Apple Cider Vinegar - shame we can buy anything but critical thinking.

Imagine a game of golf. You cannot just grab the ball and walk with it and shove it into a hole. You need to use a golf club to guide it, usually many times, until it finally lands where it needs.

Belle Gibson

 And similarly, that’s the role of a teacher. He’s the golf club, the student is the ball.

But these days the game has changed somehow. We put too much spotlight on the teacher and zero responsibility on the student.

Consumerism seeped through everything. The student is no longer the student, with obligations to study, do their homework, pay attention, be on time. No – the student is there to consume.

In a similar analogy, we no longer are interested in making a cake, learning what ingredients we must buy, how they were harvested, where do they come from. None of this. We just want to eat it. And eat it fast.

And the same goes for the wellness industry. Everyone is putting a spotlight on the infamous Belle Gibson, now featured in the Netflix TV Series ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ and the phone app ‘The Whole Pantry’. For sure she shouldn’t have lied that she’d had cancer, if she didn’t. And for sure she shouldn’t have advised people to stop their conventional cancer treatments in favour of ‘natural therapies’.

But I’d like to put a spotlight on the audience. We see a similar parallel in the yoga industry. People fall for what the ‘guru’ has to say. They eat off their lips, without questioning. We take everything as face value then memorise it and repeat it like parrots.

And what’s the most ironic in all of it is that we don’t even understand the meaning of the word ‘guru’. The literal translation is the remover of darkness. Gu – darkness, ru – remover. The teacher is like a portal to another dimension. But most of us get stuck in the door. If the guru has thousands of followers and a million likes – he must be good, he must be trustworthy. He’s the saviour. He’s the guru. And if the cooking app has nice shiny photos and the person behind it looks pretty, it must be true.

We get too caught up on the trinkets and trivialities. We get fooled by the shallowness and the insignificant aspects of the teacher. The teacher or the guru is there to teach. To probe us, to guide us - like the proverbial golf ball, to question, to spur critical thinking, until we figure it out for ourselves. It’s not there to feed us the ready-made cake so that we can just memorise it!

But that’s what we expect in almost every single aspect of our lives, including our health. We stopped being a passenger on the train, we are a consumer. We stopped being a student, we are a consumer.

My Buddhist philosophy teacher always says: don’t believe me, question my teachings. Go away and see for yourself how these teachings apply to your life. Spend time with them. Let them sink. Digest them, see if they make sense. And then come back with more questions.

 It’s like a game.

Be it golf or another. The back and forth. This is how we learn – when we are in a state of discovery and wonder. When, with the right guidance (a golf teacher) we figure it out for ourselves how to place a perfect strike. How boring would the game be if the teacher just took the ball and did it for us!

And maybe that’s why so many people do not want to study anymore. Because it’s easy and therefore beyond boring! (In fact, I’d argue that memorising is way harder than learning by understanding.)

Because it’s all about ‘buying’ the next course. It’s like we don’t study and discover but buying yet another certificate.

It's not anymore learning with curiosity, passion and patience, and a little bit of frustration at time – it must be easy. But let me repeat, easy is boring. And at times, like in the case of Belle Gibson – misleading. Yes, she had good taste in fonts and food styling and a knack to make her ‘teachings’ believable but where is our responsibility as a student to question her? Everybody just ate her proverbial raw Matcha cake; nobody asked what’s in it!