This is how you find your muse.

There is a sparkly, creative muse inside each of us.

As children, everything is perfect and whole in our curious, open eyes. Creativity is our effortless language. We play games and explore our world with delight. We build hospitals for teddy bears and perform rock concerts in our bedrooms. We design blueprints for castles and draw maps for hidden treasures. The author herself held mini-funerals for her Barbies in her grandfather’s funeral home.

In the journey to adulthood, our innate brilliance is insidiously tarnished by responsibilities to be dutiful partners, coworkers, friends, and citizens. For heart-centered physicians, our originality is oppressed further beneath rigorous schooling, sleepless nights, and a decaying health-care system that values efficiency over humanity.

We are promised it will get better, only to emerge from another week in our career of factory medicine, feeling broken and battered. We wonder what happened to the Hippocratic Oath: “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.”

This is the story of a physician who lived life with blinders on, navigating the increasing demands of being “doctor mom”. It reveals that grit and diligent hard work do not protect you against the heartache of burnout, and the best decisions are not made with logic or reason, but right-brain instinct. It’s a story about bravely walking away from a stable, profitable career into a blank canvas of the unknown in order to live a fully authentic and awake life.

This is not a self-help book or a how-to book, but you might recognize some self and help in this audiobook. Right Brain Rescue is a literary “creativity prescription” that will inspire us to think differently about how we use our energy, explore our values, and care for our bodies and minds so we can become the most sparkly version of ourselves.