essence of my being has eternal life.”

During her early recovery, she could not understand or use language but became acutely aware of people’s energy. She could tell, she says, whether someone meant her harm or healing, whether someone was lying or telling the truth, by his or her energy.

Were they compassionate? Or were they in a rush? Did they look her in the eye or avert their gaze?

We are, all of us, Bolte Taylor says, responsible for the energy we bring to other people.

The bad mood you drape around you like a fox stole? It’s your responsibility. The overwhelming joy that spills out of you like water from a pail? That’s your responsibility, too.

“We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world,” Bolte Taylor says.

She believes we are hard-wired to be able to access the kind of peace that the Bible says surpasses all understanding. It’s there. In the right side of our brain. If only we’d access it.

“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be,” she says. “And I thought that was an idea worth sharing.”

So did I.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and author of the new book “Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace.”)

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