I kind of snuck up on the back door to meditation and mindfulness. It started with me reading "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilChrist, about eight years ago while camping on the beach in Kauai. The book by the renowned psychiatrist talks about about how our brain is divided into two separate brains that talk to each other, but function differently. He tosses out some ideas about how left brain tends to dominate right brain, but right brain is the master and left brain is the emissary. Left brain thinks it's running the program, and discounts right brain, such that most of the modern people are running on purely left brain.
A few months later a friend suddenly died, then my brother. I found myself deeply hurting and confused at a level I'd never experienced before. I had heard of mindfulness, and decided to give it a try. I found almost immediate relief from this psychological pain I was experiencing, and have been a mindfulness practitioner now for eight years. I was quick to see the correlation between McGilChrist's ideas and those of mindfulness, so I've always had this understanding when reading dharma literature, and I've read a lot. It seems to me that what meditation and enlightenment masters teach is essentially right brain/left brain asymmetry. We quiet the talkative left brain so that we can hear the wisdom of the right brain.
So, am wondering if others see things this way as well?