Meeting the Teacher of Thought

The Teacher of Thought

When I married my second husband, Bill Pettit, M.D., in 2003, I stepped into a whirlwind of change.

I sold my beloved home, closed my psychotherapy practice, and moved to a new city. My daughter went off to college. I was adjusting to marriage again, navigating a new stepfamily, and starting over professionally. It was all beautiful—and disorienting.

Bill, my new husband, navigated life with a calm, compassionate ease that often left me in awe. He wasn’t perfect—he could be stubborn and moved like a tornado at times—but there was something about the way he lived that was different. He met the world from a deep inner stillness, a kind of spiritual equanimity I couldn’t name. I assumed it was just his personality. I didn’t realize he was living from something deeper.

Back then, my passion for helping had dimmed. After years in psychotherapy, a string of intense client cases—some threatening their lives, some even mine—had taken a toll. Traditional resources were dwindling, and I found myself yearning for a new path.

That’s when I discovered coaching. I trained with Mentor Coach, a program designed for licensed professionals. It was upbeat and forward-looking. Coaching felt similar to therapy—but the clients were focused more on potential than on pain. I began to mentor creative women—artists, writers, and those facing big life transitions. I worked from an office in our home, while Bill continued his role at West Virginia University’s medical center.

Then came the invitation that changed everything.

Bill returned one evening, cheeks flushed from his stationary bike workout, and said, “Babe, my teacher, Syd Banks, has invited us to Salt Spring Island for a week. I think he wants to check out my bride.”

Syd Banks. I’d heard the name often. The man Bill credited with introducing him to the Three Principles. So influential, in fact, that West Virginia University had established an institute in Syd’s name, complete with an oil painting hanging in the medical school lobby.

I tried to listen to Syd’s tapes in advance. I really did. But every time, I fell asleep. I thought his Scottish accent and soft voice were boring. I didn’t realize my mind was quieting—and my body, exhausted, was finally letting go.

We traveled to Salt Spring in the middle of a snowstorm—flight after flight, then a ferry through mist and pine-shrouded cliffs. The island felt otherworldly, like a mythical journey to Avalon. Our cabin was rustic, cold, and dark from a power outage. I tried to stay warm beside a tiny wood stove, dozing upright in a stiff chair.

Syd didn’t meet with us right away. Not the first day. Not the second. Or the third. Each time, he called Bill and said we were “too tired to hear.”

I was baffled—and a bit irritated. We had come all this way, spent all this money. But Bill took it in stride. “Syd knows when people are ready,” he said.

Eventually, we met Syd for lunch. I expected a mystic, a guru. What I saw was a slight man in khaki corduroys and a brown coat. He looked like anyone you might pass on the street. But his presence was unmistakable—calm, grounded, radiant with stillness.

The moment he hugged me, all my irritation evaporated. It vanished. I tried to feel it, to call it back, but it was gone. I was enveloped in a peaceful presence I couldn’t explain.

During our time together, Syd didn’t preach. He shared simple stories. He talked about the Three Principles—Mind, Consciousness, and Thought—not as theories, but as metaphors for Love.

“If you’re not feeling love,” he told me,
“you’ve wandered onto the rocky shores of your own thought system.”

That line landed. Deeply.

He said that Thought is the bridge between the formless and the form. That we are spiritual energy—Wisdom, God, Love—in motion, creating our experience from the inside out.

At one point, I asked him what it was like to be a spiritual teacher, sought after by students all over the world.

“Frankly, dearie,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “it’s boring. I say the same thing over and over. But people get caught up in the metaphor and miss the message.”

I laughed out loud. I didn’t fully understand his words then. But something inside me recognized the truth of them.

Before we left Salt Spring, he looked at me and said, “In the end, all forms will pass away. What will be left is Truth.”

That Truth—Love—is what I’d been searching for all along.

Syd Banks was the “teacher of Thought” a Hawaiian Kahuna had once predicted I would meet. But more than that, he helped me see the mystical logic behind life. A logic not of analysis or theory—but of stillness, simplicity, and the spiritual intelligence we all carry within.

I left Salt Spring changed. Not in a flashy way. In a quiet, enduring way.

I still didn’t think the Three Principles had much to offer me as a psychologist. But the seeds had been planted. And Truth has a way of growing, even when we’re not looking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Sandel Pettit, Ed.D., is a psychologist, writer, spiritual mentor, and author of Leaning into Curves: Trusting the Wild Intuitive Way of Love, winner of the 2024 Maxy Award for Inspiration and Self-Help. Her work helps intuitive women reclaim their power, navigate transitions with grace, and live from the deep well of spiritual intelligence within.

📖 Read more stories like this in her memoir, Leaning into Curves:
https://drlindapettit.com/leaning-into-curves/

🌿 Interested in working with Linda?
Explore The Curves Collective, a small-circle coaching experience for intuitive, creative women ready to live from rested well-being and radical self-trust.
https://drlindapettit.com/thecurvescollective/