Right Vs Left Brain

Our left and right brain offer us two different dimensions of thinking and perceiving. The left side is rational and analytical, but also unreliable and dependent on our natural and controlled filters. The right side is abstract, conceptual and perhaps even more truthful, but its insights are harder to grasp intellectually.

The United States values the rationality and practicality of left brain thinking and puts more importance on it in our educational system. Concentrated thought and planning is considered to be needed for progress and success. Contrary to our right brain, its emphasis is on intuition, creativity, and spirituality. It takes in the emotional importance of the effect of our actions on others and their consequences for the world that surrounds us. 

The left brain likes to categorize; the right, is more about holistic awareness, looking at the whole picture, looking at relationships, looking at how things fit together. It's okay that things are vague. Unlike the right, the left likes certainty. It's about living things rather than abstract. The left brain manages what is repetitive, familiar, and mundane.

A left brain meditation would be a disembodied experience, a very detached experience; in contrast, a right brain meditation would be more about really feeling the body and being present in the world. A left brain meditation may be about concentrating and focusing; the right approach would be about having very open awareness, accepting everything as it is within your awareness, not analyzing, and not judging. The left brain is also about manipulation, grasping, and changing things. The right brain is about accepting things as they are.

An example of a left brain meditation could be where you're counting the breath - a mental

process. In this meditation, you are using a mental process as a way of concentrating and

focusing.

In contrast, right brain meditation is about feeling the breath in the body, fully embodying the experience, and noticing it within the space around you. Practicing that the breath isn't just something that happens to the body. The idea is an open awareness rather than concentration, embodied feeling rather than abstract, accepting things as they are rather than trying to change them.

A left brain meditation is positive thinking like, "I'm going to change my thoughts." "I'm going to make myself think positively." Whereas a right brain meditation would be, "I'm just going to allow my thoughts to be as they are." "I am aware of my environment in this moment."

My meditations invite you into this right brain way of being: open, gentle, and accepting. Together, we create space to notice whatever arises, without judgment or analysis. You simply rest in awareness, feeling the breath move through your body, embodying the experience of each inhale and exhale, and sensing how it unfolds in the moment, exactly as it is.

Listen to my Micro Meditation For Anxiety Podcast*, The Right Brain.

*Airs 6:00PM 9/28/25.