Magic
“In the
summer of 1968, in the throes of a hardscrabble, perilous childhood,
he wandered into a magic shop and met a woman named Ruth who taught
him what she called 'another kind of magic' that freed him from being
a victim of the circumstances of his life, and that he now investigates
through science.”
Krista
Tippett (On Being: The Magic Shop of the Brain with James Doty, MD)
James Doty was a boy in
the 60's, growing up in an alcoholic family in a blue-collar
neighborhood in Lancaster, CA. He had already been thrown out of
Catholic school for slapping a nun, and was on the verge of becoming
a juvenile delinquent when he wandered into a Magic Shop to buy a
plastic thumb for a trick he was attempting to do. In the shop he met
a woman named Ruth, whom he describes as an 'earth mother type' who
happened to be the mother of the shop's owner, just visiting for the
summer and minding the store while the owner ran errands. Ruth taught
James Doty how to change his response to the difficult circumstances
of his life through practices such as mindfulness, meditation, and
relaxation of the body to clear the mind. Today, James Doty is a
professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University, and founding
director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and
Education.
This is such a good story
of how chance encounters and serendipitous meetings can change the
shape of our lives. It is my belief, simply because I choose to
believe in magic and mystery, that such people are put into our path
by the hand of fate—aka, Spirit. I can testify to this reality
because of the many people who've wandered through my own existence
and profoundly changed me. We never evolve on our own, but by the
people who shape us.
One of the lessons James
Doty teaches is that we can actually change the shape and function of
our brain to optimize the positive aspects and minimize the negative.
He speaks of the sympathetic nervous system which gives us “fight
or flight” in the face of a perceived threat, calling it
“evolutionary baggage.” It is the oldest part of the brain that
we share with most creatures. The amygdala—that almond shaped mass
of gray-matter that sits above our brain stem, whose job is to alert
the nervous system to danger—can actually be down-sized by
mindfulness practices like meditation. The effects are not
hypothetical, but have been measured. Doty sees this down-siziing as
a necessary step for the survival of our species. It is a way of
training ourselves to stay open to, rather than running from the
differences that threaten us; instead, allowing them to inform and
clarify our relationships and humanity.
James Doty gives his
serendipitous meeting with Ruth, and the many other teachers he's had
in the arena of mind/heart connection, credit for changing him from
an angry boy in search of a fight, to a man of conscience and caring.
It is not our circumstances that determine who we are, but our
response to them. We never know how we may impact the life of another
person, but it is always possible that our impact will be positive if we
practice kindness and respect.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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