Imagine a gifted artist surveying a stunning landscape. After a few moments, she lowers her eyes to the side-by-side canvases on the easel before her. She stretches her arms out to each side--a brush in each hand; a hand poised above each of the two canvases. Then she paints. Her left hand flies over one canvas; her right over the other. Each hand translates the view before her onto one of the two canvases, one stroke after another and another. Her hands move above the canvases so fast the emerging portraits seem to manifest magically. Both canvases fill with color. In a matter of moments, her paintings are done.

When our artist steps back, we see that her paintings are each magnificent, though they are dramatically different from each other. Where one has captured every detail making even the blades of grass stand out from one another, the other has captured the scene as a whole with everything bleeding and blending into everything else. One seems more realistic than a photograph; the other blends impressions of color, sensation, and relationship.

This gifted artist is our mind. And our mind paints these dueling portraits of everything we experience. Our left brain interprets events unfolding around us in a manner that generates a mental portrait of exquisite detail giving us one impression of reality. Our right brain interprets the same events in a way that generates an equally exquisite mental portrait. But this portrait gives us few details. Instead, it provides impressions--through broad strokes and splashes of color.

Our left brain identifies a thousand separate details and creates our ME perspective; our right brain identifies a kaleidoscope of relationships, and creates our WE perspective.

The dueling portraits of our experience are not captured and preserved as static images on an artist's canvas, though. They are continually being painted and repainted like frames in an animated film. Each moment of our existence is interpreted simultaneously through our left brain's lens on reality and our right brain's lens on reality. Each side of our brain continually paints frame after frame after frame as viewed through its unique perspective on events.

Which portrait is right or true? Why...both of them, of course.

It is truly unfortunate, then, that most of us have little or no awareness of one of the portraits our mind continually creates. The vast majority of us rely almost exclusively on the realistic, detailed portrait that is a product of our ME perspective. When we do become aware of the more impressionistic portrait created by our right brain, it’s usually because an experience of profound connection—to ourselves, others, and/or our world—momentarily draws us into our WE perspective.

We are not stuck with this state of affairs, though! We can nurture our appreciation of our WE perspective and learn to SHIFT from ME to WE whenever we choose. And when we become adept at making the SHIFT, it not only sustains us, it can heal our sense of disconnection and transform us into instruments of wholeness.