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Self-Care Tip #103 – Forget about divisions in knowledge. Be a friend to yourself.
Knowledge does not separate into parts of religion, diet, stars, or geometry. It is one thing, although we may not see its entirety. Like the blind men with the elephant, we might be standing by the foot or the trunk. But it is one thing. Spiritual truth, nature, physics, medicine, music, art, it’s the same story told in pieces and in different ways.
Working in psychiatry, I’ve struggled with this because it so often affects my freedom in practice. It so often affects people’s choices for treatment, people’s choices for lifestyle and their own empowerment with self-care. It affects the choices people make in medication therapy and in physicians.
Merging the tables of learning affects our quality of life either way. If we are able to do this, we have less conflict, fewer chairs to walk around. If we can’t, we find ourselves constantly checking the seating charts. It’s terrible throwing a party where people don’t know what connects them. There’s the same discomfort inside of us when our life paradigms are afraid of each other.
Take Crystal. She is a Latina Catholic. Or make her protestant Filipina, or say White Texan. Crystal grew up thinking that what was said by her tias (aunts,) or her pastor, or performed by her grit and spine, lay like bookmarks between human behavior issues and the rest of her life. Behaviors may have something to do with the church, or emotions with the girls room, or nothing to do with anything in her mind. Thinking behaviors and emotions might relate to what gave her black hair color, and to why water separates from oil is just bizarre to her.
When, Thomas Friedman wrote The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, he was talking about a leveling of the playing field of commerce. To take it further, I hear him talking about a flattening of prejudices, knowledge, access to information and hierarchies. The world is too flat to separate the brain from the rest of the body. When the world is flat, working as a psychiatrist means enlisting all of science, religion, social issues, hobbies, food preferences, and all the other things that make someone’s life worth living for their treatment. When the world is flat, a patient trying to get help for their emotional-behavioral illness doesn’t separate it from anything else in their journey.
It turns out that we have a lot of information on where emotions and behaviors come from. We should use it, don’t you think?
Of course, we don’t have it all. Not close. We don’t know how the soul factors in. We don’t know what miracles are. We don’t know God face to face. But we do know that it is the same table of knowledge. It is the same elephant in the room. It all comes from the same Love.
Walk around. Feel around. Let your quality of life get better. Don’t cut yourself off from another part of you if you don’t have to.
Question: How are you keeping your personal journey one that is connected? Or not? Please tell me your story.
Related Articles
- Quotes from Tom Friedman’s “The World is Flat” (compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com)
- The world is not flat: Exploring cells and tissues in three dimensions (physorg.com)
Before I had an emotional breakdown, I knew, from the time I was very young, that something was terribly wrong. I just didn’t know what. When I was well into therapy, I was convinced that my parents were totally awful and that my childhood was a complete disaster. Now that I’m “on the other side”, I am slowly remembering the good times in my childhood and with my parents. The other day I cried out of love for my father just remembering his laugh when he was dying. I’m beginning to see the whole in my life, and it is making me much healthier than I was when I didn’t understand at all or I considered only the worst. (Have I understood your point correctly?)
Nancy, you got the point all right, and made it bigger. I luv where u took it. Your story comes to many of us who feel disconnected from who we were in earlier life chapters. You said in your story, “It gets better.” That is hope in anyone’s struggle. Joel Burns tell us about bullying through his own story, “It Gets Better.” Awesome. Keep on!
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Wow! This is great stuff. I love how this philosophy allows deeply religious people to continue their spiritual experience but at the same time gives them “permission” to explore other parts of their psyche. We are one being: body, soul and spirit after all…
Thank u for reading and commenting. These comments, yours included, bring out many “should have been said’s!”. That is it. We all need permission to… I don’t know. Unveil. Walk in unseemly places. Call God, friend. Brestfeed in public! Keep on.
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Third paragraph “Merging…..other.” is insightful and characterizes the entire discussion in those few profound words. I suppose it is not unnatural for the academic and scientific community to compartmentalize knowledge and there is a tendency to see one’s particular “logia” as unique and exclusive excluding the possible connection with other disciplines. For example what could botany and astronomy possibly have anything to do with each other? One answer is that all disciplines depend on the employment of mathematics particular to the field of study. My own journey(which at 61 seems too close to the end of the journey’s map), is now based on three things or directions. The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the restrictive and repressive nature of Presbyterianism, and the model set for me when I was made a Mason 36 years ago. That would mean to govern all my affairs applying the square and compass to all actions in my life. I am sure you can accurately speculate what that means. As an aside re all the conspiracy theories of the cabalistic and clandestine activities of Freemasonry, which are popular themes in much of today’s literature,the only thing sinister and diabolical in which I was involved or even know about was the time we had to choose between walnut or cherry paneling and whether to have white or cobalt blue carpet.
too funny. i’m glad i have a source to the inside scoop. we’ll keep this between you and me …and the rest of those w internet access will avert their eyes i’m sure.
i luv the 12 steps. luv them. keep on mr carl. i’m so thankful for you.
I like Thomas Friedman and your comments and perspective very much. The connections between us lie at the heart of this beautiful universe. Thank you for visiting!
Hello Monica! A belated response but no less sincere and grateful for connecting w u, w us. keep on.