Sylvia Lane: Education Key to Success

Sylvia Lane can remember standing on her porch in Georgia as a little girl and sensing that her grandmother Julia was dead. Later that day, her parents told her it was so.

“I have always been interested in spiritual phenomena,” said Lane, 50, who has a doctorate in psychology. “Later, as I began to study spiritual disciplines, I realized a lot of experiences I had as a child made sense.”

Today, Lane is transpersonal psychologist and with a 13-year-old private practice in Laguna Hills. Unlike more traditional therapists, the transpersonal psychologist thinks of the personality as limitless in nature and avoids the use of labels, she said.

“I think of it as untapped human potential,” Lane said. “I don’t like putting people into boxes by locking them into diagnostic categories.” Rather, she said, “I help people know that they have within them whatever they choose to be.”

People will heal themselves, Lane said, if the proper environment is created for growth.

Lane had such an environment when growing up. Born to two black educators who stressed education and mentorship as keys to overcome racial discrimination, she said she received constant support and caring.

“They very carefully sought to shield me and my two older sisters from much of the devastating effects of racism,” she said. “Choosing a small town with a black college was part of that.”

Her family didn’t buy a television until she was in her teens because of the way blacks were portrayed. And she was not allowed to go to movies, where blacks sat apart from whites, because it would be “paying to be segregated,” she said.

Instead, Lane was taken to see black musicians and black theater. She also was given music and dance lessons and wrote poetry, an art she still pursues today.

“There was a contrived sense of safety that I experienced in my youth,” she said. “I was in a state of shock for a while when I entered the world of the inner city and discovered that life for most black children had been very different.”

When Lane went to college in Virginia, the civil rights movement was just starting. She demonstrated at lunch counters and was threatened by whites with pipes and chains, she said.

From there she went to graduate school in Atlanta, where she heard Martin Luther King preach on Sundays, an experience that helped teach her the concept of unconditional love, about changing people’s behavior rather than hating them, she said.

Lane’s clients, she said, represent all races. “There isn’t really a lot of color in emotional problems,” she said. “If you grew up in an alcoholic family, you have the same problems if you are white or green.

“When you work from the inside out, the outside loses significance. When people are at peace within, how they are on the outside will not be the deciding factor in what happens in their life.”