Jill Bolte Taylor was thirty-seven when she woke up one day to feel how her body had dissolved and had melded with all the energies of the Universe. She was having a stroke. As a brain researcher, she watched as her brain failed her.

In her now famous speech held at a conference called TED (technology, entertainment, design), she talks about the difference between the right (creative) brain and the left (analytical) brain. Somehow her entire being resided in the right side of her brain, while the left completely shut down. She thought she was going to die, and she had already said good-bye to her life. She felt so expansive, she couldn’t imagine squeezing back into her little body.

But she did.

This moving speech reminds us to live large, to visit our right hemisphere often, and to slow down to a pace that allows us to unfold into the human beings we are meant to be.