Last night, while drifting off to sleep, I started a conversation with my urinary tract because over the last few nights, I’ve been waking up too many times to go to the bathroom.
Although this pattern hasn’t left me feeling more tired during the day, it’s still a drag to drag my butt out of bed in the middle of the night to pee.
And then there’s the nagging thought, Is there something not right with my bladder or prostate gland? gnawing in the back of my mind.
Nestling a heating pad between my legs and placing my hands over my abdominal area, I began visualizing this urinary tract, recalling recent video clips I’d studied of how this tract functions.
Slowing my nervous system through focused breath work, I began to silently speak from my mind to this area inside my body: I want you to relax and be calm. Our kidneys, bladder, ureters, and urethra are being cleansed and are functioning normally. Thank you for the marvelous work you do. Together we are healthy and strong.
When I bring this kind of heightened attention into my body, I begin to experience a different awareness of my immediate surroundings as well.
Even if my eyes are wide open while silently speaking intentions into my body, I notice nothing around me. But then, suddenly I do, after finishing this internal conversation.
Staring up from my bed, I notice the broken, patterned shadows cast onto the ceiling from the street lights outside my window, now feeling almost eerily alive, dancing about.
And then, I turned my attention back to, me.
Lying there in bed, I started scanning my body, feeling into each limb, beginning at my feet and slowly moving up, eventually passing over my heart, then sweeping over my face and head, and then into the inside of my brain, as if I’d just crawled inside it.
Then the image of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, appeared across the screen of my mind’s eye.
It was a flashback from a TED talk she presented after recovering from a severe stroke that left her losing nearly all higher cognitive and physical functions, which took eight years to rebuild.
At one point during her talk, a man walked out from the side of the stage holding a serving tray with a round object covered over by a white towel. Dr. Taylor then informed the audience that the object on the tray was a real human brain.
After putting on some surgical-like protective gloves, she removed the towel, revealing the brain. Picking it up off the tray, she gingerly held it out in front of her chest, and with the attached spinal cord dangling in front of her, began to explain its anatomy.
Her stroke, she said, had interrupted the left hemisphere, which she reported is responsible for language and verbal processing, analytical thought, time orientation, a sense of individual identity, fine motor control, and detail-oriented processing.
Suddenly, the image of the human brain in her hands disappeared from my mind, and I became aware of me, lying in the bed.
Feeling my body pressing into the mattress, I said to myself while gazing at the shadowy light dancing and flickering on the ceiling, Here I am, aware of my body and my surroundings, but who is this me that I think is doing this?
Dr. Taylor spent a lot of time during her TED talk unpacking what it felt like for her to no longer have a sense of being separate from everyone else and everything around her, as the left side of her brain deteriorated during the stroke.
Later, during a podcast discussing her stroke, she described this phenomenon as the moment when the idea of a me, the girl Jill Bolte-Taylor, died, not physically, but as a felt sense, a way of experiencing herself that stopped being generated, leaving something else in its place.
Lying there on my bed, I could see and feel my body stretched out beneath me.
I had the felt sense that I’m an individual, seemingly separate from everything around me, and in that same moment, the underlying sense that something else is happening, allowing this idea of a me to emerge.
Before there was a bladder to talk to, a brain to hold, shadows to name, what was there?
