the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

Forewords and Preface vii
discover something truly novel, we may have to view it in ‘a beam of intense
darkness’ so that we are not blinded by the light of what we already know
and believe to be so.
Chaos, as disturbing as it can be, can also breed opportunity. Freed
from words and language, forced to rebuild the world within a new balance
of sensory modalities, new shapes may form and relationships may be
seen that were hidden before by the known and the expected. New ways
of ordering things, new relationships between otherwise familiar elements
may emerge.
As words slowly began to return, finding herself easily exhausted by left
brain activity – reading, writing, talking to patients – Ruth discovered that
her stamina for art and music increased. A new world opened up to her; not
just as she began to study art, but as she discovered the freedom that comes
from a change in the balance of how she existed in and experienced the world
around her. “I begin to see and feel more and more the life force around me,
more perceptive to the sentience I have never before seen and to the sensory
languages I’ve never heard.” (p. 73).
Even more powerfully, she discovered that “I am moving further and
further in the direction of living in sensory and non-verbal worlds. The wealth
of sensation, reception, and communication in the unconscious meets the
conscious brain’s aptitudes to walk in other worlds, to know altered states
of mind, and to be in service in different ways, without so many words.” (p.
59, italics added).
So began a journey, not only of recovery, but deep spiritual discovery in
ways that were unexpected, deeply personal and powerfully transformative.
A journey towards new ways of being; being in the world, experiencing that
world, experiencing one’s self in the world, “experiencing new languages
not given by words or sometimes even by communicative sounds. These
non-verbal languages are sensory syntax, sensory language, felt though my
body.” (p. 88).
Beyond the personal courage and heroism, beyond the testament to
life force and human resilience, this is a story of deep spiritual meaning and
metaphysical import: of seeing and being; of encounter and discovery. And