Hi, I’m Dr. Michael Craig. When I was a young teenager, I was re-introduced to a man who would shape the rest of my life, and I didn’t even realize it at the time.
His name was Jack Stiles. He was a Black friend of my father’s who was hired to install an electrical outlet in our home for a window air conditioner. I was asked to help because Jack was paraplegic and pulled himself around the floor while I handed him tools, wires, plugs, and connectors. He told me we’d actually met when I was too young to remember him, and he called me “Bubba,” an affectionate name shared in the Black community in Savannah, Georgia.
Jack also had a way of listening that I’ve never encountered in anyone else, before or since. After that day, I started visiting his home on a regular basis. He would often be in his bed, surrounded by books and a few keepsakes from his college days. He was well educated, built his home by himself before he was, in his own words, “stricken” with polio, and mostly asked a lot of questions. “I want to learn,” he said.
Jack was a widower and lived alone, but his family was on the premises, brought him food, and helped with daily chores. I often helped with a few chores myself in exchange for being able to pour out all my teenage angst, and pretend “wisdom.” I shared with him every drama a young man could possibly have: heartbreaks, ambitions, fears, and half-baked ideas about who I wanted to become. Jack never once argued, judged, or tried to fix me. He mostly just listened. Fully. Patiently. As if my concerns actually mattered.
“Most people don’t need to be fixed. They need to be heard.”
Since I could never talk openly with my father, Jack became my substitute father. He even said my dad would sometimes call him up to ask what was going on with me, but Jack reportedly just told him I was okay, and not to worry.
That kind of attention changes a person. It taught me, long before I ever started on the road to healing, that most people don’t need to be fixed. They need to be heard. In the coming years, I moved away from Savannah to pursue college, travel, and a chiropractic education, but never forgot my dear friend. I would call often, just to share my experiences, and ask how he was doing.
In 2004, when Jack turned 90 years old, I decided to drive from Atlanta to Savannah before dawn to bring him breakfast and celebrate his new year. We mostly just talked, laughed, and discussed philosophy, meditation, history, Ray Charles, and the state of worldly affairs, then I’d make the long trip back home. This soon became an annual tradition for me. Every January 14th I made that same drive, and we spent the day talking, mostly about stuff that evoked memories, happiness and an inner sense that time was standing still.
“Bubba, I’ve got no urgencies,” he would often tell me. His mind remained sharp and his awareness ran deep. In 2008, Jack passed away quietly at age 94. In the years since, while I no longer make that trip to Savannah, the memory of those earlier visits and of a man at peace with himself never left me.
Jack Stiles taught me early in life that real healing, the kind that actually lasts, starts with being truly heard, and with finding stillness inside yourself that no circumstance can take away. Everything I later built into the Logical Soul® method, every technique for instant self-discovery and inner guidance, traces back to lessons I first learned sitting and eating Hardee’s egg biscuits with him.
This method exists because Jack first listened to me.