Waking up the right side of your brain

Breaking your addiction to thought and coming home to the world

The Tetons and the Snake River by Ansel Adams, 1942

For much of my life, I lived entirely in my head. I rehearsed conversations that never happened, gamed out scenarios that rarely came true, and replayed awkward interactions on a loop—thinking my way through moments that begged to be felt. From the outside, it looked like I had my shit together. I was a real deep thinker. A real smart guy.

Then again, that’s not quite true. My closest friends and family could see I was lost in my own world. Not because I let them in, but because it kept leaking out anyway. Internally, I either strategized my next move or simply dissociated from the present one entirely.

Over time, that began to shift. It took years of messy recovery, trying pretty much anything that might quiet my mind and bring me back into my body. I meditated like life depended on it, experimented with more consciousness-altering techniques than I care to admit, and found teachers who helped me see it was all much simpler than I’d made it.

At first, I just wanted to stop drinking and using. But eventually, I saw the deeper engine beneath it all: an addiction to thought.

Slowly, sometimes excruciatingly so, I learned how to settle back into my own skin. It took daily practice to calm my system. What emerged was spacious presence: the ability to be here, fully in my body, letting this moment be enough. It surprised me to learn that this capacity wasn’t some rare gift or personality trait—it was a muscle. I worked it consistently, like training for a marathon, until being present stopped being work. Before I knew it, life started to organize itself around something deeper and more primal than thinking.

What I got for all that effort is something I’m still getting used to talking about. My relationships became simpler and more honest. I feel connected—to the earth, to other people, to silence. Life changed from something I had to figure out to something I could actually feel. And a soothing presence is available whenever I need it. I can sink in and let the Tao carry me.

Only later did I realize this shift had a name beyond the spiritual frameworks I already knew. Apparently, it had been described—beautifully and at length—by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. The guy’s having a serious moment right now, and you can’t escape his ideas on podcasts, Substack, or anywhere thoughtful people gather online. He shows how modern life runs mostly on the left hemisphere: the part that controls, labels, breaks things apart. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, holds the wider, relational, poetic depth we all crave. Some feel that longing acutely, others hardly notice, but it’s wired into all of us.

For decades, McGilchrist has laid bare how we’ve become a left hemisphere culture, hooked on control and the comforting lie that we can think our way out of everything. The right hemisphere—our seat of wholeness, intuition, embodied wisdom—has been pushed aside, mostly benched. Largely suppressed. Which might explain why so many people are tuning into his work now. We’re hungry to remember what we lost.

But here’s what most people miss about hemispheric theory: reading about it is left-brain as hell!

For every minute spent scrolling through a newsletter on the importance of right-hemisphere living (including this one!), ten more would be better spent practicing something like alternate nostril breathing (Nadi Shodhana is a method that actually balances the hemispheres). McGilchrist isn’t just describing theory here. He’s pointing to a completely different way of moving through life.

And in an age of AI and ever-growing cognitive noise—mounting entropy across every dimension of life, from politics to culture to the very lineaments of our cityscapes—this might be one of the most practical life skills you didn’t know you needed. The personal benefits are huge, so much so that, if properly done in sufficient numbers, the effects could ripple on societal scales. Being the change you wish to see in the world, and whatnot.

To our left-brained selves, it may be a comfort (and motivation) to know that groundbreaking neuroscience bears this up. The shift into persistent awakening, and all the wellbeing attendant to it, might quite literally be a shift from left- to right-hemisphere dominance. This is supported by MRI research showing structural brain changes in long-term meditators, and by meta-analyses on how the hemispheres work together over time. Our brains are awesomely plastic. Which just means you can learn this whenever you decide to, right in the middle of everything else you’ve got going on.

At first it might not be easy, but it’s always simple. That’s what this piece is about.

What follows is a field guide for changing how you meet reality, drawn from what’s actually worked for me (after a long list of things that didn’t). It’s my small attempt to offer something grounded and useful amid all the hemisphere discourse: a way to actually embody the shift, not just analyze it.

In the end, it’s mostly about loosening our grip on the one addiction we rarely name but constantly feed: thinking.

Unclench

Right now, as you read this, check in with your belly. Is it tight? What about your face—is your jaw locked, your brow tense? If you’re anything like me, you might even be clenching your ass without meaning to. Most of us carry a habit of bracing: an old animal reflex tucked into the body, a muscle memory so deep we mistake it for normal, if we notice it at all.

You could try this. Starting at your feet, slowly scan up through your legs, your back, your shoulders and face, all the way to your scalp. There’s almost always at least one knot of tension you didn’t know was there.

Now, if you feel like it, clench your hand tightly, squeeze hard for five seconds, then let it go.

Feel the difference?

That’s the whole move here.

It sounds simple, but noticing and letting go is a skill most of us forget how to use. It’s not something you do, but something you stop unconsciously doing.

McGilchrist explains this clearly. The left hemisphere tightens its grip when the world feels uncertain, trying to control reality by chopping it into smaller, manageable parts. Under stress, it hoards more blood flow, more metabolic fuel, and your body follows, gearing up to fight or run.

The right hemisphere, meanwhile, works completely differently. It’s built for open attention that sees wholes rather than parts. But you can’t white-knuckle your way there. You have to actually relax and unclench to sense the whole of what’s happening. When your system feels safe enough to drop its defenses, the right brain comes alive. It yawns, it loves, it softens the edges, and remembers that connection is possible.

Thomas Hübl, a contemporary teacher who bridges mysticism and trauma science, puts it simply: “Relaxation is the prerequisite for deep perception.”

Your nervous system can’t soften into the wider field when it’s locked and loaded for the next crisis in your inbox.

Stop strategizing and start dancing

Instead, stop thinking about how to manage your body and move it. Stretch, breathe, roll on the floor. Seriously, when was the last time you rolled around on the floor? One benefit of being a new dad is watching kids go absolutely feral on the ground.

I might also suggest dancing alone in your room to this and this. Or, if you like getting dubstep freaky, this. Anything that reminds you you’re an animal, not a strategy machine.

Again, if you’re anything like me, you spend a terrifying chunk of your tens of thousands daily thoughts on strategy: how many sips of caffeine is the Goldilocks number, what snack won’t ruin my gut, exactly how to sit so I don’t wreck my back again, what exact bedtime ritual will guarantee my son sleeps through the night, and so on.

We could spend our entire lives planning how to live. Or we could just stop. None of this micro-managing is actually required!

Unhook awareness from thought

Even as the body softens, the mind still wants the spotlight. That is not a flaw. The left brain is brilliant at naming, planning, and weaving meaning out of the chaos of stimuli. It makes language and maps and keeps your life organized. This is a gift. The trouble comes when it loops on its own stories and you forget they are just stories. You get so caught up in the spin that the echo starts to feel like real sound.

Enter Loch Kelly, who blends neuroscience and nondual awareness in a way that’s surprisingly good at cutting through this very human mess. You don’t fight thought head-on. You just stop feeding it. He calls this unhooking awareness from thought. I picture it like a fish slipping off the hook and drifting back into open water—where it belongs. (Unless you’re ordering sushi.)

When you notice you are lost in thought, just pause and name it softly: thinking. Then maybe let yourself feel a little glad you noticed. This moment matters more than people think. Every time you celebrate escaping the thought hook, you train your brain to love coming home. You strengthen the muscle that prefers presence over rumination. It’s one of the simplest and most underrated skills there is: the ability to unhook and see thought for what it is.

But noticing is only the first half. The shift only really happens when you place your attention right away on something tactile and alive: the hum of the fridge, the soles of your feet, the rise and fall of your breath. Sensation pulls you back into the room, which is, inconveniently or beautifully, the only place your life is ever happening.

Feel more

Once you unhook from thought, what’s left is sensation. The animal in you knows how to feel without your supervision. Let it. One of my teachers, who had roots in a Thai forest monastery, told me that the head monk always reminded him:

“The only thing you really need to do is think less, feel more.”

Let each sensation be exactly as it is. There’s nothing special to reach for, and you don’t have to get calm or “spiritual” about it. Just stay close to the pulse—meaning, stay with the living, shifting texture of your body and the space around you.

It’s like letting your awareness spread out and touch the room itself—not scanning it with your mind, but sensing it as if you could read its vibe through your skin. Almost like you’re reading space if it were psychic braille, as Peter Brown puts it, attuning to the experiential texture of what’s happening.

Feeling in this way is both the practice and the fruit. At first, it might feel awkward or difficult. But if you stick with it, the right hemisphere naturally takes over, and the edges start to blur. The warmth of sunlight on your arm doesn’t feel like something happening to you—it feels like something you’re part of. The sound of traffic becomes less like noise and more like a rhythm you’re swimming in. Sometimes you might forget where you end and everything else begins.

Soften your gaze

Of all the doors back to the right hemisphere, vision might be the one we ignore most, which is ironic, given how much we depend on it. Humans are primarily visual creatures: some estimates say that 30 to 50 percent (or even up to 80%) of our cerebral cortex is dedicated to visual processing. That is more than touch and hearing combined. But most of us use our eyes like a lighthouse rather than the sun: instead of illuminating everything around us, we narrow our focus, always scanning for the next singular thing to grab.

The left hemisphere loves this tunnel vision. It thrives on details, labels, parts—drilling down to catch what it can name. What it can’t name, it can’t see. The right hemisphere works differently. It sees the living whole, the web of connections stitching everything together.

Most of us never learned to use our eyes this way. But when you soften your gaze to include what’s happening at the edges, you tap into another kind of perception—the brain’s relational networks instead of its laser focus mode. When you relax your eyes, the brain shifts from dissecting parts to taking in the whole.

McGilchrist points out that the right hemisphere holds this wide, steady attention by default. This is simply how your eyes and mind work when you stop trying to control what you see. But most of us unconsciously clench our vision the same way we clench our jaw—and it lets go when you do.

If you feel like playing with this, pick something in front of you. Let your eyes soften until you start to notice the space around the object itself—the little bit of room it sits in. Then see if you can sense the space all the way out to the blurry edges at the far boundary of your vision. It is a bit like switching from a narrow sniper’s scope to what I call a soft cyclopic eye: one wide, relaxed eye that takes in the whole scene at once.

This part is key. You are looking out through a single visual field, a continuous space where everything appears together as one thing. Nothing in that field truly stands alone. As John Donne famously wrote in 1624: no man is an island. And in this way of seeing, no-thing is an island either.

Next time you find yourself puttering around your kitchen, try softening your eyes into that soft cyclopic eye. See how the fridge stops being just a fridge. It blends into the counter, the light, the leaves on the windowsill. Everything reveals itself as part of one unfolding whole, made of the same fabric of seeing, open to what is seen.

When the cyclopic eye was first pointed out to me, it was a bit of a breakthrough. I realized that meditation didn’t have to stay inside my body or breath, but could include everything I was seeing. I started practicing this again and again: noticing when I got caught in thought, unhooking, and relaxing into the wider view. It’s a literal shift from content to context, which is what right-hemisphere living is all about.

With a bit of training, this kind of seeing becomes second nature. And it’s really pretty sweet. It’s a small taste of the oneness mystics have always waxed poetic about. It’s just so simple and ordinary, most people overlook it.

Notice that reality is turned on

While working with the visual field, you might also notice something rather astonishing: it’s all just here, showing up by itself. The whole scene—objects, colors, shadows, the way light hits the wall—is all just appearing without any effort on your part. You didn’t push a button to make your visual field show up. You’re not straining for sound to enter your ears. When you woke up this morning, consciousness just came back online, and the whole world was waiting for you. Even thoughts arrive the same way—unbidden, instantaneously manifest.

This, too, is so simple that the left hemisphere usually skips right over it. In fact, that’s the thread running through everything we’ve covered: the right hemisphere awakens when you notice what was always already here. When you really let this sink in—that everything you see, hear, and think is showing up on its own—it feels both clear and obvious.

The thing is, sometimes the sheer force of life happening on its own, all around you, without your effort, can feel so big you might want to run from it.

For years, I did everything I could to avoid the raw horsepower of reality, even though deep down, it was what I wanted most. Substances, screens, endless busyness—anything to dull the overwhelming immediacy of what was actually happening. And our culture makes this avoidance incredibly easy. The entire consumer machine depends on pulling your attention away from what’s plainly here, selling you distractions from your own life.

But if you slow down, even for a second, there is this undeniable vibration underneath and within everything. Eventually, you won’t even need to slow down to notice that…

Reality is already switched on.

It always was. And “reality” is just another word for the undeniable happening of experience.

Stop trying so hard

Once you catch even a glimpse of this, something else becomes obvious: you don’t have to work nearly as hard as you think! Effort starts to feel a little absurd. This is what Taoists call wu wei—effortless action, or the art of non-doing. Not being lazy, but moving with the current of life instead of against it.

Suddenly, you’re surfing.

Let it be strange

The more you notice reality doing its thing without any of your help, the more undeniable it becomes: you have absolutely no idea what’s going on here.

Look at your hand right now. I mean really look, zoomed in. Notice the lines etched like old riverbeds, the texture of skin that’s somehow both solid and soft, the way light catches those tiny hairs that grow without you telling them to. Feel the warmth, the blood moving through your veins.

Then zoom out: this hand is attached to an arm, connected to a body that’s somehow breathing itself, pulling oxygen from air that trees exhaled this morning, trees that are somehow turning sunlight into the very molecules keeping you alive. All of this is happening on a planet spinning through an infinite void we call space at 67,000 miles per hour, while orbiting a nuclear explosion we call the sun. And it’s all made of stardust. Literal stardust, forged in the furnaces of dying stars billions of years ago, somehow organized into this temporary arrangement that can read these words and wonder of itself.

The details are mindfuckingly intricate. Your eyes are translating electromagnetic radiation into this vivid, three-dimensional movie. Your brain—three pounds of electrified meat—is somehow producing thoughts, emotions, the experience of being someone. Quantum fields are fluctuating in the space between your atoms. It’s all wildly, impossibly strange when you stop taking it for granted.

And who are you in the middle of all this? Beyond the non-answer of the name your parents gave you, it’s not an easy question. A better one might be: What are you? A “hominid” is as flimsy an answer as your name. There is something even stranger here—something that is aware—but try to find it and it slips through your fingers, because “you” are the one doing the looking.

And here is the strangest part: the hand, the brain, the planet, the stars—they’re just mental labels. The mind makes up words for things it can’t actually find. In direct experience, there is only this swirl of color, sound, and sensation, happening whether you think about it or not.

This should produce awe. Reverence, even.

As Socrates put it: “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” But in this area, I think Mary Oliver captured it perfectly:

“Let me keep company always with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”

The mind wants to explain it all away, to keep things neat and manageable and controlled. But the right hemisphere thrives when we let things stay just a little mysterious, when we can break from our addiction to having everything figured out.

Because maybe the point was never to know. Maybe it was always to stand here, astonished, for as long as we get to stay.