LIFE 101

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Cary Bayer is a Life Coach and the founder of Higher Self Healing Meditation. He conducts private practice and teaches meditation classes by the ocean in South Florida (954-788-3380) and in the mountains in Woodstock, New York (845-679-5526). You can find him at www.carybayer.com and reach him at successaerobics@aol.com

Many moons ago when I was living in Woodstock, NY, my wife and I had hit a bumpy patch and we decided to seek out some counseling support from the great Bert Shaw, a wise man who helped many dozens of people put the trains of their lives back on track. Bert had succeeded both in the world and not of it, having risen through the creative ranks in the advertising game on Madison Avenue and then running the Pathwork Center, a spiritual organization about 20 minutes west of Woodstock. The organization was deeply versed in “The Guide Lectures,” a series of channeled messages by a spirit known simply as The Guide.

One of the things that Bert espoused in his counseling work was the tripartite nature of the human personality, broken up into reason, will and emotion. The idea was that, while every person has each of these qualities active in their lives, one tends to dominate, while the other two are more recessive. Let me give you an example that will help make things clearer, and aid you in discovering which tendency tends to be your most dominant.

Suppose you have an appointment to play tennis at 9 AM; so three other people are counting on you to show up on time, or else they’d have to wait to get started playing, cutting in on the time that the court is theirs. So you set your alarm for say, 7:15, giving you an hour and a quarter to wash up, meditate, get dressed, have breakfast, and leave for your half-hour drive to the club.

Now suppose you worked out at the gym the day before. Let’s assume for this discussion that you’re driven mostly by emotion. And after the workout you were tired, and didn’t feel like taking a shower to clean off all that perspiration then, that you’d put it off for before bedtime. But when bedtime came around you were even more tired and felt even less like showering than you did hours before. So you decide you’ll shower in the morning.

But let’s say you didn’t sleep so well that night, and by the time the alarm rings you feel like you really could use some more time in bed.

So you stay under the covers and get out of bed maybe by 7:30. Now you’re on a shorter time leash to get out by 8:30. So you take that shower, cut your meditation time in half, and quickly run out the door, grabbing a protein bar to eat while driving, instead of sitting down to a nice relaxing breakfast with your husband.

Did you notice that the words “feel” or “felt” were used three times in that scenario? A writer who chooses his words carefully, I don’t typically repeat a word so often in such a short space, but I deliberately did this time to emphasize that feeling in the moment is what drives the way an Emotion Type behaves.

A Reason Type, on the other hand, would have showered when she got home from the gym, knowing that it’s intelligent to shower off sweat right away rather than waiting hours. Such a person might have scheduled the previous day’s workout to even earlier than the Emotion Type did. This person would have been able to get out in the morning more easily than her more emotional counterpart.

A Will Type might have even done a gym workout late at night – instead of skipping it entirely – if that person has a commitment to working out on days when she doesn’t play tennis. She would have forced herself to shower off the workout even if she was tired and didn’t feel like it. Her will would have driven the action.

It’s not that one type is better than the other; you are who you are, and are made up the way you are made up. But it’s valuable to recognize what drives you, so that you can make the more recessive abilities show up when it’s useful. For Emotion Types that means enabling reason and will to exert their influences more often. For those who are mostly driven by reason, then will and emotion can help create more balance. And lastly, Will Types can grow more quickly and be happier when reason and feelings are more able to express themselves.