I remember a saying that goes something like this: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears… .” I have identified with this truism at different times in my life. The teacher might have come as a new mentor or a book that came into my life just at the right time. However, I think it goes beyond this. When the student is ready, the teacher might come in the form of an experience or a difficult relationship or a challenging illness.

The teacher, for me, is anything that increases my ability to rise higher in consciousness or to step up in what I say I believe or to bring new information that sets me in a completely different direction. The teacher is my life and my journey toward wholeness, harmony and balance. If something is in my life, it wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t a ready student, equipped with the ability to learn and grow.

Ernest Holmes, mystic, author and spiritual leader, once wrote that the world would soon come to an understanding that it did not have to learn through suffering. I believe this. I believe that as soon as we are ready to truly drop the idea of suffering and transmute it to another energy, we will begin to learn in a different way.

Actually, I think that is what we are being called to do. Perhaps, we need to stop putting labels on things, saying this is bad and this is good. Perhaps, it just is. Perhaps, it is all just part of the journey back to wholeness. In terms of evolution which is the out-picturing of involution or taking something deeply into our inner world and transmuting it into something new for us, I believe that the more I can take labels off my experiences, the more I can turn those experiences that are challenging into a new wisdom.

I do believe that what Shakespeare wrote about life being a stage and we all being players on the stage of life has much validity to it. I think we are the author, the director and the actor. However, sometimes we do not know this. Either we think we are the actor, just being pushed around by a bossy director with no volition of our own, or we think we are the director, wanting everyone to do it our way, or we just refuse to look at the fact that we were the ones that wrote the play.

I prefer the idea of taking responsibility for the whole thing. I am writing the story of my life. I am acting in it at the level of my consciousness, and I am directing where the story goes right now through my choices, moment by moment. Yes, a good actor is always in the moment approaching the scene new, like it has never been played before and yet knowing who he is so deeply that his reactions become responses from that deep place.

I take full responsibility for the play called my life and for all the teachers that show up everyday to move me toward wholeness and that deep knowing of who I am. I know that  as soon as I accept and surrender to gratitude for everything, the more I will leave suffering behind.

I am reminded of a beautiful woman. Her name is Ruth Dubey and she is well into her 90’s. She is such an inspiration to me. She has had some of the most deep and challenging experiences during her life time, and yet she glows with joy when you talk to her. If you ask her how she grew through her experiences, “It’s gratitude,” she says. She is so grateful for her life, not for any particular reason, but because that is her state of being. What a great teacher she is.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. I am a ready student today, who remembers who she is.

Love and Aloha,

Rev. Rita