 How many of us feel we are seekers? How many of us are seeking the truth for ourselves, or for someone else, the truth of how to live, or what to do, or what to think. When we find what we are looking for, what do we do with it?
Do we change according to the truth we have found?
I ask Marie (names not the real names), a 4th stage cancer patient: What will you miss about having cancer when we get you better? She readily answers. I will miss being free of taking care of my daughter-in-law’s house and children. Because I am sick I can’t go over there.
It amazed her also that even though she had not gone to their house during the past two years of her illness, the kids are still well and thriving and the house is fine.
Avoiding what we think we have to do is a benefit of an illness.
Harold had never had a friend. We all need a friend, someone to speak with and to share with.
You would think that is a terrible thing. And it is.
But with it is also the benefit.
I asked “When you get a friend, what will you miss about not having a friend. Harold, who is on the spectrum, talks in bullet points and shot out a list of at least 20 things he will miss when he does get a friend.
Among them were the complete control he feels he has when he is alone, the avoidance of conflict because, to him, conflict is so unpleasant, the feeling of obligation, and so much more.
While Harold wanted a friend so very much, the benefit of not having a friend had been winning until he became aware of what he really wants.
A person who stays in a situation usually chooses to do so from the bottom of his soul. Yet he may keep seeking to find an answer.
We meet a “seeker” in the torah portion named after him, Yitro, the father-in-law of Moshe Rabbeinu.
Yitro joins the Jewish people after hearing about the revelation at Sinai.
At the Israelite camp, Yitro sees Moshe sitting down to judge the people. He sees the people standing before Moshe in a very long line, waiting for a very long time.
“What is this thing you are doing to the people?” Yitro asks.
“Why do you sit by yourself while all the people stand before you from morning till evening?”
Moshe answers telling him the people are waiting for two things.
The first is that the people come to seek God. (Moshe says that first so I imagine it must be the more important of the two.)
The second is that in a disagreement, he judges between the men and teaches them the statutes of God and His teachings.
Yitro tells Moshe that what he is doing is not good. He explains that he will wear himself out and will wear out the people. It’s too much for anyone to do this alone. Yitro advises Moshe to find men to judge the smaller matters and about how to choose these men.
But Yitro never addresses the first thing the people were coming for. He never mentions that the people come to Moshe to seek God.
This is strange because Yitro is a seeker, himself. According to Rashi, Yitro has tried every religion and form of worship.
Now, he has found the truth that he was seeking in Torah from Sinai.
Yet, Yitro, the seer and seeker, ignores that the people come to Moshe because they are seeking.
Yitro has found what he has searched for his entire life.
He declares, “Now I know that God is greater than all other gods.” (Shemot 18; 11)
What does Yitro, who is a seer and seeker, do with the truth that he has found?
Does he now live according to that truth?
Does he stop searching other religions and start learning the depth of the Torah?
Does he follow through on what he now knows to be the truth, and his own truth?
Let’s see…..
In Numbers 10:29, Moshe asks Yitro to come with the Israelites to where God is sending them. “Go with us and we shall treat you well for God has spoken of good for Israel.”
But Yitro, who found his truth with the Israelites, responds that he will not go with them. Rather he will “go only to his land and his family.” In other words, Yitro will go back to his old life, ignoring his great find.
Moshe tries to convince him but to no avail.
For Yitro, after having sought every religion and finding the truth in the Torah from Sinai it must have be an awesome moment in time, a truly inspired, meaningful event to find what he had been searching for.
It would be for any of us who is searching for answers and then finds them.
What do we do with those answers?
Do we internalize them and change our ways?
Or
Do we go back to our old ways?
Do we ignore what we have found and keep seeking?
Yitro chose to keep seeking. He is a seeker.
There are those who seek and seek but do not do anything with the answers they find. They go back to seeking.
Why would anyone do that? Why would a person hold onto his illness or onto anything negative in his life?
I have found that for many there is a benefit to staying where we are and continuing the search for an answer.
There is a benefit in the discomfort of our condition.
There is a benefit in the illness.
Robert called me from a California hospital to heal his heart condition. He was only 38 years old.
I asked him, “What will you miss about this heart problem when we get you better?
I ask many of my clients how what they are suffering from may be helping them in some way.
It amazes me that the answer is often so readily available to them.
Robert’s heart condition began when he saw that his parents, who live in Argentina, were aging. He worried that they may need financial help soon and that he would have to put out the money to support them. Robert is a planner. He plans for every penny.
The benefit to Robert of being in the hospital with a heart problem is that no one would expect any kind of help from him while in this condition.
While Robert loves his parents, deep down, his illness was of great benefit to him in that he believed it would save him from financial loss.
He knew this was not how he wanted to be.
We found alternative ways to deal with his worry about finances and his need to plan ahead. He also realized how impossible it is to plan for everything that will happen. His heart condition became a thing of the past shortly after that.
Susan was diagnosed schizophrenic. When I began working with her, she was plagued with daily hallucinations. She is a very high soul, as I have found all schizophrenics to be, and wanted very much to think of herself as “sweet and good.” There is reasoning to the hallucinations she was experiencing. When Susan had a thought that she felt did not make her sweet and good, she simply made the hallucination say it. Ex: Mary Smith said my sister is bad.” Susan was angry at her sister. She did not want to own the fact that she could have anger. So she gave that anger to Mary Smith. Then the thought was not Susan’s. Susan now could blame the anger on someone else and remain the person she wants to think she is. There was great benefit to Susan in her private hallucinatory world that was never boring. Owning her feelings has greatly relieved her occurrence of hallucinations.
Susan received so much relief from looking at the reality and the patterns of thought she had that she recently got married,
To each illness there is a benefit. Each illness serves a specific purpose for that person. The person needs his illness for something more important than getting better. It might be an excuse for a failure. It could be a subconscious way to get others to care for him. It might be for the special attention or even for relief from criticism that is a byproduct for one who is ill.
In order to get better, we need to be aware of what that benefit is.
As a mind-body practitioner who heals so many maladies of others and of my own, I had to examine why I still need crutches to walk? I had to do my own searching.
Any of you who has read the manuscript of my book Light From the Darkness, can’t miss the lack of kindness with which I had been treated for decades.
By 1997 I was diagnosed with RSD. I was in horrific pain, very embarrassed that I needed crutches after having been a skilled athlete.
The first year or two I was pretty much homebound.
When I began coming back into the world and even presented at conferences, people were nice to me. I realized that they wanted to help a person who is disabled.
It was so healing, not just of RSD, but of my whole life.
How healing it is to have so may people run to hold the door for me, even though I know I can push it open and fly right through by myself. Just the fact that they would want to is healing to me.
How healing it is to go on stage and rather than see daggers of jealousy thrown at me from the audience’s faces, seeing people on the edge of their seats ready to help me, ready to support, totally rooting for my success.
On crutches, I am no longer a threat to anyone, for no one wants to be me. No one wants to be a person who needs crutches to walk, a person who needs to accommodate how she does everything in order to do what everyone else does with ease.
The benefit of the illness I am not ready to give up
I am not ready to face the world without the shield of using crutches, They are my Magen David, protecting me from the worst side of people and bringing out their best, for people like to help one who they thinks needs it.
Behind these crutches I can have encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition, healing, coaching, Torah, and about a thousand other subjects. I can be an intuitive without anyone being jealous. I can be me without the suppressive force of those who want to attack me, because behind those crutches no one wants to.
And so for Yitro there was a benefit I am sure in continuing to be a seeker without living up to what he has found. Perhaps the great responsibility of a Torah life, of commitment, or even of leadership, was too much to imagine had he internalized and committed to what he had found.
There are many benefits we each have in not internalizing and changing according to the truth we have found.
But in order to get better, in order to heal, in order to change, we need to know what the benefit of being where we are is. We need to be aware of that before we can take on the benefit of being who we want to be.
Knowing the benefit of the illness unlocks the key to the jail that we put ourselves in. Then we are free to decide, to heal, and to be the person we choose to be.
Copyright © Chana Klein 2012
www.thespectrumcoach.com
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Subscribe
