Maybe the Geico Piggy Got It Right

One of the popular TV advertisements these days stirs up both irritation and intrigue inside me every time it plays.  It's the Geico Insurance commercial with the little piggy squealing with delight "Wee, Wee, Wee" all the way home as it rides in the car with its head out the window.  It's obviously having the time of its life and loving every minute of the ride home, much to the irritation of the woman and her son. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F_G2zp-opg]

The sound of the high-pitched squealing irritates me.  The concept and message, at the same time, intrigue me.  Though it's advertising an insurance company (most of whose commercials are very lame to me), the attitude being graphically displayed is quite powerful the more I watch it.  The pig is experiencing absolute delight in something most of us would consider terribly mundane - riding in the car on the way home.

That pig's attitude and experience stand out to me this Thanksgiving Season.  It's amazing how an attitude of delight in the simple things impacts one's experience.  Some people call it an Attitude of Gratitude.  And the more the experts study this simple attitude, the more profound they discover the results of stepping into it truly are.

My wife Shasta forwarded me one of her blogger friend's posts today because it was on this issue of gratitude.  In the post, author Rachel Bertsche quotes from this morning's Wall Street Journal that references the latest scientific research:  “Adults who frequently feel grateful have more energy, more optimism, more social connections and more happiness than those who do not, according to studies conducted over the past decade. They’re also less likely to be depressed, envious, greedy, or alcoholics. They earn more money, sleep more soundly, exercise more regularly and have greater resistance to viral infections.” (“Thank You. No, Thank You,” Wall Street Journal, 11/23/2010)

Imagine that!  Who among us wouldn't want more energy, optimism, social connections, and happiness?  Who among us wouldn't want less depression, envy, greed, or addiction?  Who among us wouldn't want more money, restful sleep, exercise, and greater disease resistance?  Hard to pass on those effects!  And think of it - all from simply stepping into gratitude.

I've read study after study, and research experiment after research experiment, on the impact of gratitude, and they all offer the same conclusions:  people who find specific, tangible ways to delight in their lives, to express gratitude for what they already have, are at least 25% happier and experience a much higher degree of personal and relational well-being than those who don't practice gratitude.

Knowing all of this has prompted my wife Shasta and me to adopt the very simple practice every morning at the end of our spiritual devotion time.  We both have iPhone apps called Gratitude! So we open it up, spend the next few minutes writing at least 5-6 things we're grateful for, and then share our lists with each other.  I've been in awe of the inspiration as well as sense of well-being this activity has given to both of us.  [Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology and leading researcher on the dynamics of happiness, has discovered that the most effective tool for raising personal happiness and well being is the gratitude journal.  And one of the powers of it is that it is so simple and easy to do.  You can do it any time, any where.]

This morning Shasta and I were sharing our lists and I mentioned one of my items:  "I'm grateful for the fun ride on the shopping cart with Shas down the long ramp at Costco."  The moment I read it, we both broke out laughing hilariously with the memory of that experience yesterday (it's actually our very regular practice whenever we finish our shopping at Costco - the ramp down to the parking lot rocks, much to the dismay at times of some of the boring customers slowly walking their carts!).  Our endorphins and dopamine were literally bubbling through our systems as we laughed in memory. :)

There is power in gratitude and in the ability to find delight in the simple things.  Don't you think?  So what gratitude list will you come up with this Thanksgiving?  Why not even make it a regular spiritual practice?  After all, a few extra endorphins and dopamine hormones squealing "Wee, Wee, Wee," all the way home through your system can't hurt!  If little piggy can do it for Geico, maybe you and I can do it for ourselves, too!

Happy Thanksgiving!  I'm very grateful for each of you who continue letting me into your computers and hopefully hearts. :)

Extending Tax Cuts For the Rich, On One Condition

I have a feeling that I'm not the only one who's so glad the election season is over!  Wow!  What an ugly process this time around - as some politicians and news commentators said, this is the nastiest campaign season they've seen in decades.  How sad that the very people who are suppose to put their own interests aside in order to hear and represent the people instead consider only their own party politics regardless of what's best for the constituents. One of the big questions among partisan lawmakers and politicians now is, should we let the Bush-era tax cuts die out at the end of 2010 or should we renew them, especially for the middle class?  If the tax cuts are continued, the big political debate is whether the tax cuts for the rich should be ended or continued.  I say, let the rich keep their tax cuts but on one condition.  Here it is.

A heartwarming story was reported in the New York Times last Sunday, "Kindness of a Stranger That Still Resonates." It seems that a suitcase full of letters was delivered in 2008 to a man named Ted Gup, who is an investigative journalist formerly with The Washington Post.  The letters were all addressed to a Mr. B. Virdot.  The letters were all Thank You's to B. Virdot for money given to the letter-writers.  Apparently, an advertisement appeared Dec. 17, 1933 (during the height of the Great Depression), in The Canton Repository newspaper. "A donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers’ identities secret 'until the very end.'"  And the secret donor, it turns out, was Ted Gup's grandfather, Samuel Stone of Canton, Ohio, who had himself escaped poverty and persecution as a Jew in Romania to build a successful chain of clothing stores in the United States.

Ted Gup read through the 150 letters in that suitcase, tears streaming down his face from the poignant expressions of gratitude from these desperate people and families during such a desperate time in history, a time very much reflected in today's economic disasters for so many.  He was so moved he decided to write a book about these letters called "A Secret Gift."  And last week, 400 people gathered in the famed 84-year-old Palace Theater in Canton, Ohio, at a reunion for families of B. Virdot’s recipients planned by Ted Gup.

Helen Palm, 90 years old, the only living recipient of those anonymous checks, sat in her wheelchair on the stage of the Palace Theater and read her letter for help, the one she wrote 77 years ago in the depths of the Great Depression to an anonymous stranger who called himself B. Virdot.  “I am writing this because I need clothing ... And sometimes we run out of food.”

It was a profound and powerful evening for all those who attended and for the rest of the city who heard the story.  Honoring the memory of a man who during desperate times chose to give from his wealth to those who were fighting to survive.

"For the older people [that evening], it was a chance to remember the hard times. For relatives of the letter writers, it was a time to hear how the small gifts, in the bleakest winter of the Depression, meant more than money. They buoyed the spirits of an entire city that is beginning to lose hope."

So I say, let the tax cuts for the wealthy in this country be extended ... on one condition:  that every one of those in the upper tax brackets do what Samuel Stone did and give from their wealth to those who are struggling to survive in our cities all over this country.  B. Virdot lived out a model for generosity that could sure be used these days!

The growing divide in this country between the rich and the poor, along with the diminishing ranks of those in the middle, is at an all time high.  In a sobering column last Saturday called "Our Banana Republic," Nicholas Kristoff stated that "The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.  The United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.  C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent."

This is a tragic state of reality!  If there's ever a time we need the moral courage and determination of B. Virdot it's in these desperate times.  Imagine what could happen if this 1 per cent in our country followed Samuel Stone's model of generosity.  It might actually inspire the rest of us to follow suit.  And then imagine where we could be in this depressed and hope-chasing economy.  How many anonymous checks or gift cards or cash gifts could be given away in every city in America out of the wealth that still exists in this country?  How many people - men, women, and children - could be given hope and love for this upcoming Holiday Season?

This value of the "haves" giving to the "have-nots" is a part of the core message of every enduring spiritual tradition.  Here are some representative admonitions:

From the Jewish Scriptures:  "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God."  (Leviticus 19:9-10)

From the Muslim Scriptures: "Let not those among you who are endued with grace and amplitude of means resolve by oath against helping their kinsmen, those in want, and those who have left their homes in Allah's cause."  (Qur'an 24:22)

From the Christian Scriptures: "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead."  (James 2:14-17)

All sacred scriptures connect spirituality with how personal wealth is used.

Now I obviously realize that the Government can't do something like extend tax cuts to some people with conditions that they give to the needy.  But I have to admit it's getting wearisome hearing the endless debate over our economy with the primary determining issue being, "What's in it for me?"  I too want to have enough to live on.  I too want meaningful work and employment with commensurate remuneration.  I want to be paid what I'm worth.  I too want to survive in this difficult recession.  But believe me, most of us have more than we think.  Experts remind us, for example, that if we have the luxury right now of reading this blog in the format we're reading it in (e.g. computer, internet, hard copy even), we're in the top 5% of the world's wealthiest population.

As all the enduring spiritual traditions remind us, we are being called to rise to a higher level of life value than personal survival.  We are being called to be willing to think of others beyond simply thinking of ourselves.  We are being challenged to give of what we do have to help those who have less.

I don't know the extent of B. Virdot's (Samuel Stone) personal weath in the 1930s from his successful chain of clothing stores.  But I do know that what he did during those years for the 150 needy families in Canton, Ohio obviously reverberated down through the succeeding generations into the current climate of devastation from today's recession in that same city.  When the 400 people gathered in the old Palace Theatre several weeks ago to honor B. Virdot and his acts of kindness, they all talked about how Mr. Stone’s example of generosity resonates today.

“I think there’s a message here that people in Canton know how to get through the hard times by pulling together,” Mr. Gup said.

Days before Christmas 1933, with Mr. Stone’s gift in hand, Edith May took her 4-year-old daughter Felice to a five-and-dime store and bought her a wooden horse.  Seventy-seven years later, Felice May Dunn owns two farms and 17 Welsh ponies.  “In my life it made a big difference,” Ms. Dunn, 80, recalled. “It was my favorite toy.”

I wonder how that wooden horse gift has impacted her response to life these days?

Four Steps To Turning Your Hope Into Reality

"Christina's World" Andrew Wyeth (who died in January 2009 at 91 years of age) was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century, and was sometimes referred to as the "Painter of the People," because of his work's popularity with the American public.  He learned art at an early age from his father, who inspired his love of rural lan

dscapes, sense of romance, and a feeling for Wyeth family history and artistic traditions.

In October 1945, his father and his three-year-old nephew were killed when their car stalled on railroad tracks near their home and was struck by a train. Wyeth referred to his father's death as a profound personal tragedy and a formative emotional event in his artistic career.  Shortly afterward, his art began to be characterized by a subdued color palette, realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged, symbolic objects and people.

One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his 1948 painting, “Christina's World,” currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The woman of the painting is his neighbor Christina Olson who was 55 at the time of this painting. She had an undiagnosed muscular deterioration that paralyzed her lower body. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when through a window from within the house he saw her crawling across a field.

He described her as being "limited physically but by no means spiritually." Wyeth further explained, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless."

"In the portraits of that house, the windows are eyes or pieces of the soul, almost," he said years later. "To me, each window is a different part of Christina's life."

So the painting depicts Christina’s journey of hope to get back to her house, the windows to her soul – the journey to reconnect with her true self in the midst of her disabilities, to hang on to the hope that she can fulfill her true soul’s purpose no matter what obstacles she faces.

The Power of Hope

Experts tell us that hope is one of the most powerful emotional attributes in helping us move our lives toward where we truly want to be.  Without hope, we die.  As author Brennan Manning wrote, there are three ways to commit suicide:  take our own lives, let ourselves die, and live without hope.  In those terms, consider how many people there are among us who are in reality committing suicide - they're letting themselves live without hope.  Perhaps they're afraid of hoping (for fear of getting disappointed).  Perhaps they don't even know what to hope for.  Perhaps they don't think they're worthy of anything good to base their hopes on.  In any case, they're taking their own lives by living without hope.

Hope is an optimism that believes something is possible, even when the reality we see appears to contradict the possibility.  Hope not only refuses to let go of the possibility, it chooses to take action to turn possibility into reality.

So how does this work in real life?  Think of people like former South African President Nelson Mandella and world-class athlete-cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong.  They represent countless everyday people who have done the same thing:  rather than wait for their fears to disappear or for facts to back up their hope, they used hope to create new facts and reach their goals.

Here's what Lance Armstrong once said:  "If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from the.  When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope?  We have two options, medically and emotionally:  Give up, for fight like hell."

The power of hope is in its ability to help us create new facts about our possibilities - to chart new directions, to establish new behaviors, to take bold action in the face of odds and obstacles.  That's what successful people do.

Dr. Srinivasan Pillay, Harvard neuroscientist and psychiatrist, describes the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.  The study of successful people reveals that they “rely less on existing facts about any given situation to get what they want.  Instead, they recognize the challenges, and rather than giving in to the relative impossibility of achieving their goals, they seek out routes that will allow them to achieve them.  In other words, successful people do not lead statistically sensible lives.  Rather than asking questions based on what is probable, successful people train their brains to focus on what is needed to accomplish the less likely of two options.”  (Pillay, Life Unlocked, pp. 49-50)

How Hope Works the Brain - the Four Steps to Creating Your Reality

And the power of this Hope Approach is that it actually taps into and leverages the way the brain has been wired to work.  “When the brain thinks that something is possible, it will stretch out the route for achieving it.  It will chart a path toward your goal that is radically different from the course it would chart without hope.  We call these motor maps and they are action plans based on information that we give the brain.  They are highly dependent on what we imagine.  If we remain fearful, fear will disrupt our imagination.  If we focus on our goals instead of on our fear, the brain can use what we imagine as a guide for sketching out motor maps.  This imagining is tied so closely to doing that expert athletes can literally make improvements in their performance by first imagining them and then practicing them.  We call this motor imagery (or imagery of action), and it precedes actual movement or action.  So, if you want to make a change in your life, first imagine yourself making that change so your brain can determine the route that will take you to your goal.  Hope is necessary for action.”  (Pillay, p. 51)

So what’s the process of using hope to create your new reality?

1. Start with hope – believing that something is possible
2. Then imagine yourself doing it (motor imagery)
3. And your brain creates motor maps – action plans – to help your whole body mobilize into action
4. Then ACT on those plans.

And the good news is that it’s a self-reinforcing cycle.  If we continue to take those steps, it becomes a self-perpetuating process and creates its own momentum.  Jim Collins, in his best-selling book Good To Great, calls it the flywheel principle.  With every simple turn of the wheel, it begins to pick up speed.  Every turn creates more turn, until it finally has its own momentum.  Our part is to keep turning the wheel - to keep doing the simple actions, keep taking the small steps that move us forward.  The flywheel reminds us that our actions will ultimately generate a sustainable momentum.

Keep affirming your hope - keep imaging yourself doing what you're hoping for - and then keep stepping into the actions your brain creates to bring your imagination into reality - keep acting - and then keep on repeating those steps.

I'm a firm believer in this process, having seen the reality of it take place again and again for myself.  Hope generates belief, which generates vision, which generates action, which generates reality.  As long as I keep turning the flywheel, momentum keeps building.  Don't stop turning the flywheel, don't stop hoping and acting!

Christina's World, Your World

Go back to Andrew Wyeth's painting.  Notice Christina's body language.  She's paralyzed from her waist down.  She can only get around by crawling.  There's a cross wind blowing - notice the strands of hair on her head.  Her arms have an emaciated thinness.  What's more, she's off the beaten path.  See that?  In the middle of a barren field.  And her house stands on the top of a hill that for a paraplegic must seem starkly unattainable.

And yet what is her body language?  Does it describe defeat?  Hopelessness?  Resignation?  No, she's leaning forward, toward her home, what Andrew Wyeth describes as her soul, her true self.  She hasn't given up.  She's focusing her life on where she truly wants to go.  She's about to mobilize all of her strength to move up the hill and get home.  One crawl forward at a time.  Putting one arm ahead of the other, pulling her lifeless legs behind.  One crawl at a time.

Now that's courage.  That's the power of hope.

So what do you find yourself afraid of?  What feels hopeless to you at times?  What do you tend to despair about?  What are the obstacles you face that stand in the way of your dreams?

What does stepping into hope look like for you?  What is the new reality you want to imagine?  How can you affirm that vision to yourself and others again and again?  Are you willing?  Are you willing to take action, to create new facts and act on them in ways that move you forward?  And are you willing to keep hoping, keep imagining, and keep acting, refusing to stop turning the flywheel?

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A Simple Tool for Confident Living in the Age of Anxiety

The Scream Edvard Munch, who lived from 1863 –1944, was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art.  His best-known composition (painted in 1893) is "The Scream" which has become one of the most recognizable paintings in all art.

It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man.  With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of “the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self."  Munch wrote of how the painting came to be:

“I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood.  I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired.  Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord.  My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear.  Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.”

In the Norwegian language, the word he used for scream literally is "shriek."  Imagine the existential angst he was feeling to use that word.  He later described the personal anguish behind the painting:  “For several years I was almost mad…You know my picture, ‘The Scream?’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”

Considering his childhood, that despair makes sense.  He grew up with a cold, angry and foreboding father who was a fundamentalist Christian who used God as a punishing and revengeful authority.  Little Munch was always being threatened by violent punishment for his forays into creativity, imagination, and play.  So even as an adult, Munch felt alone, isolated, and incapable of being loved.  He lived with the constant fear of rejection.

The Age of Anxiety

This painting is more contemporary to today than ever before.  Psychologists and sociologists are calling this new millennium the age of Anxiety.  Fear, they’re saying, is the defining emotion of our time. Think back on this initial decade.  First, there was the Y2K hysteria, which portended widespread computer failures and a massive breakdown in public services.  Next, uncertainty gripped the nation as we awaited the results of the disputed presidential election.  This was followed by the start of the stock market's protracted crash as well as a surge in unemployment.  Then came the California energy shortage in which the world's fifth largest economy and the most populous state in the country experienced the kind of rolling blackouts typically associated with developing countries.

Finally, there was the tragedy of September 11th, the anthrax scare, and a steady stream of government warnings that we are no longer safe. In the midst of this turmoil, major U.S. corporations such as Enron and WorldCom collapsed because of corporate malfeasance by executives and accounting firms, and tens of thousands of people lost their retirement savings. Now there is the threat of bioterrorism, the possibility of successive wars, and growing multinational, multigenerational hatred of the United States and of Americans.  And we’re in what is unarguably the worst recession since the Great Depression – everything is uncertain, including who to trust as a friend.  Fundamentalism in religion increasingly creates enemies and terrorism of all kinds.

In the midst of this environment, in my work as a coach and pastor, I hear stories often of people wanting to move in one direction for their lives but instead finding themselves moving in another; people who claim to be trying, but repeatedly finding themselves failing; people who are bored and stuck yet unable to make the changes they know they want to make and to make those changes sustainable.

Which raises significant questions.  If we know what we want (for the most part), why are we unable to act on it?  Why are we unable to follow the directions given by our conscious minds and reach our goals unimpeded?  And when we do try to do the right things, why are we often unsuccessful?

For so many people, this is a source of much heartache.  Whether it’s a tortured relationship or a difficult job situation, we often feel regretful after we realize we’ve made the wrong choice.  Why do we continue to make these choices, and what steers us toward them in the first place?

The Science of Fear

Experts call this the “rip current of human nature.”  A rip current is the very powerful surface flow of water that is returning to the sea from close to the shore.  It can turn an eerily calm-looking body of water into something extremely dangerous that has the power to drag swimmers out to sea.  Many people who get caught in rip currents eventually drown from sheer exhaustion of trying to swim against the current.

Say the experts, the unconscious is the rip current of the human mind.  From a distance, it’s calm, barely noticeable, and difficult to anticipate.  And at its core lies the threatening force of fear.  Much like a rip current is helpful to surfers who rely on its force to pull them away from the shore, fear may be helpful if it urges you forward toward your goal.  But like the unpredictable rip current, fear can also drag you away from your goals and destinations.

Significantly, our brains are wired to default to fear.  It's the survival mechanism in play - the need to instinctively and instantly respond to a threat or danger to our system to protect our species.  The brain picks up on a threat (via our senses through the thalamus) and sends an immediate signal to the amygdala, the part of the brain called the "guard dog."  When that amygdala switch is flipped, it instantly sends a signal to the hypothalamus which engages the whole body's fight or flight systems (the heart starts pumping faster, cortisol increases, the eyes dilate, the muscles contract, breathing rates increase) - everything is mobilized instantaneously for engagement to protect itself.

Research is now showing that most of this process is actually taking place beyond our consciousness.  Our brain picks up external inputs (like even a fearful expression on someone's face, even as seemingly insignificant as eyes that show more white than normal - the posture of fear) and interprets it as a potential threat - and the fear response kicks in.  The brain needs as little as 10 - 30 milliseconds of exposure to flip the fear switch (far beyond our level of consciousness).

Which means, as experts are now realizing, that many of us are living in an almost constant physiological and emotional state of anxiety (much of it not even in the scope of our awareness).  Falling asleep with the TV on, for example, impacts our brains response, and the amygdala still sends its fear signals picked up from the drama taking place on the screen that impact bodily response, even though we're "sound" asleep.

Imagine all the fearful input we're receiving every day - the news, people's reactions, TV, movies, music, dangerous sounds all around us.  But then add on top of all that our own thoughts - the perceived "threats" we insist are coming our way from others, even those close to us - our almost automatic assessment that other people are not liking us or are displeased with us or think we're stupid, dumb, or you-name-it.  Even though we might be making faulty assumptions, our brains still interpret these signals as "danger," kicking into gear the fear response via our highly trained and instinctually-wired amygdala.

So for one thing, we should do more monitoring of how much fearful and anxiety-producing input we're allowing into our brains.  Do we tend to listen to people who use fear motivation (e.g. so much of politics and religion these days)?

But in addition, the problem is that not all input is in reality something to be feared.  We make faulty assumptions all the time.  And unless we intentionally refuse to flip the amygdala switch, our systems go straight to fear mode.  And we end up living in high stress, unnecessarily.  No wonder so many of us feel drained and exhausted.  No wonder we so often find ourselves sabotaging our success or desires to move forward effectively with our dreams and goals.  We're flipping the wrong switches in our brains.  We're not living intentionally enough and instead are letting our default instincts control us.

A Simple Tool to Moving Ourselves Forward

Dr. Pillay, Harvard neuroscientist and psychiatrist, encourages a rather simple strategy to help us overcome this fear tendency.  It's not by any means the only strategy but it is effective.  Here's the way he puts it:

"Sometimes it helps to take a lighthearted look at what we're feeling.  Life is short.  Experiences do come and go.  And our brains, because their fast, unconscious responses are like barking dogs, are not always barking or frenzied for an actual reason.  If we take every physiological sensation and narrative seriously, then we are assuming a certain conscious responsibility that is entirely outside of awareness.  So if you are afraid, you might be able to calm yourself by asking yourself, 'Now what is my brain up to?'  It helps to give yourself this feedback because it can stop the vicious cycle of 'Oh my God ...' that then leads to a greater sense of catastrophe."  Dr. Srinivasan Pillay, Life Unlocked, p. 44.

This simple stopping and phrase-speaking is enough to delay the amygdala's instinctive fear response.  The interruption is just long enough and strategic enough to allow the secondary brain signaling system to be fully engaged.  Upon sensory input, the thalamus sends the signal to the cortex (the more advanced outer layer of brain cell connections that are involved in evaluating and processing the signal).  Because the cortex takes longer to process the visual information, its assessment is more accurate than the amygdala's.  When you see a coiled rope, for example, out of the corner of your eye (or perhaps aren't even realizing it), the amygdala would automatically assume it's a coiled snake and kick into gear your fight or flight response.  But when your cortex is allowed evaluation, it assesses that the object is in fact a coiled rope (not snake), and it calms down the amygdala and turns off the body's fear response.

For this reason, it's important for us to often take the time to ask ourselves about the fear we're feeling (unless of course we're being chased by a mugger, in which case we're better off letting our bodies react instinctively and instantly into the fear mode).  Is this is a legitimate threat to our system?  What is the nature of this fear?  Is it simply my self-defeating feelings and self-thoughts that I've accumulated and chosen to hang on to through the years?  Is it worth allowing to control my entire system?  Is there any truth to this fear?  And even if there is, is it necessary for me to cave in to it?  Am I allowing this fear to flip the amygdala switch too automatically instead of sending it on the cortex where it can be accurately evaluated and I can develop a more proactive response?

"Now what is my brain up to?" instead of "Oh my God ....!"

"Knowing that fear can turn on your amygdala without your conscious knowledge may help you feel more certain about the need to develop new neuronal connections" by using tools like this simple one.  "If you are feeling limited in your life in any way, examine your life through the lens of 'Am I afraid?' even if you don't feel afraid" (Dr. Pillay, p. 45).  Our instincts are wonderful - we're wired to protect ourselves from real danger and threat.  But our instincts can also lead us astray if they're not based on reality or if they're not helping us go where we truly want to go.  We can take control of them.  It's nice to have the choice!

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Transformational Spirituality Pays Attention to Walls

Gordon MacDonald, author and speaker on spirituality, tells about one Christmas vacation when their son Mark flew home from college and greeted his parents with an unexpected gift – a cute little ferret named Bandit.  Unexpected, for sure.  And not exactly a gift they were hoping for. But in the following weeks, the cute little furry animal worked its way into their hearts – Bandit was cuddly, fun, funny.  They enjoyed him.

But enjoyment stopped after about four months.  Bandit began to grow up, and they started learning the hard way that adult ferrets can become nasty – they bite, they exert independence by neglecting simple hygiene producing a stinky house – it all overwhelmed their delicate senses.

Gordon and his wife Gail soon lost all affection for this Christmas gift critter.  Which led them to begin considering how they could get “rid” of Bandit.  The idea finally emerged:  Why don’t we take Bandit up to our cabin in the woods and give him his freedom.  After all, the acres of forest and woods will be perfect for him to live and roam and enjoy!  Nothing there will be bothered by his smelly habits!

Gail said she’d feel more comfortable if she could first go and talk to the pet store people to see what they thought.  Later that day, she came home and told Gordon:  “The pet store people explained that we shouldn’t release a tamed ferret (or any tamed animal for that matter) in the woods.  It would be dead within twenty-four hours because it wouldn’t know how to find its own food and it wouldn’t know who its enemies are or how to defend itself again them.”

The irony of the situation struck them both.  By taming this ferret, by taking it out of the real world and teaching it to live in the safety and seclusion of their nice home, they had destroyed its ability to live where it had been born to inhabit.  It could never be a free ferret.

Is it possible we do the same thing with our faith and our spirituality?  By trying to forge faith and spirituality within the exclusive confines of a personal, small, safe, isolated, and secluded world, we create a faith that doesn’t work in the real world – a limited faith and spirituality – a potentially timid, narrow, insecure, ineffective, unliberated spirituality.

I love the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it.  Bonhoeffer was the Protestant pastor in Germany during WWII who became convicted that he should preach and write against Hitler and the genocidal Nazi regime.  He boldly broke ranks with many Christian leaders of that time who were either silent or supportive of Nazism.  He ended up being arrested and jailed and then finally executed by Hitler just as the Allied Forces struck the final blow of liberation in Europe.  Here’s what he wrote:

“It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith … By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.”

Effective spirituality, transformational spirituality, has to be forged and lived in the real world.  It has to work and make sense and produce positive effect in the WHOLE world, not just our safe, small worlds.

So in my spiritual community Second Wind, we’ve had a series during September called “APPLYING YOUR SPIRITUALITY TO THIS WEEK’S GLOCAL HOT SPOT."  Our goal is to inform our spirituality by means of seeing the rest of the world beyond our individual lives.  So each week, we focused in on a current issue taking place in the world (*GLOCAL = think global + act local).  What is the “crisis/need/situation” – what are the issues involved – who are the people involved – how is the situation being currently handled – how are we impacted?  And how does this situation inform and shape our spirituality?  What kind of spirituality does it take to work in this situation?

The whole attempt is to inform our spirituality and faith with the real world, opening ourselves up to a bigger picture than we would typically allow for ourselves.

This last Saturday we looked at the current plight of the Roma, Europe's largest minority group that originally migrated from Northwestern India back in the 11th century.  They traditionally held slave-type positions among the aristocracy and monasteries of Central and Western Europe.  And now they find themselves spread out all over the continent and beyond, often living in camps under squalid and marginalized conditions from the rest of society, barely able to eke out subsistence to stay alive and provide for themselves.  Last year, Amnesty International described current realities:  "The Roma community suffers massive discrimination throughout Europe. Denied their rights to housing, employment, health care and education, Roma are often victims of forced evictions, racist attacks and police ill-treatment."

The Roma have especially been in the news the last few months as France's President Nicolas Sarkozy moved to expel over 1,000 Roma from his country back to Romania and Bulgaria, creating quite a firestorm of controversy among the nations of the European Union.  It's forcing leaders to address this significant humanitarian crisis within their borders.

So how does our spirituality and faith inform our response to this contemporary situation?  How does this significant human need shape and inform our spirituality and faith?

Timothy Egan, in The New York Times last week said it well:  “Perhaps the best way to judge the health of a nation’s heart is by how it treats the shunned.”

He's certainly echoing the sentiments of historic sacred scriptures.  Jesus himself put it this way:  "If you've shown compassion to one of the least of these, you've shown it to me."

In other words, a Christlike heart (a healthy heart) manifests Christlike compassion, especially to the shunned and marginalized of our world (in Jesus' statement of what the final judgment is about, he refers to acts of compassion to the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, and prisoner).  And the amazing thing about Jesus' statement - that reveals how important this issue is to Jesus and the values of God's Kingdom - is that when we show compassion to those in need, we are in reality showing compassion to Jesus - Jesus incarnates himself within the "shunned" person so that we're actually encountering and relating to Jesus himself.  And in the End, says Jesus, we are judged by our response to these people (and therefore to him).  Quite a different paradigm from the picture of Judgment so many religious groups paint of the End, where we're judged by what we believe, by our subscription to the doctrines of those religions and how closely we align with them.

Transformational spirituality is informed by a global view of the world, not just our narrow individual every day worlds.  Transformational spirituality, the kind that really works and makes a difference, chooses to actively engage with the "least of these," refusing to ignore the shunned, the strangers among us, the aliens and foreigners, the dispossessed, the refugees and immigrants, the sexual "other," all of those people groups who are too often labeled and judged as "less than" or wrong or unworthy for whatever reason.

This is a raw and honest kind of spirituality that refuses the easy way out, that allows itself to be confronted by those most unlike us, that chooses to look beyond the surface and in fact discover that we are one family under God, interconnected, interdependent, and intertwined in the life of this planet.  How we navigate this complex, complicated, and yet very human journey is how we are ultimately judged, says Jesus.  Sobering and yet exciting and brimming with possibility!

I'm reminded of Robert Frost's profound poem Mending Wall.  He pictures himself and his neighbor walking along the stone fence that separates their two properties, talking together about the purpose of the wall, the sections that need mending and how.  His neighbor's view is that "good fences make good neighbors."  He, however, doesn't see it that way.

"There where it is we do not need the wall: / He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. / He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head: / 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it / Where there are cows? / But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down.'"

Transformational spirituality is about taking down walls where there shouldn't be any.  It's about refusing to shut ourselves out from the "shunned."  It's about engaging the world of hurt, human suffering and pain.  It's about not allowing our sight to become mono-focused and narrow to our own little worlds.  It's about compassion for "the least of these."

Rarely easy to do.  I admit.  But, as Timothy Egan reminds us, it reveals the true health of our hearts.  And who among us doesn't want a healthy heart!

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Three Ways To De-Clutter Your Life

I came across a news story from Las Vegas, Nevada several weeks ago that was quite stunning and sobering.  As husband Bill James told authorities this last month, he woke up from a nap back in April and couldn't find his wife anywhere.  He assumed that she had wandered away. She had recently had a mini-stroke that left her disoriented, and he worried that she had suffered another.  So authorities launched a massive hunt for the woman, using sniffer dogs and even helicopters equipped with infrared to search the desert.  Husband Bill even set up a Facebook page to promote the search and offered a $10,000 reward. According to the report, four months later, on August 28 the search came to a terrifying macabre ending when the husband spotted her feet sticking out from the pile of junk that filled the room in their house from floor to ceiling.  She had been buried beneath a mountain of garbage and clutter in her own home.   The collected clothes, trash and knicknacks in this woman's house was so extensive that the police sniffer dogs had searched the home without finding her corpse.

"For our dogs to go through that house and not find something should be indicative of the tremendous environmental challenges they faced," police spokesman Bill Cassell said.

Apparently, according to family friends, Billie Jean was a compulsive hoarder, with a passion for shopping for trinkets and clothes. One friend said that Billie Jean referred to the room where she was found as "her rabbit hole."  Sari Connolly, a friend of' Billie Jean's, said she had become so obsessive in her hoarding that she kept people out of her home, even refusing to let them use the bathroom.  The police spokeman told the Associated Press that the house had only small amounts of clear space so that people could get around, and that the home was filled with strong odors from animals, garbage and food.  So who would think that her body would be decomposing right in her own home, a victim of her cluttered life.

Apparently, this isn't the first time this kind of terrifying story has taken place.  This last May, an aging Chicago couple was trapped for two weeks after being buried in their belongings. When they were rescued, they were found to have rat bites on their bodies.  In 1947, police found a body inside a Manhattan row house. Brothers Homer and Langley Collyer had filled the house with possessions, including a Model T chassis, 14 pianos and more than 25,000 books.  Both brothers were found dead among the clutter.

Imagine dying underneath your own clutter - losing your life in every possible way, even before physical extinction.

I'm reminded how important it is to regularly evaluate our lives and de-clutter when necessary.  Have you ever considered what kind of "clutter" you might have in your life, "junk" you might be hanging on to that is in reality extinguishing your life little by little?

Emotional Clutter

Perhaps it's emotional clutter.  Resentment.  Guilt.  Shame.  Insecurity.  Anxiety.  Lack of confidence.  Sense of failure.  Anger.  Addiction to conflict.  The more I go through my own personal journey, and the more I work with people, the more I realize how easy it is for us to hang on to this clutter - to simply let ourselves live with these feelings or self-defeating thoughts and beliefs - to refuse to do the hard work of processing these emotions and resolving them in effective ways.

An assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, who commented on Billie Jean's tragic story, observed that people often hoard because they find it impossible to make decisions, organize themselves or focus on immediate tasks.  In other words, they have the inability or lack of internal strength to address the current chaos in their lives.  And ironically, all the things they end up accumulating provide a twisted kind of comfort while they're being gradually smothered to death by them.

By hanging on to our emotional clutter, we become "slaves" to our automatic reflexes, those brain functions involving conditioned feelings and thoughts (most of which, according to experts, revolve around fear, our instinctual response to perceived danger, our ego's sense of threat). And we all know that often our instinctual fear reactions are not based on reality - they're only ego survival tactics.  Often when we choose to face our emotional fear, we end up discovering that there wasn't any basis to that fear or that we had the necessary strength to push through that fear-producing experience into the light of emotional freedom.

But many of us live our lives on auto-pilot, allowing these emotional clutterings to control us and corral us in self-defeating ways.  And unless we de-clutter, we end up losing life bit by bit, suffocating under the load of our junk.  And unfortunately, the gradual decomposition of our own lives emits a painful stench to those around us, too.

Decluttering Our Emotional Clutter

So what does it look like to declutter?  What are proactive ways to declutter?  Here are a few ways experts emphasize.

1.  Identify your clutter.  What are the negative emotions or thoughts or limiting beliefs that you are hanging on to?  Are they serving you well?  That is, are they helping you live a life of freedom, moving you forward toward the kind of person you want to be?  Are your relationships filled with joy and hope and warmth as much as possible?  Be honest with yourself.  Is there a more healthy and effective way for you to live?

2.  Harness your attention.  According to brain experts, our natural, instinctual, first response to life tends to be fear.  This is because our brains were designed to instantly activate under threat for our survival - the fight or flight response central to the amygdala, the small front part of the brain.  But no longer having to live with the threat of extinction by dinosaurs or bears or lions, that instinctual brain response gets redirected toward less obvious threats - like threats to our ego survival, our sense of esteem and self-confidence - fear of being rejected or ridiculed or failure.

The problem is that we tend to allow our brains (by choosing to simply "float along") to keep stimulating our fear response when we don't need to, causing our whole physiological system to live in a high state of stress.  And this constant distress damages both our minds and our bodies.  No wonder it's simply easy hoarding stuff - keep everything external to distract us from our internal chaos.

Here's the way Dr. Pillay, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and brain expert, in his latest book Life Unlocked, describes the powerful way out:

"Fixing your attention stops the frontal cortex from randomly provoking the amygdala.  The frontal cortex is like an electrode that can buzz the amygdala, but if we occupy it with other thoughts [positive, hopeful, honest thoughts], it will not randomly shoot current toward the amygdala.  If your attention is scattered and chaotic, though, the frontal electrode will randomly activate the amygdala and cause fear.  Harnessing attention allows the amygdala to react to other high-impact positive and negative emotions, and in the absence of fear, even negative emotions can feel less unpleasant.  Similarly, fear can make even positive emotions feel overwrought or too activated, and we often come to regret these states of forced happiness.  Thus attentional depth is critical to overcoming fear.  One way to develop this depth is by using the power of intention."  (p. 66)

What are you giving your attention to?  Dr. Pillay is showing us that unless we intentionally direct our attention to dealing with our destructive emotions and limiting beliefs, and unless we work to resolve and let go of those feelings and thoughts, and then apply our attention to the positive outcomes and hoped for states of empowering feelings and being, we will continue to be overcome with fear.  We will destroy ourselves from that fear.  And we will then do whatever it takes to distract us from that debilitating fear - by hoarding or medicating or dying.

3.  Choose to become a minimalist.  Once you harness your attention on what needs to change and on what you want to change to, you can summon the courage to let the "clutter" go.  And here's the power of it:  decluttering inspires more decluttering.

Blogger Joshua Becker described the dynamics of his physical cluttering and decluttering this way:

"Clutter attracts clutter.  It just takes one piece of junk mail, one article of clothing left on a chair, or one receipt not filed properly to get the clutter momentum started.  What I have found over the last three weeks is that the opposite is also true.  When a surface is left clean, that one piece of clutter seems out of place and calls you to put it away.  Since I minimalized my office and removed all the clutter, I can’t stand the idea of leaving one piece of paper sitting on my desk – and so I put it away.  Since I minimalized my wardrobe, I can’t stand the idea of leaving one shirt laying on the floor – and so I throw it down to the laundry.   Since we minimalized the living room, I can’t stand the idea of leaving my shoes in the corner or a book on the table - and so I put them where they go right away."

The power of attention placed on both confronting and changing (decluttering) is exponential and transformative.  Our higher brain centers are called into action and stimulated, the amygdala fear center is deactivated, and the nerve pathways toward powerful action are electrified.  Positive motor skills kick in.  And we begin to live the life of freedom, forward momentum, and transformation we want.

Ambrose Redmoon once wrote:  "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."

Billie Jean, hoarding stuff in her house, never learned that truth.  And finally succumbed to her clutter.  A tragic lesson to the rest of us to declutter and learn how to really live life.

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Two Implications About Spirituality From Terry Jones' Qur'an Burning Frenzy

A Moment in the TV Studio Malcolm Muggeridge, the English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist, wrote about the time he escorted Mother Teresa into a New York television studio so that she could be interviewed on a network morning show, “a program,” he wrote, “which helps Americans from coast to coast to munch their breakfast cereal and gulp down their breakfast coffee.”  Her interviewer for this TV show was, as Muggeridge described him, a man “with a drooping green mustache, a purple nose and scarlet hair.”

Here’s the way Muggeridge told the story.  “It was the first time Mother Teresa had been in an American television studio, and so she was quite unprepared for the constant interruptions for commercials.  As it happened, surely as a result of divine intervention, all the commercials that particular morning were to do with different varieties of packaged food, recommended as being nonfattening and non-nourishing.  Mother Teresa looked at them with a kind of wonder, her own constant preoccupation being, of course, to find the wherewithal to nourish the starving and put some flesh on [the] human skeletons [in Calcutta where she served].  It took some little time for the irony of the situation to strike her.  When it did, she remarked in a perfect audible voice:  ‘I see that Christ is needed in television studios.’  A total silence descended on all present, and I fully expected the light to go out and the floor manager to drop dead.  Reality had momentarily intruded into one of the media’s mills of fantasy – an unprecedented occurrence.”  (quoted in Gordon MacDonald, Forging A Real World Faith, p. 42)

Both Malcolm Muggeridge and Mother Teresa certainly knew that this world they were in that day, this environment of the TV studio run and operated by real people with real lives facing real issues was a real world.  But it wasn’t the whole world.  It was a world that tended to be isolated from the starving and suffering people she served every day in India – the commercials and advertisements that day revealed that truth.  In contrast, her spirituality and faith were informed every day by the realities of a bigger world where the poor, suffering, and dying existed on dirty streets and faced daily injustices and inequalities.  A world beyond the sanitized TV studio – the world of the ghettos, where the color of your skin or the level of your economics or the place of your birth determined your opportunities or lack of opportunities in life.  Mother Teresa’s spirituality compelled her to point out the reality of their limited world that day in the studio.

Muggeridge had lived most of his life as an agnostic.  But his relationship with Mother Teresa, his up close and personal witness to her passion to live out a real-world spirituality and faith that made such a radical difference in the lives of so many suffering people through the years, ended up leading him to convert to Catholicism and Christianity.

One of our great temptations is to assume that the world we live and work in is the whole world.  When that happens, our spirituality and faith become narrow and small.  Our faith and spirituality become in fact unreal – divorced from the rest of the planet.  And the irony is that that is antithetical to the true nature of spirituality and faith.

True spirituality, having a faith that is genuine and that works, has to be connected with the whole world – it has to work in the rest of the world beyond the fences & studios of our own little lives.

So we’ve started a Saturday morning series at Second Wind this month called “APPLYING YOUR SPIRITUALITY TO THIS WEEK’S GLOCAL* HOT SPOT."  Our goal is to inform our spirituality by means of seeing the rest of the world beyond our individual lives.  So each week, we’re focusing on a current issue taking place in the world (*GLOCAL = think global + act local).  What is the crisis/need/situation – what are the issues involved – who are the people involved – how is the situation being currently handled – how are we impacted?  And how does this situation inform and shape our spirituality, and how does our spirituality inform our response?

Last Saturday we looked carefully at the stunning circus surrounding Pastor Terry Jones (of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida) and his threat to burn over 200 Qur'ans (Islam's holy scriptures) on the anniversary of 9/11.  I call it a "stunning circus" because Pastor Jones' hateful rhetoric and threats managed to provoke not just a local response but a global one, including personal statements to him by the leaders of our government including the President, the Pope, and governments across the world.  His YouTube sermons and Facebook pages went viral on the internet.  The media became obsessed and every other news story was obscured by their coverage of this one man and his tiny congregation.  In one month, he had become a global media celebrity.

The Spirituality of Interconnectedness

Let me suggest two implications for real-world spirituality from this major news event.  First, interconnectedness.  Genuine and transformational spirituality must embrace today's global reality:  nothing ever happens in isolation.  We no longer live and act in isolation – one action can cause a global stir.  We are first and foremost citizens of the world.  Which then embraces the truth that we have a responsibility to each other on a planetary scale.

Spirituality and faith are not just about me and God (or whatever label you put on your Life Source) and the rest of the world can go to hell.  Personal spirituality must include global interconnectedness and interdependence.  I must allow the "other side" of the world to help shape and inform my spiritual life.  And I must recognize that the way I live out my faith impacts the "other side" of the world, too.  Though John Donne wrote "no man is an island" several centuries ago, that paradigm is especially true today.

My sense of global citizenship profoundly shapes my spiritual life because I allow my mind and heart to open up to broader, wider, deeper possibilities and realities beyond my local world.  Mother Teresa comes into my personal studio - a place where my focus is on what cereal I'm going to have for breakfast in the morning - and interjects global reality - children and adults are dying from hunger on her streets of Calcutta.  And suddenly I'm forced to open up my spirituality by asking, What do my spirituality and faith do in response to that acute awareness and need?

The Spirituality of Honoring Others

Second, freedom and expediency.  We live in a country that honors and values religious freedom.  It's protected by our Constitution shaped by our founding fathers and mothers.  It protects the right for the Terry Jones in our midst to proclaim their message of personal and religious conviction.  Even though the city of Gainesville was refusing to give Terry Jones' congregation a fire permit to burn the Qur'ans on their property, his lawyers were reminding him that his right to burn those books was a guaranteed and protected right.  So go ahead if you are so convicted, they said.

Genuine spirituality acknowledges freedom.  Embraces it.  Celebrates it.  And it also willingly includes a caveat.  "All things are permissible," says the Christian New Testament, "but not all things are expedient.  You are allowed to do anything, but not everything is beneficial.  So don't think only of your good.  Think of others and what is best for them."  (1 Corinthians 10:23-24)

Manifesting the Divine Nature

Transformational spirituality embraces complete freedom with self-imposed limitations in order to show tangible honor and respect for the Other.  Terry Jones' worldview compels him to conquer the Other by putting his own convictions and even rights ahead of honor and respect.  Though he concludes that he is putting his honor for God ahead of all others and therefore is not compromising his faith, ironically his approach reveals a lack of understanding about the very God he feels he's honoring, "who though he [Jesus] was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God.  He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form ...."  (Philippians 2:5-7)

That's profound!  The very nature of the divine life, the very nature of divine freedom, is expressed in the context of self-imposed limitations out of honor and respect for the Other.  Terry Jones missed that nonnegotiable center of Godly living.  Exercising the freedom of his convictions was more important to him than whether they were truly beneficial to the Other as perceived by the Other.  This tends to produce a very self-centered spirituality with minimal benefit and often destructiveness to the world.

The central and core principle at the heart of every enduring spiritual tradition is what has been called The Golden Rule:  do to others only what you would want them to do to you.  Transformational spirituality uses freedom to show honor and respect to the Other, just as you would want that same honor and respect shown to you.  What a profound contrast the two spiritualities of Mother Teresa and Rev. Terry Jones are!  This isn't about having to agree with everyone.  It is about honoring and showing care toward others even in the midst of our disagreements.  Which of the two spiritualities would you like someone in your world possessing?

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How Hope Can Trump Fear

This last Saturday at Second Wind we began a new series ("Applying Your  Spirituality To This Week's Glocal Hot Spot") in which we're taking a very current event happening in the world and asking what the story tells us about the journey of spirituality.  How does this event inform and shape our spirituality so that we develop a real-world kind of spirituality, a perspective on faith and the spiritual life that works in real life, that embraces contemporary life in a relevant way.  Saturday we focused on the story unfolding in Chile with the 33 trapped miners which has already broken the record for the number of days miners have been imprisoned underground.   Experts are predicting that it will be at least another 3 months before the men are able to be rescued, provided more collapses don't take place.  A heartbreaking story, to say the least. Imagine if you were a family member or one of the miners.  How would you be feeling?  What would keep you alive and hanging on?  Would you hope for a good ending, even if the possibility existed that it might not happen?  Would you allow hope to set you up for a potential catastrophic disappointment?  Does hope work?

The Washington Post last week reported about Jerry Linenger  who was the only American on the Mir space station in 1997 when a small fire caused a crisis that left him isolated in space for four months with two Russian astronauts. Cut off from his family and facing a lot of stress, Linenger endured a period of uncertainty that provides a good parallel to what the 33 Chilean miners are facing.

The initial explosion terrified and galvanized the crew of six. After the fire, the connection between the two modules that made up the space station was cut, leaving Linenger alone with the Russians. Over the next months, the Mir lost its oxygen generator and had serious trouble with the carbon dioxide scrubber. The toilets malfunctioned, and communications broke down. But the worst aspect, Linenger said, was being led to expect something that failed to materialize.

"Expectations unmet are a horrible thing," Linenger recalled, "especially when you're already psychologically stressed. The biggest dips for me and the others is when we were told something would happen and it didn't."

Among the many examples he could point to, the one that remains raw after 13 years is when he was told he would be able to speak with his pregnant wife at a time when potentially life-threatening problems had begun to mount.  "They said I could talk to her for a short time as we passed over a ground antenna near Moscow," he remembered, "and I prepared for a week. I wrote down what I would say and then crossed things off and added new ones. I was so excited. But the time came, they said she was on the line, and all I got was static. And then another emergency started and we were cut off entirely. After that, I expected nothing and was psychologically more healthy."

What do you make of Linenger's conclusion?  Is it healthier to simply not hope, to not have expectations, in order to prevent disappointment?

Though I can appreciate the need to try to minimize emotional pain from loss and grief (I've gone through this many times myself), the truth is that according to recent neuroscience about brain formation and function, hope is one of the most significant brain functions to not only taking away fear but also to producing profound life transformation.

As we know, our brains were originally wired for fear responses - it was to protect humans from being gobbled up by predators - it's the basis for the fight or flight response.  And according to recent research, fear is so wired into our brains that the brain actually "senses" fear-producing stimuli even at an unconscious level (before we recognize it).  When something dangerous occurs outside of awareness, the conscious brain reacts to it.  In other words, as experts are telling us, your brain prepares you to respond to danger faster than it does to other tasks, and it starts to respond to frightening things before you even realize they are frightening.

And unless this wiring tendency is proactively dealt with, fear always trumps everything.  And when we live in fear, our stress levels stay heightened, causing us to live on increased cortisol which keeps our physical and emotional systems over-stimulated and thereby more susceptible to disease and deterioration.

I'm reading a book right now written by Dr. Srinivasan Pillay, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the former director of the Outpatient Anxiety Disorders Program and the Panic Disorders Research Program in the Brain Imaging Center at McLean Hospital.  Dr. Pillay is writing about the recent neuroscience findings about the brain and fear and how to overcome the tendency to be paralyzed from from fear:  Life Unlocked:  7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear.

He says that hope is the choice to make the assumption that something is possible.  Instead of allowing the facts to justify fear, we use hope to reveal new facts and remove the fears.  This is precisely what people like former South African president Nelson Mandella, world-class athlete and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, and countless others have done every day.  Rather than wait for their fears to disappear or for facts to back up their hope, they used hope to create new facts and reach their goals.

According to brain science discoveries, hope and fear both wander around in the unconscious parts of our brains.  They both require amygdala activation, and whichever one is stronger will win the amygdala for its own use (the amgydala is the almond-shaped part of the brain, a mass of nerve cell bodies, designed to be the danger alert system, "the guard dog of the human brain."  "It's so powerful and efficient that it alerts us to danger in our environment within tens of milliseconds of detecting it.").

Dr. Pillay's point is this:  "To be processed by the amygdala, emotions have to stand in a queue, with their order determined by their strength - the strongest soldier gets to the front of the line.  If fear is strongest, then it will grab the amygdala's power and dominate all the other soldiers in the line.  If hope is stronger, then it will be preferentially processed over fear ... So we have to develop a strategy to help hope 'bulk up' and have an intelligence that supersedes the intelligence of fear.  This isn't easy because, as we've learned, our brains are structured so that the amygdala processes fear first in order to protect us from danger."  (p. 52-3)

This certainly explains why it's easier for us to give in to the impulse of fear instead of building hope.  But it also explains why it's so important for us to choose hope, to give intentional attention to hope and what it is we're hoping for.  Regularly imagining the state of life that hope is directed to.  Those specific activities build up our hope response.  And when we hope, says Dr. Pillay, we stimulate out brain center (amygdala) to use its mass of nerve pathways to empower our bodies to act in harmony with that hope instead of short-circuiting it with fear.

Hope isn't a naive, feel-good fantasy approach to life.  It's central to using our brain structure to facilitate positive, profound life transformation.  We do need fear, too.  We need to feel fear to keep us from dangerous situations - we need the fight or flight response for survival.  But we can't live there - we end up destroying our systems if we do.  So we must "bulk up" hope.  We must choose to imagine what we truly want our lives to become.  We must spend time directing our attention to that picture.  We must allow our emotional, rational, physiological systems to mobilize us toward that preferred future.

No wonder many of the sacred scriptures of the great faith traditions talk about hope and setting our minds and hearts on the object of our hope.  "Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see."  (Hebrews 11:1)  Confidence.  Assurance.  And the rest of that chapter describes how those qualities lead to dramatic and transforming action.  Maintaining that kind of hope is what empowers us to take necessary steps to bring it into reality.

It's significant that all the families of the 33 trapped Chilean miners are staying on the mining site in a tent village that they're calling Camp Hope.  They are choosing to stay focused and to embrace hope.  Like Elizabeth Segovia, the wife of one of the trapped miners (reported by CNN).  The day before the tragic mine collapse, she received a piece of great news - she was pregnant with a girl - an ultrasound had confirmed it.  The next day, her world collapsed.  She cried and cried.  As the weeks went by, she found herself talking to her baby girl inside her, "Daddy's okay?  Daddy's okay!  It's going to be alright!"

Last Thursday, Segovia got a handwritten letter from her husband Ticona proposing they name their daughter Esperanza Elizabeth -- esperanza is Spanish for hope.  "First, because we never lost hope," she said, and "second, because it's the name of the camp where the families are living; and third, because the 33 miners never lost hope either."

With her daughter due to arrive in less than two weeks, and her husband due to arrive in perhaps four months, Segovia plans to make a video of the birth to ensure he doesn't miss it altogether.  "We have to record the birth in great detail, as well as everything that happens to my baby day by day so we can show him," she said.

What do you need to hope for in your life?  What is your preferred future?  What do you need to hang on to in order to stimulate your brain center into powerful action?  Where are you most fearful?  Is your fear paralyzing you?  Can renewed hope in you create new facts to bolster that hope and bring transformation?  Esperanza.  Hope. Best to hang on to it!

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Dealing With the Fear Of Taking the Risk To Be Alive

"Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are." Don Miguel Ruiz I spent some time this morning at the Federal Building for Immigration downtown San Francisco supporting one of my gay friends, a dear colleague in ministry and one of our leaders of Second Wind.  He appeared in front of an immigration judge this morning to tell his story in order to apply for legal asylum here in the States.  His request is based upon the real dangers of being gay in the religious subculture he lived and worked all of his adult life within in his home country.  When he emerged from the court room with his lawyer and we debriefed the experience, I asked him what it felt like to retell his story in great detail.  "It was cathartic in many ways but also very painful - remembering all the awful things I encountered when I came out as gay:  the ostracization from my church community, the loss of my pastoral occupation and reputation, my marriage, the pain for everyone including my kids who had to put up with ridicule from their friends and others, living with the fear of rejection every day, often experiencing it in painful ways.  But I feel good about how clearly and openly I told my story to the judge."  His son was there to speak to the judge on behalf of his father, too.  "I want for us both to be able to live here in this country and build our lives here," he told me.

Now my friend (along with his long time committed partner) waits for two weeks to hear the immigration judge's verdict.  And we wait with them as their friends and spiritual community who love them and are committed to the journey of life together.

And I'm reminded of the great courage and bravery he's manifesting to take the risk to be genuinely alive, the risk to express who he really is in spite of the consequences he's both faced and continues having to put up with even in this country.  I admire him for his honesty and his integrity to live with transparency and congruity.

It's not easy choosing to be alive and really live life in alignment and integration.  It takes risks.  We have to encounter our fears.  We have to be willing to fail from time to time but then to pick ourselves up and keep moving forward.  It's not easy.

Have you ever asked yourself what your biggest fears are to living the life you feel deep inside you're called to live?  What does the cage look like that might tend to keep you from being really alive?

Maybe that's why in my work with people I encounter so many who are simply trying to survive, to make it to death safely, not pushing the edges of their lives, simply maintaining the status quo.  It's easier that way - it appears less risky.  But notice I say "appears" because in actuality, it's more risky.  When you live your life out of alignment, not being who you really, trying to live someone else's life instead of your own, when you're not living your calling and purpose, settling instead for status quo, your inner spirit and physical body pick up on this lack of congruity and create what we call dis-ease - a restlessness inside, a lack of ease.  Experts remind us that this condition is a condition of stress.  And when you live with this state of stress for a long time it becomes chronic.  And chronic stress has been shown to be terribly debilitating to the body, leading to a susceptibility to disease and illness on multiple levels, including depression.  Our human systems are designed to experience maximum status when there's complete alignment between our emotions, our feelings, our thoughts, and our behaviors - when we're living within the integrity of our true selves, when we're using how we're wired with boldness and confidence and purpose.

As I listened to my friend's lawyer giving a thumbnail sketch of the process this morning and where it goes from here, I felt deep admiration for her as a professional who is so committed to helping people enjoy the opportunity to live life deeply and freely in this country.  I was reminded of the profound statement of mission and purpose Jesus stated when he began his ministry.  He quoted from Isaiah 61, applying the mission of God to himself:  "God's Spirit has anointed me and chosen me to bring freedom and liberation to the captives, to proclaim this as the year of God's redemption and favor for all."

In my opinion, this powerful and professional lawyer who is helping our friend and all her other clients has stepped into the legacy of the great prophets of old and Jesus himself who came to give all people the joy of freedom and liberation to be alive, really alive.

Filming the event this morning was another of my friends here in the City.  He and his wife (both leaders in our Second Wind spiritual community) are producing a documentary about gays who are trying to reconcile their sexual identity with their religious and spiritual orientation.  These two courageous people are sacrificing everything they have to travel the country (carrying their 20 month old daughter along) filming stories to highlight this tremendous need.  They, too, have stepped into the legacy of Jesus' mission of announcing the freedom and liberation to be alive, really alive, for all people.  I admire their persistent passion and boldness.

It takes courage to take the risk to be alive no matter what your orientation - "the risk to be alive and express what we really are."  This isn't about sexuality.  It's about being human on every level.  We all face it.  And it's risky business.  We have to take intentional steps forward every day, choosing to live deeply and purposefully instead of letting the days go by without any thought or awareness or momentum.  It's about choosing to live our God-given life, not someone else's.

But in the end, for those who are willing to take that risk for themselves and on behalf of others, the reward of living in alignment, of living with purpose and mission, of choosing courage and boldness instead of fear and intimidation will far outweigh the risks.  There's certainly stress in taking risks.  But this kind of stress - eustress - always trumps distress!  It's actually good for you.

I love the way George Bernard Shaw describes this kind of life.  This is the way I want to live.  This kind of life is the highest level of spirituality and it produces the most profound kind of transformation possible (Jesus' life showed this to be true).  Here it is:

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a might one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

So here's to taking the risk of being alive and expressing what we really are, for our sakes and for others and for Life itself!

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The Spirituality of Stress: Gender and Sexual Orientation Inequality

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is considered one of America's leading scientists doing work on the psychosocial and physiological effects of stress on human life.  He began his ground breaking research back in 1978 by studying baboon troops in Kenya.  One of the things he noticed was how a baboon's status in the troop impacted it's physiological condition.  He noticed, for instance, that the males at the bottom of the hierarchy were thinner and more nervous in general. “They just didn’t look very healthy,” he said. “That’s when I began thinking about how damn stressful it must be to have no status. You never know when you’re going to get beat up. You never get laid. You have to work a lot harder for food.” So he would shoot these baboons with anesthetic darts and then, while they were plunged into sleep, quickly measure their immune system function and the levels of stress hormones and cholesterol in their blood.  What he discovered was stunning.  These lower status baboons were living in a state of chronic stress - they had to fight for everything and continually "bow" to those males at the top of the totem pole.  And this chronic stress, measured by Sapolsky via their blood samples, revealed that it was a profound chemistry problem that he and other specialists have shown to be true over and over again since that discovery.

Here's how a recent article in Wired magazine described it:  When there's stress like this, "a tiny circuit in the base of the brain triggers the release of glucocorticoids, a family of stress hormones that puts the body in a heightened state of alert. The molecules are named after their ability to rapidly increase levels of glucose in the blood, thus providing muscles with a burst of energy. They also shut down all nonessential bodily processes, such as digestion and the immune response. 'This is just the body being efficient,' Sapolsky says. 'When you’re being chased by a lion, you don’t want to waste resources on the small intestine. You’ll ovulate some other time. You need every ounce of energy just to get away.'

"But glucocorticoids have a nasty side effect: When they linger in the bloodstream, as they might due to chronic stress related to low rank, damage accumulates. It’s the physiological version of a government devoting too many resources to its defense department, Sapolsky says. The body is so worried about war that it doesn’t fix the roads or invest in schools. Interestingly, the effects of stress appear particularly toxic to the brain."

One of the profound impacts of Dr. Sapolsky's research was to show how even one's status in a social group led to a state of chronic stress with the related physiological symptoms being able to be clearly measured and repeated.  The long term impact was hugely negative:  increased heart rate and blood pressure, a rise in arterial plaque even when fed a low-fat diet, and more than twice as likely to suffer from heart disease and a correspondingly premature death.

Numerous studies among humans since those early primate studies have reconfirmed the powerful negative effects of stress caused by subordination in position and status.  When people have a sense of control and power over their lives, stress decreases and health increases.  When they don't, stress with all the negative effects, especially when it's chronic, impacts the entire system - and the system ultimately dies.

Here's the way Wired put it:  "The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair."

Or, it's the person who because of gender or sexual orientation feels consigned to a "lower status" in society - who feels a sense of powerless because the policies or practices of an organization and laws of the land conspire against their ability and opportunity to rise to higher levels of position and acceptance in their environment.  The tragic result of creating this state of imposed potential helplessness and powerlessness is that we as a society, whether intentionally or not, are reproducing experiences of chronic stress and sentencing such people to the risks associated with major health problems.  Inequality and prejudice do impact stress levels.

In my opinion, this makes our contemporary religious and social issues of women's ordination and same gender marriage hugely spiritual issues.  The fact that in our religious and political organizations we've developed a hierarchy of acceptance and status, denying equality in position and power and therefore rights and opportunities based upon gender and sexual orientation, means that we are also denying a quality of life with its proven and profound health benefits and longevity to some and not others.  We are ironically mirroring the baboon troops that live purely instinctual survival existences.

Isn't this in distinct contrast to the model of life Jesus described himself coming to bring to all?  "I have come that people will have life, the abundant life!"  (John 10:10)  Jesus was about lifting people up, increasing their quality of life, empowering and building up people in an atmosphere of equality and acceptance.  As opposed to the thief, he pointed out, whose sole purpose is to steal, to kill, to diminish and destroy life for others.

When we develop pyramidal hierarchies where there's an "upper" and a "lower" based upon gender or sexual orientation, and then we develop practices and policies that ensure that the value of that "status" is chronic (and then we top it off by using religious / spiritual language to justify our pyramidal laws and values), we are no better than thieves, stealing from them the abundant, free, and high quality life Jesus came to give them.

Research has also shown another tragic outcome of the state of chronic stress.  The stress response can get hardwired into our system especially when it happens at an early stage in life, making people more vulnerable to stress-related diseases and conditions.  Here's how it works:  "The physiology underlying this response has been elegantly revealed in the laboratory. When lab rats are stressed repeatedly, the amygdala — an almond-shaped nub in the center of the brain — enlarges dramatically. (This swelling comes at the expense of the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory and shrinks under severe stress.) The main job of the amygdala is to perceive danger and help generate the stress response; it’s the brain area turned on by dark alleys and Hitchcock movies. Unfortunately, a swollen amygdala means that we’re more likely to notice potential threats in the first place, which means we spend more time in a state of anxiety. (This helps explain why a more active amygdala is closely correlated with atherosclerosis.) The end result is that we become more vulnerable to the very thing that’s killing us."

Meaningful and effective spirituality is about empowering ourselves and others to experience the highest quality life possible.  It's being faithful to the kind of life Jesus said he came to give freely to people - the abundant life - a life where people can become the very best they can be at every stage of life.  And genuine spirituality involves facing the structures, policies, practices, and beliefs that people put into place that are diminishing and destroying life for others - facing them and changing them.  Equality and justice are spiritual issues that impact the quality of life for all people!  To fail to address them is to diminish our own souls, our bodies, and our whole lives - for when even one person in this world is diminished we are all.  And when one person is lifted up, we all are lifted up, we all are enhanced.

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Spirituality Is Like the Golden Gate Bridge, Part 2

My wife and I love taking long walks from our apartment in North Beach to Chrissy Field along the water with spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge.  No matter what the weather is like - fog rolling in over the bridge, a sunset behind the bridge highlighting the orange color of the bridge, sailboats and container ships sailing under the bridge - the bridge is always romantic, beautiful, inspiring.  I can see why the Golden Gate is considered one of the most iconic structures in the world. Living around the Bridge has given me opportunity to think often of the spiritual dimensions of it on a metaphorical level.  In my last post, I mentioned the first two spiritual lessons.  Here are the final two.

Third, the safety record during those four years of construction was remarkable, thanks to the safety net installed under the bridge floor.  Imagine how those 19 men and their families felt when they were saved by that net - proud to belong to the "Half Way to Hell Club."  Developing meaningful spirituality requires putting a "safety net" into place, as well.  We need support structures in our lives to keep us on the journey.  I'm reminded of psychiatrist Paul Tournier's statement:  "There are two things in life we can't do alone:  one, be married, and two, be spiritual."  Spirituality is by nature a relational experience.  It's not something you can simply think or act or feel your way into by yourself.  We are designed to grow best in an environment of meaningful, supportive relationships with others.

For this reason, engaging with frequency in a positive, encouraging spiritual community is vital to our spiritual growth life.  None of us feels strong and effective all the time.  We have our falls from the scaffolding for whatever reasons.  We have those times when we simply don't feel like we're making it, or we feel discouraged and despair sets in, or we make choices or others make them for us that end up collapsing our worlds down around us. We need that safety net.  We need those other people around us who will hang on to us, who will encourage us and embrace us no matter what, who will stand beside us and help us to keep the journey going.

Of the eleven men killed from falls during construction, ten were killed (when the bridge was near completion) when the net failed under the stress of a scaffold that had fallen.

I'm a member of the Half Way to Hell Club.  And I can tell you, those people in my life who surrounded me as a safety net were beyond helpful in keeping me going and helping me to see a future, and assisting in keeping my eyes on a God who loves me and refuses to give up on me.  What will it take for you to develop that support in your life if you don't already have it?  If you do have it, are you utilizing it as much as you could for your personal spiritual development?

And finally, no important endeavor is without obstacles.  The engineers and architects of the Golden Gate certainly faced their share, all the way from having to deal with the fierce elements of nature in the Bay area to the politics at the White House.  But thanks to the courage and collaboration between all the players involved, combined with determined persistence and patience, the bridge was moved from dream to reality, becoming the most photographed bridge in the world.

The very nature of spirituality is messy and chaotic.  Life is never a simple straightforward journey.  We have to learn and relearn lessons along the way.  We have to regularly manage expectations, making sure we're basing them on reality and truth.  We have to deal with obstacles and challenges if we want to grow healthy spiritual lives.

I just got off the phone from visiting with a woman who was worried she was losing her spirituality.  She's grieving over the death of her husband a year ago.  She's angry with God for allowing him to die in spite of her sincere prayers, for taking the one person in her life who encouraged the most meaningful spirituality she'd ever had to that point.  She's struggling with all her beliefs, trying to make any sense of them in the light of her present realities.  She doesn't want to go to church or pray or read scripture.  And with all this chaos, she's afraid she's going to hell.

Life is messy.  Unpredictable.  So interwoven with everything.  Our emotions, our thoughts, our beliefs, our relationships, our life experiences - all of them impact every one of those areas.  We're constantly challenged as we try to navigate our way through.  How do we bring alignment in the midst of chaos?  How do we bring alignment to beliefs and behaviors when our beliefs are under repair or renovation or our behaviors are prompted by confusion?

The Golden Gate bridge was built and completed, in spite of huge obstacles and seemingly impossible challenges, because a large team of dedicated and skilled individuals were willing to collaborate, to share their knowledge and expertise, to allow their individual weaknesses to be compensated for by others' strengths, to include many people's contributions.  In fact, the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, incorporated in 1928 as the official entity to design, construct, and finance the Golden Gate Bridge, after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, was unable to raise the construction funds.  So it lobbied and won approval for a $38 million bond measure.  But the District was unable to sell the bonds ... until 1932, when Amadeo Giannini, the founder of San Francisco–based Bank of America, agreed on behalf of his bank to buy the entire issue in order to help the local economy.

Spirituality is, believe it or not, a group process.  Obstacles are best faced together.  It takes "a village," as it were, to build healthy lives.  We cannot do it alone.  Just like the Golden Gate bridge.  And it ended up being declared one of the Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Spirituality IS a lot like a bridge.  Perhaps we could learn some lessons from the Golden Gate.

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Spirituality Is Like the Golden Gate Bridge, Part 1

I live in San Francisco which is a city primarily accessible from the north and east by bridges (the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge).  You can reach the City from the south by land.  Only boats reach us from the west emerging from the Pacific Ocean into our Bay. Bridges are quite fascinating spiritual metaphors.  Take our Golden Gate bridge, for instance.  It's the ninth longest suspension span in the world (1.7 miles).  And believe me, my body has felt the pain of every inch of that span, having run in the SF marathon which crosses the bridge and back along the total route (about 8-9 miles in), with the bridge curving uphill from both ends to the center of the span!  It was brutal, especially with heavy fog and light mist in our typical July weather!

The bridge clearance is 220 feet from the high water.  It weighs 887,000 tons total.  And the two cables that span the bridge's suspension are each composed of 27,572 strands of wire. There are 80,000 miles (129,000 km) of wire in the two main cables, and it took over six months to spin them.

Construction on the bridge began on January 5, 1933, and the first cars drove across on May 28, 1937.  The toll was 50 cents one way, $1 round trip and 5 cents surcharge if there were more than 3 passengers.  Those were definitely the good 'ole days because the toll now is $6 per vehicle (charged only for southbound traffic).  Gotta love inflation!  The bridge traffic now averages about 41 million vehicles a year.

One of the most interesting Golden Gate Bridge facts is that only eleven workers died during construction, a new safety record for the time. In the 1930s, bridge builders expected 1 fatality per $1 million in construction costs, and builders expected 35 people to die while building the Golden Gate Bridge. One of the bridge's safety innovations was a net suspended under the floor. This net saved the lives of 19 men during construction, and they are often called the members of the "Half Way to Hell Club."

So why go to all the expensive, difficult, dangerous work to build this bridge?  Before the bridge was built, the only practical short route between San Francisco and what is now Marin County to the north was by boat across a section of San Francisco Bay. Ferry service began as early as 1820, with regularly scheduled service beginning in the 1840s for purposes of transporting water to San Francisco.  San Francisco was the largest American city still served primarily by ferry boats. Because it didn't have a permanent link with communities around the bay, the city's growth rate was below the national average.

But in spite of the need, the obstacles from opposition were strong.  Many experts said that a bridge couldn’t be built across the 6,700 ft (2,042 m) strait. It had strong, swirling tides and currents, with water 500 ft (150 m) in depth at the center of the channel, and frequent strong winds. Experts said that ferocious winds and blinding fogs would prevent construction and operation.  It was too costly on every level!

The Department of War was concerned that the bridge would interfere with ship traffic; the navy feared that a ship collision or sabotage to the bridge could block the entrance to one of its main harbors. Unions demanded guarantees that local workers would be favored for construction jobs. Southern Pacific Railroad, one of the most powerful business interests in California, opposed the bridge as competition to its ferry fleet and filed a lawsuit against the project, leading to a mass boycott of the ferry service.

But thankfully, strong vision, lots of courage, and collaboration between many dedicated experts, along with the investment of massive human and financial resources, produced a bridge that today is unarguably one of the most iconic structures in the world.

So what are some of the spiritual applications to this particular bridge metaphor?  Notice several.  First, the Golden Gate bridge looks like it's simply straight across and level from one side to the other - until you get on it and start traveling across, especially on foot at which time you realize it's actually uphill both directions.  A lot like the spiritual journey.  There's no such thing as a straight, flat distance.  Spirituality is about life and life has ups and downs even though you can't see them at first.  So don't get discouraged.  Keep running or walking, keep moving forward - you'll eventually get to the downhill side.  To get where you want to go, you need to cross the bridge.

Second, to build a strong bridge like the Golden Gate, every task is done with great care and persistence.  Look at the two main cables - 80,000 miles of wire, taking over six months to spin.  Imagine that - 6 months to do one spinning-the-wires task.  But without that attention to that specific project, the finished bridge wouldn't be still standing strong today.

Spirituality involves engaging in sometimes menial tasks - routine - repetitive - over and over and over again.  It's easy to take short cuts for the sake of brevity or expediting the process.  But healthy and deep spirituality is like a good wine - it takes time, careful and loving attention.  And some times you simply have to "sit with" it - let is simmer, percolate, age.  Spirituality takes patience and persistence.  Spinning the wires again and again.  Sometimes it doesn't feel very productive.  Our hearts aren't in it.  But we still do it.  It's a sacred routine that ultimately builds a strong spirituality - a holy bridge from here to there.

That's why the enduring religious traditions of the world have developed what they call spiritual practices - behaviors, activities, that you engage in over and over again - like spinning those wire cables around and around and around, each spin producing a stronger wire.  We pray, we meditate, we read, we serve others, we attend services, we practice healthy behaviors, we work on healthy thought patterns - over and over and over again - with each new practice, we're building a stronger, deeper receptivity to the Spirit, and transformation increases.

Look at how long it took to build the Golden Gate bridge - January 1933 to May 1937 - four years.  But because the builders took this strategic time and attention to the process 73 years ago, over 40 million vehicles today make it to their destinations safely every year.

Stay tuned to my next post - we'll look at two more ways I see the Golden Gate Bridge as a spiritual metaphor.  I'm reminded of these every time I walk or drive where I can see the bridge.  It truly is inspiring to me from every angle.

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Two Ways To Boosting Your Wellbeing

True happiness, said comedian Bob Monkhouse, is when you marry a person for love and later discover that they have money. We all appreciate the joke, of course, because though one side of us knows that a loving relationship provides a good chance of happiness the other thinks it would be guaranteed if that relationship made us rich as well.  Imagine it:  true love plus lots of money!  What more could you ask for!  Happiness guaranteed.  It's like my dad would say to me when I was in college (tongue in cheek, I'm sure):  "Remember, Greg, money isn't everything.  But if you happen to marry someone with money, it won't hurt. " And yet we all know - and study after study confirms it - money doesn't buy lasting happiness.  In fact, as it turns out, nothing produces lasting happiness in a one shot deal.  A sense of wellbeing, the ability to thrive with joy in life, is more complicated than that.  Behavioral economists and economic psychologists coined the contributing problem the "hedonic treadmill" - our expectations rise with our incomes, material possessions, or other positive experiences so that the happiness we seek remains just out of reach.  It's like we're caught on a treadmill, working hard, and getting nowhere.  We have to keep working just to stay in the same place.

James Montier (global equity strategist for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and author of the report entitled It Doesn’t Pay: Materialism and the Pursuit of Happiness) described it this way:  "In other words, we quickly get used to new things and they become part of our norm. We might get a new fast car and at first be out washing it every weekend but six months later we have become accustomed to it, the kids have scuffed up the seats in the back and the boot is full of dog hairs.  This is hedonic adaptation at work . . . material possessions are likely to be assimilated relatively fast.”  And like you and I have experienced, we're off to find the next new happiness-inducing experience.  The treadmill keeps going.

So can you do anything about this cycle?  Some experts say, "It's simple.  Just reduce your expectations so you don't experience the discrepancy between expectation and experience."  The theory is, if you have low expectations, you won't get disappointed.  Just be Zen about it all and live in the now.  Buddha's point was:  since desire is the root of all suffering, the solution is to simply get rid of desire.  Live without want and you'll never want of anything.

Certainly learning the art of managing our desires is important.  But it might not solve the whole problem.  Happiness, or a sense of thriving and being fulfilled, wellbeing, is impacted by both our expectations and experiences.  So rather than denying that reality, perhaps there is a way to shape them in ways that actually pay off.

A recent study reported in the Journal of Economic Psychology (2008) suggested two powerful ways that increase a person's wellbeing and happiness.  First, the principle authors acknowledged how many studies have shown that few events in life have a lasting impact on subjective well-being because of people’s tendency to adapt quickly; worse, those events that do have a lasting impact tend to be negative.  And second, their research showed "that while major events may not provide lasting increases in well-being, certain seemingly minor events – such as attending religious services or exercising – may do so by providing small but frequent boosts: if people engage in such behaviors with sufficient frequency, they may cumulatively experience enough boosts to attain higher well-being."

In this study they surveyed participants before they attended religious services or exercised and others as they left these activities.  Study 1 showed that people reported higher well-being after religious services, and Study 2 showed a similar effect for attending the gym or a yoga class. Equally important, frequency of engaging in these activities was a positive predictor of people’s baseline wellbeing, suggesting that these small boosts have a cumulative positive effect on well-being.

Imagine that.  You can boost your experience of wellbeing by going frequently to church (at least once a week) and to the gym or yoga class (at least several times a week).  The positive effect from frequency is cumulative - it increases your wellbeing more and more, as opposed to dropping off dramatically like after a major event or purchase is over.

"The key for long lasting changes to wellbeing is to engage in activities that provide small and frequent boosts, which in the long run will lead to improved well-being, one small step at a time."

It's interesting that oftentimes people will become involved in spiritual community on a "I'll go when I really feel like it" basis.  But if they're particularly tired one week, the motivation isn't there to get up and go, or it doesn't seem like it really matters much in the long run if they miss for awhile.  And yet, in the physical exercise and trying-to-get-in-shape arena, we all acknowledge the reality that you have to be regular and stay regular to reap the real cumulative benefits.  Which means going even when you might not feel like going.  And going regularly.

This happiness research is pretty significant - if you want your wellbeing to be boosted, you have to be frequent and regular.  Even engaging in what some might consider to be "small" activities (like church or exercise), when engaged in often, raise your wellbeing and experience of thriving.

This study certainly corresponds to numerous research done in the last 10 years about the positive overall health impact of spiritual community and regular attendance.  UC Berkeley's School of Public Health reported on a major study several years ago about the connection between faith and health.

Using data collected over a period of 31 years and involving 6,545 adults in Alameda County, non-churchgoers were found to have a 21 percent greater overall risk of dying sooner compared to those who attend religious services at least once a week.  Even after controlling for potentially confounding variables (like gender, current health, income, education, etc.), additional trends were noted, including a 66 percent greater risk of dying from respiratory diseases and a 99 percent greater risk with digestive diseases among those not attending religious services.  Regular involvement in supportive and meaningful spiritual community was linked with lower blood pressure, fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease, less depression, and a decrease in earlier death from all causes.

Study coauthor William Strawbridge of the Public Health Institute attributes the health benefits highlighted in the study to the networks within religious congregations.  "The church attendance aspect involves the interaction between people," he said. "Basically it's these relationships that are good for health," coupled with the accompanying attention to life issues and spiritual growth and development in the context of supportive community.

So, want to give a boost to your wellbeing?  It apparently won't be coming from that "retail therapy" we often feel tempted by.  It won't even be come from winning the lottery we all dream of.  But apparently it will involve not hitting the snooze button this weekend and instead making your way to a spiritual community of people who will support you on your journey.  And then hitting the gym afterward will be the icing on the cake! :)  Go figure!

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How to Vaccinate Yourself Against Spiritually Transmitted Diseases

So are there any spiritual vaccinations to bring protection and healing to the spiritual diseases we can fall victim to described in my last blog (10 Spiritually Transmitted Diseases)?  Let me suggest several. David R. Hawkins (MD, PhD) for the last several decades has been on the leading edge of the science of behavioral kinesiology which is the study of the relationship between thoughts-feelings and muscle strength.  Research repeatedly shows that our consciousness has a powerful impact on our bodies - some thoughts and feelings make our bodies go strong, others make us go weak.

If you haven't already, you can experiment with yourself and a partner.  You stand erect, your right arm relaxed at your side, your left arm held out parallel to the floor with the elbow straight and both hands open. Your tester faces you and places his left hand on your right shoulder to steady you. He then puts his right hand on your extended arm just above the wrist. Now, he tells you that he is going to try to push your arm down as you resists. He quickly and firmly pushes down on the arm, just hard enough to test the spring and bounce in the arm, but not so hard that the muscle becomes fatigued.  This is simply to test your basic resistance level with a neutral stimulus.

The testing continues with you holding a negative thought about yourself in your mind - what is a limited belief about yourself that you tell yourself from time to time?  Think about it and the negative feelings associated with it, hold it in your mind as your partner tests your muscle strength.  Repeat the testing with a positive statement about yourself that you hold in your mind.  Compare the results.

The point is, our thoughts and feelings do make a powerful difference with the way our bodies respond.

Dr. Hawkins, from his extensive research, has developed what he calls a "map of consciousness" - it charts the progression of the states of thoughts/feelings from the weakest to the strongest, along with accompanying worldviews, picture of God, primary emotions, and life processes for each state..  The results are quite profound.  If you click on the following Map (c), you'll see a bigger, clearer image of it.

Notice that the weakest state of thinking and feeling is shame (3rd row from the left, bottom), followed closely by guilt, apathy, grief, and on up the chart.  Courage is the tipping point toward everything strong.  Everything below Courage tests weak.  Courage and everything above test strong.

So what does all this mean?  Contemporary science is confirming what ancient science has been saying all along.  Notice these ancient observations:

"Be careful what you think, because your thoughts run your life."  (Proverbs 4:23)

"As a man thinks in his heart, so is he."  (Proverbs 23:7)

All of this science is suggesting a hugely significant spiritual reality - what we think impacts our life experience.  And Dr. Hawkins has mapped out the strongest kind of thoughts and feelings - courage, trust, willingness, acceptance/forgiveness, reason/understanding, love, joy, peace, enlightenment.  This list, describing the attributes of a strong life, are mirrored in another piece of ancient wisdom which describes the attributes of the divine life.  Notice the parallels:

"So what does living the divine life look like? God brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others (love), exuberance about life (joy), serenity (peace). We develop a willingness to stick with things (patience), a sense of compassion in the heart (kindness), and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people (goodness). We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments (faithfulness), not needing to force our way in life (gentleness), able to marshal and direct our energies wisely (self-control)." (Galatians 5:22-23)

According to both contemporary and ancient science, the process of life transformation involves choosing to reflect upon, contemplate, think about these powerful, divine-like traits and qualities.  The very act of spending time thinking about them brings about spiritual growth and change.  This is one of the primary vaccinations against the spiritually transmitted diseases I talked about in my last post.

Here's the way another piece of ancient wisdom describes this spiritual vaccination:

"Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on the divine life. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize this divine reality, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you." (Romans 12:2)

Vaccination one is to make the choice to fix our attention on the strongest qualities and attributes and thoughts and feelings in life possible.  Look at that list often.  Repeat it to yourself often.  The very process of doing that, says Dr. Hawkins and scripture, begins to transform our thinking and feeling which in turn makes our bodies strong.

One of the ways I've done this lately is to repeat these attributes of the divine life in my prayers, going over and over each quality in my mind and heart, asking for the divine spirit to grow that "fruit" in my life.  It's kind of a targeted prayer and meditation that helps to keep me focused, to fix my attention on the strength and power of the divine life.  You and I can exercise our ability to choose, our willingness to experience transformation by how we direct our thoughts and feelings.

Dr. Hawkins describes the dilemma of the human struggle as well as the antidote to it in this statement:  “The world of the ego is like a house of mirrors through which the ego wanders, lost and confused, as it chases the images in one mirror after another. Human life is characterized by endless trials and errors to escape the maze. At times, for many people, and possibly for most, the world of mirrors becomes a house of horrors that gets worse and worse. The only way out of the circuitous wanderings is through the pursuit of spiritual truth … At first, spiritual purification seems difficult, but eventually, it becomes natural. To consistently choose love, peace, or forgiveness leads one out of the house of mirrors. The joy of God is so exquisite that any sacrifice is worth the effort and seeming pain."

And this process leads to vaccination two. Here again contemporary and ancient science provide us with a profound and powerful transformation process.

In 1665 a Dutch Physicist and Scientist named Christian Huygens discovered what is now known in physics as the principle of entrainment.  It was during his research with pendulum clocks that Huygens noted the new physics concept. He found that when he placed two of them on a wall near each other and swung the pendulums at different rates, they would eventually end up swinging at the exact same rate. They fell into rhythm with one another. He realized that this concept applied to not just pendulum clocks, but as a basic law of physics:  the tendency for two oscillating bodies to lock into phase so that they vibrate in harmony. It's easier and takes less energy for systems to work in cooperation than in opposition.  So the powerful rhythmic vibrations from one source will cause less powerful vibrations of another source to lock into the vibration of the first, stronger source.

Entrainment happens all around us, all the time. It's like Newton's Law of Gravity. It just is. It occurs biologically, such as when women who spend a lot of time together find their moon cycles synchronizing. It occurs sociologically such as when people in the same cliques or communities or social groups dress and think similarly. It happens mechanically, like all of the grandfather clock pendulums in a clock shop swinging together in unison after a few days, even if they started off unsynchronized.  It can be found on emotional levels too, such as what happens when you walk into a room full of people who are laughing and light-hearted and your mood magically lifts to match theirs. Even our brain waves follow this physics principle. It happens when people are subjected to certain stimulus and their brain frequencies shift to calmer states.

Here's the power of this principle when it comes to our spiritual lives.  An ancient scripture describes it this way:

"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And we, who with unveiled faces all contemplate the attributes of the divine life, are being transformed into that likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."  (2 Corinthians 3:16-18)

When we deliberately and intentionally place ourselves in the presence of the divine life, as well as in the presence of those qualities being lived out in others, when we acknowledge our connection to God and reflect on the divine life and spend time in environments that reflect those qualities, we the weaker of the two energy sources are drawn into greater and greater synch with the stronger Energy which is God.  The result is increasing transformation into a likeness of the divine life.  The principle of physics results in profound spiritual growth.  The Spirit increases our freedom to become more and more of who are designed to be.

So how's your vaccination history?  Time for some more healthy antidotes?

It's so easy for me to allow my thinking to get lazy and distracted - to make an almost automatic choice to allow negative and unhealthy thoughts take over - to let my limiting beliefs about myself and others be my default mode.  But the good news is that life is like standing on the train station - our thoughts are the various trains set to leave the station to their destination.  When a negative trigger happens in our lives, and our automatic response tends to be to get on that negative train thought, you and I have the choice whether or not to get on the train.  We can actually let that train pull away from the platform without us.  We can instead choose to get on another more healthy train.  And when we make that significant choice, the ride ahead is much more enjoyable - for ourselves and for the others in our lives.

So here's to getting vaccinated!  And here's to getting on a good train for a good ride into the divine life!

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10 Spiritually Transmitted Diseases

I took today's perceptive title from a blog post I read recently written by Dr. Mariana Caplan, an internationally acclaimed author and teacher on Western Spirituality, and a psychotherapist specializing in spiritual issues and somatic and body-centered approaches to transformation.  She has an active practice in San Francisco and Marin County.  You can read her whole post here. Dr. Caplan provides what I think is a helpful description of the some of the dangers inherent in the spiritual life.  These are dangers that we often don't want to think about or simply don't see, especially in relation to ourselves.  In the midst of our genuine desire to grow spiritually, to commit ourselves to experiencing transformation and positive change in our lives, regardless of the specific religious environment we're a part of, there are certain blind spots that have the potential of derailing our spiritual growth.

Blind spots are those places that we simply don't see but by not seeing them, we are susceptible to crashing.  Remember taking driver's ed training and the teacher talking about being careful of the blind spot between what you see in your rearview mirror and what you see in your driver's side mirror.  There could be a vehicle in that blind spot and if you make a lane change too quickly, you could hit that vehicle.  So what are you suppose to do?  You're suppose to check your mirrors first, and then look over your left shoulder to take a specific visual cue of what's actually there.  And if there is in fact no vehicle there, you turn on your signal blinker and slowly make the turn.  You've checked your blind spot in order to navigate safely.

The title also suggests another spiritual reality.  If we aren't aware of our spiritual blind spots, not only will we hurt ourselves, we'll hurt others, too.  Dr. Caplan describes these spiritual diseases as transmittable - we can infect others with our spiritual deformities.  Our sneezes pass on our diseases.  How significant, then, for us to be aware of our own issues and work hard to deal with them effectively.  It's good for everyone in our lives!  The health of a spiritual community is only as good as the health of each individual's personal spirituality.

So here are Dr. Caplan's 10 spiritually transmitted diseases.  Ask yourself which one(s) you tend to suffer from.

1. Fast-Food Spirituality: "Mix spirituality with a culture that celebrates speed, multitasking and instant gratification and the result is likely to be fast-food spirituality. Fast-food spirituality is a product of the common and understandable fantasy that relief from the suffering of our human condition can be quick and easy. One thing is clear, however: spiritual transformation cannot be had in a quick fix."

And I would even add this caution for Christians:  though belief in the grace of Jesus is hugely significant to building confidence and security (we can't work our way to God's favor and the Next Life - it's a gift), grace is no substitute for the intentional discipline of applying that grace to every aspect of our lives.  Transformation doesn't happen in us spontaneously or magically.  It takes effort, determination, and practice.  Healthy, transformational spirituality cannot be purchased in a drive-through, fast-food delivery system.

2. Faux Spirituality: "Faux spirituality is the tendency to talk, dress and act as we imagine a spiritual person would. It is a kind of imitation spirituality that mimics spiritual realization in the way that leopard-skin fabric imitates the genuine skin of a leopard."

This is true because deep spirituality works from the inside out.  It deals with motives and values, feelings and thoughts, not just behaviors.  Even Jesus, in commenting on many of the religious professionals of his day, called them "white-washed tombs; cups that were clean on the outside but dirty on the inside."  Their kind of spirituality was external only - what you see on the outside is what matters most, not who you are on the inside.  That kind of spirituality was not acceptable to Jesus.

3. Confused Motivations: "Although our desire to grow is genuine and pure, it often gets mixed with lesser motivations, including the wish to be loved, the desire to belong, the need to fill our internal emptiness, the belief that the spiritual path will remove our suffering and spiritual ambition, the wish to be special, to be better than, to be 'the one.'"

Have you ever asked yourself, what tends to motivate my actions when I'm around other people?  Is my spirituality being driven by healthy motivations?

4. Identifying with Spiritual Experiences: "In this disease, the ego identifies with our spiritual experience and takes it as its own, and we begin to believe that we are embodying insights that have arisen within us at certain times. In most cases, it does not last indefinitely, although it tends to endure for longer periods of time in those who believe themselves to be enlightened and/or who function as spiritual teachers."

5. The Spiritualized Ego: "This disease occurs when the very structure of the egoic personality becomes deeply embedded with spiritual concepts and ideas. The result is an egoic structure that is 'bullet-proof.' When the ego becomes spiritualized, we are invulnerable to help, new input, or constructive feedback. We become impenetrable human beings and are stunted in our spiritual growth, all in the name of spirituality."

Perhaps this explains why oftentimes it's spiritual or religious people who simply can't be argued with.  They know "the truth" and they believe they're embodying it, which makes them right and everyone else wrong.  They're already on "the way" so what can anyone else teach them, especially those who don't have "the truth" like they do?  They've allowed their identities to become completely enmeshed with their spirituality - so if their spirituality is threatened in any way, their identity feels threatened.  So they cannot allow their spirituality to be questioned.  And they will fight to keep their "rightness" and certainty.

6. Mass Production of Spiritual Teachers: "There are a number of current trendy spiritual traditions that produce people who believe themselves to be at a level of spiritual enlightenment, or mastery, that is far beyond their actual level. This disease functions like a spiritual conveyor belt: put on this glow, get that insight, and -- bam! -- you're enlightened and ready to enlighten others in similar fashion. The problem is not that such teachers instruct but that they represent themselves as having achieved spiritual mastery."

Contrary to many church's religious zeal and methodology, you cannot mass produce spirituality through attempts at mass movements or mass conversions.  And genuine spirituality is not a "cookie-cutter" life where everyone looks and acts and believes the same or where everyone only has to utter the same words in a simplified formula.  Authentic spirituality looks different in different people.  It's achieved differently because everyone is unique.  Embodied spirituality

7. Spiritual Pride: "Spiritual pride arises when the practitioner, through years of labored effort, has actually attained a certain level of wisdom and uses that attainment to justify shutting down to further experience. A feeling of 'spiritual superiority' is another symptom of this spiritually transmitted disease. It manifests as a subtle feeling that 'I am better, more wise and above others because I am spiritual.'"

I find it significant that the primary spiritual teachers and leaders from the major spiritual traditions (people like Jesus, Abraham, Buddha, Confucius, Mohammad) were people of great humility.  Jesus commented about his spiritual life by saying, "I assure you, the Son can do nothing by himself.  He does only what he sees the Father doing."  No wonder, on the eve of his death, in an upper room where he and his disciples had gathered to celebrate the Passover meal, when it became clear that there was no servant to wash their dusty feet, he took off his outer robe, picked up a towel, and began to wash his disciples' feet.  Genuine spirituality is not driven by pride but by authentic humility.

8. Group Mind: "Also described as groupthink, cultic mentality or ashram disease, group mind is an insidious virus that contains many elements of traditional co-dependence. A spiritual group makes subtle and unconscious agreements regarding the correct ways to think, talk, dress, and act. Individuals and groups infected with 'group mind' reject individuals, attitudes, and circumstances that do not conform to the often unwritten rules of the group."

Every authentic spiritual tradition encourages inclusivity and compassion as core to the spiritual life.  Ironic, then, that so many religious groups develop an "insider" vs. "outside" mentality - an "us" vs. "them" worldview.  "You can only be here if you become like us!"

9. The Chosen-People Complex: "The chosen people complex is not limited to Jews. It is the belief that 'Our group is more spiritually evolved, powerful, enlightened and, simply put, better than any other group.' There is an important distinction between the recognition that one has found the right path, teacher or community for themselves, and having found The One."

This deadly spiritual disease has been the motivator of countless persecutions, executions, and shunnings in the name of God.  The paradigm is, "If we have been chosen, then you can't have been chosen, too.  For you to be equally chosen like us, you have to join us, believe what we believe, live like us."  So the whole mission of the "chosen people" is to bring everyone else into alignment with them.  And if they resist, they are resisting God.  So we either have to "fix" them, or walk away from them lest we get contaminated by them.  This is a deeply destructive spiritual disease that can often be terminal for both parties.

10. The Deadly Virus: "I Have Arrived": "This disease is so potent that it has the capacity to be terminal and deadly to our spiritual evolution. This is the belief that 'I have arrived' at the final goal of the spiritual path. Our spiritual progress ends at the point where this belief becomes crystallized in our psyche, for the moment we begin to believe that we have reached the end of the path, further growth ceases."

I'm reminded of the super-disciple of Jesus, Paul, who once wrote about himself that he had not arrived.  He was still on the journey.  And so he kept his gaze on the one he was following, Jesus, in order to stay focused and remain moving forward.  Spirituality is not about arriving, it's about traveling; it's about a transformational process and journey that continues one's whole life.  That reality should produce great humility in us.

So which of these 10 spiritually transmitted diseases do you struggle with the most?  Is there one you tend to be infected with more than the others?  How does the disease manifest itself in you?  What are your primary symptoms?

Dr. Caplan's partner, Marc Gafni (an author and teacher), makes this statement:  "The essence of love is perception.  Therefore the essence of self love is self perception. You can only fall in love with someone you can see clearly--including yourself. To love is to have eyes to see. It is only when you see yourself clearly that you can begin to love yourself."

And when you and I begin to truly love ourselves, we are empowered to love others in healthy, meaningful, and compassionate ways.

So are there any spiritual vaccinations we can take to prevent and/or heal ourselves from these spiritually transmitted diseases?  In my next blog, we'll take a look at some powerful antidotes that have the potential of effecting profound, honest, authentic spiritual growth and transformation.  Stay tuned!

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