Yoda on TMS

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Just had to share...​

 

Yeah, I love how he ties anger/hate/rage into it. George Lucas probably meant that we become angry at what we fear, but in the context of TMS it could mean that living with something that terrifies you can be enraging. Fundamentally, you know that your TMS isn't fair and you just want to rage at the world for doing this to you. Unfortunately, this rage only leads to suffering because, as Dr. Sarno explained, rage is crucial to TMS.

I also found another great Yoda quote. "Grave danger you are in. Impatient you are." I think that Lucas' message in this quote is that impatience, like fear, can lead us to take shortcuts, forgetting our true priorities. It could also be applied to TMS, though, in that people are often so eager to heal that their very focus on healing can become a source of emotional tension that can make their TMS worse rather than better. Marc Sopher calls this calendar watching, and Alan Gordon calls this outcome dependence. No matter what you call it, you need to avoid it and instead cultivate a sense of equanimity and joy.

I suspect that both quotes were directed toward young Anakin Skywalker, who later became Darth Vader. Yoda sees him heading in the wrong direction and is trying to warn him away from turning to the dark side.

I found a better video of the first quote that shows him saying this to Anakin. I think it's worth watching if you've read this far:

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In general, if Anakin suffered from impatience and anger and Yoda tried to coach him away from these things, perhaps these Yoda quotes can be relevant to TMS healing. I believe that TMS healing starts with a mindset, and that everything else flows from that. Once you get the mindset right, then you can start cooling down your rattled and terrified nervous system. The parts of your brain involved in fear (most notably your amygdala) can literally shut off the higher centers of your brain that would otherwise help you soothe yourself. As your brain prepares to "fight or flight," it is as if it fears that it cannot afford to focus on anything else. That is a problem, because TMS is a mindbody condition, so anything that gets your mind out of whack will inevitably also cause problems in your body.

Once you get your mindset straightened out, then your true Self comes out. At the Harvard/Mass General Hospital conference about mindbody medicine that I went to a couple months back, this was referred to as top-down functioning, where the higher, more enlightened areas of your brain are guiding the older, shadowy areas and soothing them over time. You learn how to bring joy and happiness into your life rather than rage, fear and frustration. (Carrying the Star Wars metaphor forward, the light side of the force starts winning over the dark side of the force within you .) Then, when those changes have taken hold in your mind and you have reached a level of meditative equanimity, those changes will become reflected in your body.

I suspect that when George Lucas was creating the Yoda character, he wanted to make 800 year old Yoda seem as wise as possible, so he took what he thought were some of the wisest ideas that he knew of and channeled them into the character. Perhaps the reason why the character resonates with me so much is that that's basically what we are doing here. As peers, we take what we have learned from our own experience (which might seem like 800 years because of all of the pain) and try to share it with other members in "the fraternity of TMS." When we see someone going down the path of fear or obsession, it can feel a bit like Yoda coaching Luke.

.... Now I'm going to start wanting to put Yoda quotes in threads in the support subforum. I'll try to resist the urge, as the newcomers probably wouldn't make the connection, but I can't guarantee that I'll resist the urge. Life is about having fun after all...​