Two weeks ago, I started with a joke — which goes like this:
A zen master visiting New York City goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything,” The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the zen master, who pays with a 20 dollar bill. The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it.
“Excuse me, but where’s my change?” Asked the zen master?
The vendor replied: “Change must come from within.”
Well, here is the second part of that story:
The zen master agreed that change must come from within, so he ate his hot dog, but it gave him bad breath and bothered his sore tooth. So he walked to the dentist to get a filling. Although he was old and frail, he walked often, and he walked barefoot, as evidenced by the thickness of the soles of his feet. It is for this reason he is known as the “super-calloused fragile mystic vexed by halitosis.”
The dentist inspected the zen master’s tooth, and said he could fill the cavity right then. When he offered to use Novacaine, the mystic declined, saying he wanted to “transcend dental medication.”
There are four areas to each of our lives: our physical bodies, our intellectual minds, our social/emotional side and our spiritual self. Part of our life’s work is to understand and grow and change in each of those areas. Today, these four areas have been reduced to three areas with the phrase Mind, Body and Spirit, and we often hear Mind, Body, Spirit Connection.
Our body is our physical structure holding our brains, body parts, muscle and fat. Our mind governs our mental and emotional aspects. Our mind allows us to be aware of the world, and it powers our ability to think and to feel. Our Spirit is invisible to us, and to others. Its eternal nature doesn’t need a physical body, or need to conform to space and time. Instead, it expresses life’s creator — a Divinity, Source, God, or The Universe — through the creative expressions of each and every one of us. An immortal being, our Spirit can connect us to something much bigger than ourselves and to our five senses.
How do these three individual parts of us connect? And more importantly, how does their connectedness impact our lives? While Mind, Body, and Spirit may seem to be separate, they are each intimately connected and reliant upon one another. When integrated, they complete our unique human essence. The interconnectedness of our Mind, Body and Spirit means that whatever we experience in one part, we experience in all three parts of us. When we experience disease in our Body, our Mind and Spirit are also affected.
When negative thoughts or fears occur in our Mind, our Body and Spirit also feel stressed or “off-balance.” When our connection to Spirit is frail, we may turn to our Mind and Body to find the answers as to why. The truth is that each of our three aspects are always listening, and always aware. Our Mind, Body and Spirit are always present in each and every single thing that we think or do, consume or say. Because our three parts are interconnected, every problem we address must involve all three. This process, which we call ‘integration’, is holistic. It is a returning to the original, natural harmony between our Mind, Body and Spirit. Without a holistic approach, we will always feel a little “off” — like something is missing, or out of balance. We are also more likely to focus on symptoms, rather than on root cause.
In I Thessalonians we encounter the recognition of these areas of our lives with these words:
“May the God of peace make you perfect in holiness. May you be preserved whole and complete — spirit, soul and body.” — I Thessalonians 5:23
Many of us are affected by how we handle the stress that life brings us. If chronic stress is left unchecked, over a period of time it takes a toll on our bodies. A strong faith can help us to cope with the stress that we experience in our life and enable the impact of that stress to be less significant. Without a strong personal faith we must resort to our own resources to cope with the stress present in our life. Often we attempt to cope with this stress through addictions and other methods of escape. This behavior can further negatively impact our physical health. A strong personal faith can be a resource that helps to manage stress.
I believe that the recognition of the relationship between Mind, Body and Spirit is not only incredibly important, but I think this relationship and our efforts to maintain wellness within our Mind, Body and Spirit is actually life-saving because it gets us through the storms of life. When tough times hit us, we rely upon our bodies, our minds and our spirits. We need those three aspects of our life to support us literally, to get us through the challenge.
In today’s video clips, we will watch the story of a young man named Pi, stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger. We have seen him cry out to God for help. His plight serves as a metaphor for the storms — the difficulties — of our lives. Think about the times in your life when you felt like you were stranded on a lifeboat. Think about the times in your life when you felt like you were trapped somewhere with a tiger. Pay attention to how this young man’s mind, body and spirit work together to help him through his difficulty.
We may not be stranded on a life-raft with a tiger, but we have all been in a tough spot or a difficult season in our life. We have all gone through desperate, frightening times, and we will go through them again. We fare best when we are balanced in our Mind, Body, and Spirit. An athlete doesn’t wait until the night before the tryouts to start learning how to play the game.
An actor doesn’t wait until opening night to learn his lines. We need to keep our our Minds, Bodies and Spirits tended and fed and the relationship between them as balanced as possible so that when the sudden surprising challenge arrives, we have some resources to fall back on. If we wait until we are stranded on the open ocean to try to find something bigger than ourselves to believe in, we are coming very late to the party.
Now, how will we know if we are doing a good job of balancing those elements or not? How will we know if we are healthy and ultimately balanced in our body, mind and spirit?
According to an article entitled “Wellness” written by Dr. Brian Seaward, there are some identifying markers of well-being, of wellness in each of the three parts of our being.
Physical wellness is the easiest to identify, because our bodies are tangible and measurable. We are physically well when our bodies’ systems are working optimally. There are tests that can be run to determine our wellness level. Measuring our mental wellness is more difficult. Our mental well-being is understood as the ability to gather, process, recall and communicate information. Also part of the wellness of our minds, emotional well-being is best defined as the ability to feel and express the entire range of human emotions from anger to love, and to control them, not be controlled by them.
Our spiritual well-being is defined by the maturing of our higher consciousness. Our spiritual well-being is measured by our relationships, our personal value system and a meaningful purpose in life.
We know how to exercise our bodies — we know that we need connection and breaks to strengthen our minds — but how, you might be asking — how do we strengthen our spirit?
I think we work out our spirit just like we work out our body — since our spirit gives us meaning and purpose and our spirit enables us to love one another, then we practice loving each other. Even when it’s hard. Our spirit gives us intuition between right and wrong. We exercise that intuition. We don’t ignore it. We take time to figure out what our own personal value system is — we don’t ignore the big questions in life — we actively seek a meaningful purpose in life. We work out our spiritual muscles just like we work out our body and our mind.
Author, Leo Buscaglia has written:
“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another’s, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.” — Leo Buscaglia
I challenge each of us to care enough about the quality of our lives to seek balance in that relationship between our Mind, our Body and our Spirit. Let’s keep ourselves fit and balanced in all areas, so that we will be better equipped for the next time we are in the middle of a storm. Amen.
B.K.S. Iyengar has written:
“Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit.” — B.K.S. Iyengar
My prayer for each of us is that we will strive for this state of harmony so that we can live well.
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