Even Bigger Than The Roman Empire

How a Tik Tok Trend inspired me to go deep

I think I’ve found my Roman Empire.

And if you don’t know what the heck I mean by that, let me get you up to speed.

I’m referring to the Tik Tok trend where women ask the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire only to find out the men think of the Roman Empire several times a week…some even several times a day! A frequency that shocks most women who (if they’re like me) probably haven’t thought about the Roman Empire since high school history class.

Some women have gone on to make videos about what their own “Roman Empires” (a topic that pops into their minds with odd frequency) might be, with answers ranging from Taylor Swift lyrics, to certain romance series, to a mom who answered “how to save my three children when my car plunges into an icy river.”  Oh, how I remember that fear!

Pondering what my own answer might be, I realized the concept I think about multiple times a week comes from a clip from Jill Bolte Taylor’s viral TED Talk “My Stroke of Insight” where she described what it was like to experience a stroke.

What makes Bolte Taylor’s experience so special is she’s a neuroscientist who studies the brain. So as her stroke was happening she was actually able witness it from the inside out. Eventually understanding it in a way most laypeople couldn’t.

Here’s the part of her description that I just can’t forget: Jill’s stroke occurred in the left side of her brain—the side responsible for analytic, linear thinking, and which allows us to see ourselves as individual beings. So when that function went off-line Jill recounts what happened:

“I look down at my arm and realize I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end because the atoms and molecules of my arm are blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I can detect is this energy…energy.”

In her book, Whole Brain Living, she goes on:

“Instead of a physical being, I experienced myself to be an energy ball that was as big as the universe. Shifted into the consciousness of my right brain, I perceived the essence of myself as enormous and expansive, and my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

Wow. Like just…Wow. Without that part of the brain functioning her sense of self actually blended right into the world around her. I’d say that’s a pretty big mic drop. (And the 29 million viewers of the video would probably agree.)

Photo by Gabriel Dizzi on Unsplash

I had so many questions. Could we really all be connected by this unseen sea of energy? Is there really only one little part of our brain that’s been pulling the wool over our eyes this whole time? Is it only a little mass of cells that keeps us in an illusion of separateness and disconnection? Has Jill Bolte Taylor just revealed the brain’s best kept secret? Seriously…even now, I can’t stop thinking about this.

I’m sure we’ve all gotten whiffs of this feeling in the past. It explains the murmuration of birds. How they undulate like pieces of fabric in the sky without ever running into each other. How butterflies migrate to places they’ve never been before. The unspoken bond between parents and children. How empaths can sense others’ energies. Heck, it might even be the reason I get a visceral pain in my gut whenever I watch those skateboarders face plant on TV.

Writer Mara Gleason experienced this oneness first-hand when she was mugged at gunpoint in Buenos Aires when she was in college. In her book “One Thought Changes Everything” she describes what surprisingly became a beautiful out-of-body experience for her:

“When my head fell silent upon feeling that gun against my temple, the sensation that emerged was indescribably huge, like a wave of vast energy. Not the personal energy that makes us feel revved up, but pure, impersonal energy. Beautiful and quiet…Without separateness I was an energetic experience connected to the fabric of all energy: not an individual drop, but the whole ocean.”

She goes on to describe the same kind of merging as what Bolte Taylor felt during her stroke:

“…I was looking at the gunman’s hand on my arm, but I couldn’t distinguish a physical end to my body and a start to his. Everything blended together. Then, when I looked beyond him to a tree that was growing out of the sidewalk, I couldn’t really separate this singular blob of energy that was he and I from the tree. Again, no end and no beginning. Just one continuous flow."

Luckily for her, the gunman himself was also swept into this merging and, after meeting eyes and feeling an unspoken knowing pass between them, she removed his hand and walked away.

So what can we learn from these vividly recounted experiences? We know we need our sense of individuation to live in our external world. But what Bolte Taylor has now concluded is the idea that we’ve handed way too much power to our left brain…the side intent on keeping us separate from both each other and from our natural flow. And she believes we have a choice to step into the consciousness of our right brain more of the time. 

She ended her TED talk with this:

“Which would you choose? Which do you choose and when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemisphere, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.”

So, if this makes any sense to you it might be helpful to ask yourself:

• Would you be quite as jealous of another’s achievement if you knew they were quite literally a part of you?

• Would you be quite as confused if you knew the same wisdom that guides the migration of the birds also guides you?

• Would you feel quite as unimportant if you knew the same power that keeps the planets spinning in their orbits also exists inside you?

This way of thinking is a paradigm shift for sure. What Bolte Taylor describes as the “power of We inside me.” It calls us to see not only our common humanity, but our common universality. To intentionally blur our rigid walls the next time someone hurts us or (more commonly) we hurt ourselves.

If anything, this concept puts new meaning in the phrase “we’re all in this together.” Who knows, if we learn to embrace our connectedness we might eventually be united under one empire…a place where only love reigns.

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Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear what your own “Roman Empire” is! Share below and keep scrolling for more goodies

Kiersten

Whole Brain Living:

In her second book, published 25 years after her stroke, Bolte Taylor expands on what she’s discovered about the brain since then, presenting the four distinct modules of cells as four characters that make up who we are. (You can even give them fun names!) Working on the premise that the more we know about our brain the more power we have, she helps you understand those nagging voices in your head, and guides you on how you can embrace, love, and rally them together to live your best whole-brain life.

Brooklinen Socks:

Continuing on my theme of : “Christmas presents that were a big hit” I present these fluffy, soft socks that I gave to my whole family (and to myself!) a couple of years ago. There are lots of colors to chose from as well as men’s and women’s sizes. You’ll be the hero of your holiday gift exchange when you show up with these!

Caffeine For the Soul Podcast:

Michael Neill is probably one of the wisest and entertaining transformative teachers I follow. A former actor, he has a great gift for communicating broad ideas about life in a light-hearted and easily digestible way. And boy can he ever conjure a good metaphor! If you’re new to him this short podcast, or the free Basic Course videos on his website are a great place to start.