My earnings were below poverty level for the first eight years post-stroke — at least until the TED talk and the book went out into the world.

Reaching wide audiences through her talk at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference and her appearance on Oprah’s online Soul Series, Taylor provides a valuable recovery guide for those touched by brain injury and an inspiring testimony that inner peace is accessible to anyone. And wouldn’t it be even more amazing if there were a way to reprogram your brain to experience less anxiety overall?

I recognize that mistakes will be made, but this does not mean that I need to either victimize myself or take your actions and mistakes personally. We spoke to her about how the stroke changed her perspective on work, and what it means to be ambitious in the wake of a life-changing health crisis. But when that was all gone, I felt this incredible sense of relief because I was no longer juggling a billion details.

And the irony of a brain scientist at Harvard who loses her mind and lives to tell the tale — I think it’s just a great story of the human spirit. The pair would regularly go for walks together, and every time Bolte Taylor made progress, her mother would celebrate with her. Eventually, she landed her dream job at the Laboratory for Structural Neuroscience at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. After suffering a massive stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor turned the negative event into a positive stroke recovery story. Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds.When we compare the new information of our thinking mind with the automatic reactivity of our limbic mind, we can reevaluate the current situation and purposely choose a more mature response.

He also argues that the advice Taylor gives to stroke patients might not be valuable for all stroke patients. She focuses on how we can activate the power of our neuroplasticity to not only recover from neurological trauma, but how we can purposely choose to live a more flexible, resilient, and satisfying life. But the "new world" that Cherkaoui is exploring is current theories about the brain, and the text that the 17 dancers speak during the first moments of the 75-minute work comes from My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's uncanny recollection of her stroke. The days that followed were tough for Bolte Taylor, but her physical abilities quickly started to improve.But she suffered from a stroke that left her with severe brain damage, which disrupted many of her memories and other important capacities. Via our left hemisphere language centers, our mind speaks to us constantly, a phenomenon I refer to as “brain chatter. With her left brain mostly out of function by the stroke, Taylor discovered that she felt calm and totally in touch with the world.

One of Bolte Taylor's goals with the book, she says, was to reach doctors-to-be while they were still in school, to "influence the way they perceive the ability of the brain to recover.It was an enormous task for me to undertake, and at the same time it was incredible for my brain to challenge itself in that way. She had to deal with policies and practices that were not conducive to healing, which made the experience unpleasant for her.