Do you have a mystery bag?
In a conversation this week, I heard a great phrase that made me hopeful. I was talking with a doctor who has practiced internal medicine for over two decades and is now the CEO of a leading healthcare organization. We were talking about metaphysics and increasing mind-body awareness into the delivery of healthcare generally and his organization specifically. He is very smart, a truly effective leader, and grounded in the scientific approach. And yet, he is talking to me: a paraplegic yoga teacher who is attempting to transform the mind-body relationship in both patients and healthcare workers alike.
Already we were outside of ordinary paradigms.
He was thinking about people within his organization that would be interested in my work. He described his Research Director. “She’s as hard-nosed, quantitative, and number-crunching as they come. But she also carries a MYSTERY BAG.” This meant that she did not discard the unknown.
I love that phrase. Some of us do carry a mystery bag, a secret willingness and hunger to explore the ‘more’ part of life, the part that doesn’t quite make sense and doesn’t have to. This is the part that we often cannot share in our professional lives. We do not talk about in groups, lest people would think us strange. In this mystery bag lives beliefs in such thing as ghosts or omens or what have you. And yet, it is this openness to ‘more’ that not only makes life interesting but also becomes the catalyst for change.
Our conversation made me hopeful. Two people – the CEO and the Research Director of a leading healthcare organization – carry mystery bags. This is how things change. My life’s work is bringing more mind-body awareness into both healthcare and our every day lives. The research isn’t there yet. I cannot point to a large body of accepted evidence to support the causal effectiveness of deepened mind-body integration in treating people suffering with trauma, loss, and disability. That research is coming, but it isn’t here yet.
In the meantime, I am grateful that more and more people carry mystery bags. They know intuitively that the Universe is bigger than the world that our entrenched paradigms have created. It is our mystery bags, not our linear thinking, that are the source of innovation, of insight, and of change.
The question is do we have the courage integrate our mystery bags into our every day lives. My conversation this week made me hopeful that the answer is yes.
Aristotle wrote, “Hope is the dream of a waking man.” To which I would add: and our dreams don’t always make sense, at least not at first.