Synthesis

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."  This much-quoted thought is most often credited to Buddha Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, or to many of us, just "The Buddha."

I'd like to alter the line just a bit. "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear...and appear...and appear." So often, it seems that when I start working on a spiritual lesson, everywhere I turn I bump into a slightly nuanced version of the same lesson.  Like a fine crystal, every way I turn it, I see unique impressions which describes a nuance of the lesson.

The last two evenings I've written about slightly different versions of seeing lessons through a lens of letting them support me in experiencing the beauty and wonder of spiritual growth as an endpoint but through which I must tiptoe through lessons.  Today brought two very distinct, yet remarkably similar extensions of those lessons, or "teachers," if you prefer.

"People's Pharmacy" is one of my favorite sources of well-researched health information, and I've been a faithful listener for over 25 years (and an avid reader of their newspaper column for years before that.) When I moved to DC, I could no longer get the show. Since discovering the podcast about a month ago, I've been devouring many back episodes. As consequence, I am not sure when ones to which I listened today aired.  The show's guest was Matthew Sanford, a yoga instructor and paraplegic. He lost use of his body from the chest down when he was 13, if I recall correctly 38 years ago.+

Because I've had significant body function/pain issues over the last 25 years, I listened carefully as he described the change he had experienced in his relationship with his body.  (You might say he was rewriting his story.)  His rehabilitation programs taught him how to overcome his disability by using parts of his body that were able to do so to facilitate movement through the world. But, Matthew missed his body and didn't like the image of dragging non-functioning parts of his body through the world.  (My words, not his.)  He began doing yoga to assist his experience of how his mind and body connected: his body is his body to be experienced not overcome.

As I listened, I drifted to the years I spent in rehab.  At first, I wanted someone to make it better, and I spent years just doing with determination whatever I needed to "get back to normal."  As soon as I'd experience a modicum of time with minimal pain, I'd stop doing my exercises, and soon I'd be in pain again.  Ten or 12 years ago...maybe more...I had an aha! moment when I realized that if I was going to live with a minimal amount of pain, my physical therapy exercises were going to be an everyday part of life.  I wouldn't like it but I would commit to doing them, day in and day out.  It was a good decision.  Although I do fall into periods of pain from time to time, if I faithfully do my exercises, most of the time I am relatively pain free.

I was doing a light jog on the treadmill as I was listening to the interview with Matthew. Mirrors all around me showed that I was in pretty good shape.  A personal trainer who had worked with me last week had pronounced my routine as pretty thorough and had little to suggest that I add. I was able to walk 65 minutes on a springlike day yesterday.

As I listened to Matthew talk about the change in his thinking about his body, I realized that, perhaps less consciously than Matthew, I too had changed.  I've moved beyond having to do exercises every day to stay out of pain to being delighted with this machine which is carrying me through life so effectively.  If I were able to stop the exercises without pain, I wouldn't want to do that now.  That is how I've come to show my body love...as it is.

Less than an hour later, I bumped into another teacher: an article by Dr. Tim Lomas, Ph.D., in Psychology Today.* He wrote about the approaching 20th anniversary of the positive psychology movement, launched by Dr. Martin Seligman. The piece was both retrospective and prospective, attempting to point the way forward for the growing psychology of happiness movement.  The article described three stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  For the first part of its history, psychology had been concerned with how to get us out of misery--the "thesis."

Then along came Seligman with the antithesis: the point of psychology should be to have us experience well-being and happiness.  In so doing, all the miserable parts of our lives were castigated or discounted as negative or lacking in value. But, the article proclaimed, there is usefulness from fear: it allows us to assess risk. Lomas continues that "'anti-social' emotions like anger can impel one to resist injustice, and drive progressive social change."*

Finally, Lomas predicts the future of psychology as being a synthesis that values the downsides while supporting our individual quests for well-being.  As he described this integration of resistance of the negative while supporting happiness and well-being, it seemed to me that what he was describing for our psyches was a parallel to what Matthew and I had come to in our relationship with our bodies and what I've been coming to over the last two days in this blog.  There is value in the struggle with the parts of ourselves that we might not like, but as we learn to accept the richness of the whole, we enable our souls to reach their potentials.

This is not a new concept to me.  In fact, I wrote about it in Leading from the Heart, which is also marking its 20th anniversary.  I actually looked through the book this evening to get my exact quote, but I was unable to locate it; the gist is that we see the world in black and white when in truth it is a million shades of gray. (That was when shades of gray weren't X-rated.)  When we only focus on what we perceive as bad--disability or misery--or good--overcoming and happiness, we lose the texture of the fullness of our existence. Wholeness lies in the synthesis--accepting the fullness of our possibilities.

+https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2017/01/19/show-1065-how-can-yoga-benefit-everyone-fit-and-flexible-or-not/

*https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-light-in-the-darkness/201602/second-wave-positive-psychology-introduction