A comprehensive guide for creating a daily spiritual practice, Growing Your Inner Light gives specific advice on developing a unique spiritual path that fits exactly who you are, and what you hope to grow into as a spiritual being. Author Lara Owen clearly shows how a personalized practice can open the doors to living fully with integrity and to feeling connected with the surrounding world.
For readers yearning for a sense of inner peace, and a direct experience of spiritual meaning and connection, Growing Your Inner Light is a groundbreaking, transformative journey through thirteen phases of your growth, including: developing intuition; creating sacred spaces and altars; understanding your dreams; exploring the importance of retreats, meditation, and rituals.
Growing Your Inner Light gives readers the freedom to integrate from different traditions — and develop new ones — in order to create their own spiritual tradition. One former student of Lara’s program shared that she feels “less like a spiritual tourist and more like a pilgrim.” Spiritual development is a natural part of being human, and a vital way to expand the intensity of your inner light throughout your life.
Lara Owen grew up in England and has traveled the world to study with traditional Chinese doctors, Native American and Mexican shamans, Tibetan lamas, Swiss and American psychologists, and many other teachers. She has worked as a doctor of Chinese medicine and as a psychotherapist, and now consults on personal and spiritual development with individuals and institutions. She is the author of several books including the acclaimed Her Blood is Gold.
Anyone thirsting for a more intimate and disciplined life of prayer will find a rich wellspring in The Cup of Our Life. In this original and practical book Joyce Rupp shares how the ordinary cups that we use each day can become sacred vessels that connect us with life and draw us ever closer to God. She explores how the cup is a rich symbol of life, with it emptiness and fullness, its brokenness and flaws, and all of its blessings.
This creative guide for individual and group prayer offers six weekly themes based on different images of the cup. The open cup, the chipped cup, the broken cup, the blessing cup … each in turn becomes a teacher in prayer. For each day the author offers a short inviting essay, a wisdom saying, a scripture verse, a brief meditation, questions for journaling, and a suggestion for keeping the theme close to one’s heart throughout the day. The reflective art that accompanies each theme offers yet another inspiration for prayer. The Cup of Our Life can also be used with groups that meet regularly for spiritual growth. Simple, helpful suggestions for group sharing and ritual are provided for each of the six weeks.
The Cup of Our Life will both revitalize and enrich your relationships with the Divine.
Thoughts from the Author…
“…I have found the cup to be a powerful teacher for my inner life. The ordinariness of the cup reminds me that my personal transformation occurs in the common crevices of each day. The cup is an apt image for the inner process of growth. The cup has been a reminder of my spiritual thirst. As I’ve held it, filled it, drunk from it, emptied it and washed it, I’ve learned that it is through my ordinary human experineces that my thirst for God is quenched. In the cup I see life, with its emptiness, fullness, brokenness, flaws, and blessings.
A cup is a container for holding something. Whatever it holds has to eventually be emptied out so that something more can be put into it. I have learned that I cannot always expect my life to by full. There has to be some emptying, some pouring out, if I am to make room for the new. The spiritual journey is like that–a constant process of emptying and filling, of giving and receiving, of accepting and letting go.
“…the main purpose of a cup is to have its contents given away.”
The cup has taught me many valuable lessons for my spiritual growth. I have learned that my life holds stale things that need to be discarded and that sometimes my life feels as wounded as a broken cup. I have learned that I have flaws, chips, and stains, just as any well-used cup may have, but that these markings of a well traveled life need not prevent me from being a valuable gift for others. I have learned that the contents of my life are meant to be constantly given and shared in a generous gesture of compassion, just as the main purpose of a cup is to have its contents given away. I have especially learned gratitude for all those moments when the unexpected has transformed my life into an abundant cup of blessings.
“…The spiritual life is a journey toward becoming whole, a day-to-day movement of continually growing into the person we are meant to be.”
(The) yearning for greater spiritual oneness with God is the foundation of The Cup of Our Life. I hope that this six-week guide, which is centered around the many facets of the cup, will inspire you to grow in your relationship with God and will fill your cup of life to overflowing. – Joyce Rupp
Why am I here?
What does a life worth living look like?
What is the higher intelligence trying to express through me?
In this time of global change and uncertainty, of spiritual indirection, Americans are asking these age-old questions with renewed curiosity. There’s a thirst for meaning and purpose—a dawning realization that happiness isn’t a commodity that can be bought with a gold card. Fulfillment and joy arise naturally from creative and compassionate action– from the understanding that all life is interconnected and guided by a higher intelligence. Our personal choices make a difference, and when they are spiritually inspired even the smallest action serves a larger whole.
Sacred texts ranging from the Torah to the New Testament, the Tao Te Ching to the Buddhist scriptures, the Vedantas to the Koran, speak of making life-enhancing choices where a force greater than the individual flows through us and informs our thoughts and actions.
In this book we’ll focus on the three classic aspects of living such a spiritually guided life:
(1) alignment: maintaining a direct and personal connection to the Source of our Being;
(2) discernment: distinguishing the movement of Spirit in our lives from our own wants, fears and social conditioning; and
(3) action: making our best, most inspired contribution to the evolution of life.
Joan Z. Borysenko, Ph.D. Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., is one of the leading experts on stress, spirituality, and the mind/body connection. She has a doctorate in medical sciences from Harvard Medical School, is a licensed clinical psychologist, and is the co-founder and former director of the Mind/body Clinical Programs at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School.
Joan Borysenko Talks About Being Open to Spiritual Guidance
By Arielle Ford
Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., is a pioneer in integrative medicine and a world-renowned expert in the mind-body connection. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, and the author or co-author of 13 other books. Her most recent is Your Soul’s Compass: What Is Spiritual Guidance? We caught up with her to discuss her views on spirituality.
Gaiam: How do you define spirituality?
Joan Borysenko: To me, spirituality is essentially all about love, kindness, and recognizing that in the end we’re not the doer. In other words, we’re not in control of everything, and there’s a larger field of intelligence that has a flow. That flow moves toward the potential good for everyone. Spirituality means being able to listen for and cooperate with that flow so that we are co-creators. That requires deep listening, the willingness to let go of the blocks to guidance, our pride, our fear, our envy, all of those kinds of things.
In your book Your Soul’s Compass, you interviewed 27 sages, people from various religious and spiritual backgrounds. Why? What is this book about?
This is a book about waking up. It’s about self-realization, and recognizing that in cooperating with the larger intelligence, we potentially bring forth not only the best within ourselves, our own joy and happiness, but also the ability to cooperate in bringing forth a better future for our family, for our community, and hopefully for the world in these very chaotic and troubled times. We asked the sages—a collection of rabbis, priests, Buddhists, Hindus, shamans and Sufis—a variety of questions, everything from what are the practices that might enable us to listen to and act upon guidance, to what are the blocks to listening to and carrying out that guidance. And the really big question that so many people have, how on earth do you tell the difference between your own ego, your own desires, your own agendas, your own past conditioning? It’s a question of discernment. And that’s important because discernment may be the key spiritual practice.
What I would hope we would birth is a world of compassion, where people could find the means to stop their own personal suffering.
In working together, we could end some of the suffering in the world.
What an amazing experience for a little girl to have. I know that trusting the unknown is a theme of your book, and obviously, it’s a great fear for many people. Why should we court the unknown?
Because we’re always walking into it. The truth is, we don’t know from one minute to next what is going to happen. The sages of all traditions say that we simply have to learn how to be present in the moment, this moment, because this moment is the only moment we know. And in understanding that, we can walk into the unknown. Because here’s the paradox: The ego always wants to control. It wants to know. It has plans. It has agendas. And, of course, we need some of that.
But at a deeper level, our agendas become like boxes that we put ourselves into, and all we see are the bars of our own self-imposed box. Letting go and going into the unknown and saying, “It’s a mystery, I trust whatever is going to happen next is happening to me in some service of waking up.” And that opens us up to what the world of infinite possibilities can be. So, living in the unknown is life outside the box. While we may not like it, in fact it’s the only choice we have.
One of the questions you asked the sages was, What are we evolving to? What do you think we’re evolving to?
I would say we are evolving into a place where we can express our spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is the wisdom and compassion of creation itself, so that what we’re evolving to is to become conscious co-creators with the divine. What I would hope we would birth is a world of compassion, where people could find the means to stop their own personal suffering. In working together, we could end some of the suffering in the world.
What practices can you suggest to help people open themselves up to spiritual guidance?
First of all, trust. Without the trust that there is an educating function in the universe that guides us in our journey of awakening, then who’s going to listen to guidance? Second, we need time for stillness, whether it’s 20 minutes of retreat walking in nature each day, or 20 minutes of yoga or qigong or meditation, or going away for a weekend or a week. Times of stillness and letting go are very important. What is the higher intelligence trying to express through us? – Joan Borysenko
Joan Z. Borysenko, Ph.D., is an internationally known speaker and consultant in women’s health and spirituality, integrative medicine, and the mind/body connection. She’s the author of numerous books and audios, including a New York Times bestseller.
As a cardiologist,Dr. Terry Gordon dealt with life-and-death circumstances on a daily basis. He learned that life is precious and tenuous; it can change in an instant. Such a dramatic shift occurred when his son, Tyler, was involved in a car accident, sustaining a severe spinal-cord injury that left him paralyzed. Leading his family through the experience, Terry’s journey resulted in a spiritual awakening to a clearer understanding of life and the truths it has to offer.
Terry has learned that our experiences become calamities only if we make the conscious decision to make tragedies out of them. Rather than lamenting the so-called adversities, we can choose to be grateful for them, embracing them as gifts from the Divine. These gifts provide fertile soil for growth and enlightenment, offering us the opportunity to transform turmoil, disappointment, and suffering into understanding, insight, and resolve . . . and such gifts are presented to you in No Storm Lasts Forever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Terry Gordon, a Cleveland Clinic–trained cardiologist, practiced within mainstream medicine for over two decades. Named the American Heart Association’s National Physician of the Year in 2002, Terry is nationally recognized in matters of the heart. As a motivational speaker, he has shared the stage with Dr. Wayne Dyer; as a musician, he is the co-host of Docs Who Rock, a United Way event. He is currently spearheading a national campaign called The Josh Miller HEARTS Act, which will place Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) in every school in the country, protecting from sudden cardiac arrest our most precious resource: our children. Website http://www.drterrygordon.com
No storm lasts forever – Dr Terry Gordon
In his soon to be published book by Hay House No Storm Lasts Forever, Terry shares with us from personal experience how a so-called tragedy in one’s life can actually be a blessing in disguise.
“When adversity comes our way, it is how we respond to that difficulty that determines who we are. Our life experiences become calamities only if we make the conscious decision to make tragedies out of them. We might just as easily choose to view them as opportunities for personal growth.”
“The difficult days we experience can become the driving force of change. Rather than lamenting adversity, we can choose to be grateful for it. We can embrace and accept it as a gift from the Divine. Within these gifts are the lessons that can promote our development and maturation. By being grateful for adversity, we can see it as an opportunity to transform turmoil, disappointment, or suffering into understanding, insight, or resolve.” – http://www.drterrygordon.com/
Keynsham Transition in Bristol UK hosted this inspiring talk by Satish Kumar on reverential ecology, a must see for those interested in how to relate to our planet.
Snippet taken from Resurgence article; “Satish Kumar is a former monk and long-term peace and environment activist. He has been quietly setting the Global Agenda for change for over 50 years. He was just nine when he left his family home to join the wandering Jains and 18 when he decided he could achieve more back in the world, campaigning for land reform in India and working to turn Gandhi’s vision of a renewed India and a peaceful world into reality.”
An overview of reverential ecology can be found here:
A beautiful Question about the Nature of Love towards Maharishi and Maharishi’s answer:
Guru Dev and our love for Maharishi
Rishikesh, 1968
Question: Something comes frequently to my mind, but I do not really dare to ask you that. But in the end I probably will ask you anyway.
MAHARISHI: Be bold. (laughter)
Question: It is very personal and it has to do with the Holy Tradition. I have more feelings and affection towards you than to Guru Dev. Guru Dev is more like a passed away grandfather to me, someone I do not really know.
MAHARISHI: A very scientific evaluation, it is very natural.
Question: It don’t feel uncomfortable to do the offerings to him, but I don’t know how to have feelings of an overflowing heart towards someone I don’t really know. Is it possible to kind of transfer the love towards you also to Guru Dev?
MAHARISHI: Yes. The greatness of the gardener is in the full bloom of the beautiful flower. And that is it – we enjoy the flower and hold high the gardener.(laughter) The gardener is not there, just from the flower we know he must have been good and great.
Love for me is very natural, it is just very natural. But what we are faced with here is the effect that the attitude of the initiators is going to produce in the preservation of the knowledge. The attitude of the initiators, generation after generation, in the preservation of the wisdom.
Reverence to me is alright, but what I intended from the beginning was that – personal I am just an individual, just out of nothing – but something that is coming on from times immemorial, this great Holy Tradition coming on from times immemorial and because it speaks of truth, it represents the truth, and that is why it is coming on.
And therefore this movement which has in view thousands of years of human population, should be tied down to something eternal. Fortunately for the world Guru Dev happened to be Shankaracharya. And therefore we got both the things – not only the knowledge, but the most valuable tradition has been attached to this knowledge.
When I started the movement I could have started a religion. So many religions have been coming up and coming up. But I thought another religion will be another river flowing towards the ocean. It won’t present to the world the source of all the rivers, which again ultimately is the ocean itself. All the clouds they come from the ocean and then the streams go back to the ocean.
Just for that thing with thousands of years ahead in view, I thought not the person but the photo of him, who has been the source of this wisdom for me, Guru Dev. Directly he is the source of wisdom for us, very directly. I know the reality of all this. It has only been due to the innocent surrender- innocent sense of service, just innocent sense of service.
And his personality was so great, it is all divine. And just as the midday sun, the blazing sun, is just…that great sun of the divine effulgence, it just held me gripped in his grandeur. And very naturally the transparency of all that he stood for. And all what he stood for was pure divinity, pure knowledge, eternity, absolute.
This imbibing of the knowledge of integration of life in totality, in completeness, is from that level of innocent surrender. It is now that I am able to analyse the whole thing and see the mechanics which have brought the whole wisdom in its completeness from both points, practical and theoretical.
During those days I was just living Guru Dev. I was living him in my life. That’ s innocent. And it was this that has grabbed the wisdom. It was a great fortune for all the future times that he was taken to be the Shankaracharya, installed as Shankaracharya. Therefore whatever wisdom came, it came in all the dignity and fullness, complete fullness of it.
And that is the reason why for us it is of immense value that we tie down our feelings and our emotions and our understanding, everything to him who really presents the last point of the tradition nearest to us. Very, very important. It is absolutely important.
And fine, it is no harm singing of the glory of the bulb that is there, but all the glory is transferred to the powerhouse. Actually electricity is generated there. (laughs) And therefore not an individual, but the most illumined star in the galaxy of stars. And to him we point our mind and heart and this. It is fabulous to have that thing…
When my husband was diagnosed in July 2009 with esophageal cancer — a disease with a 25% survival rate beyond 18 months — my initial instinct was to talk about inner strength. “You’re going to beat this,” I told him. “You’re strong. You’re healthy. You’re young.” I think I was trying to convince myself that he would be ok just as much as I was trying to comfort him.
In his serene way (the neurotic guy from NJ I’d married had become a lot more zen after discovering meditation in his early twenties), he immediately said to me, with a smile, that he was fine, that he was going to be okay, and that he was really more worried about us, his family. I was astounded. As physicians, we were taught in medical school about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.
“You can’t go right to acceptance!” I remember saying to him. “You have to be angry about this! You have to fight this!”
“I don’t feel the need to fight cancer,” he replied calmly. “Fight comes out of fear of dying. And I don’t have that fear.”
Don’t get me wrong. He was not exactly happy about having cancer. Of course, if he had a choice, he would have preferred to live, and not leave his loved ones. But I found it so incredibly amazing how at peace he was with this journey – not sure where it would take him, but going along with the ride anyway. He wasn’t fighting the disease; he wasn’t battling it. He was just living with it. While he was going through chemo and radiation, which were brutal, I felt helpless that I couldn’t help him. In addition to being a physician — a healer by trade — I’m someone who likes to be doing something all the time. It was hard for me to stand by and just hold his hand and love him. It didn’t feel like enough.
Throughout treatment, and in the ensuing months, there was a calm that came over him. He had always taught in his workshops and lectures to physicians, medical students and many others in health care that “today is a good day to die,” an age-old Native American adage. I think he found it curiously satisfying that in the face of death, he could continue to live each day as he had in the past 30 years, loving and appreciating family, friends, and life, and living without fear. As he reflected back over his life, he realized that he was not the same person as that anxious child growing up in New Jersey. Moreover, the lessons and skills he learned throughout the latter half of his life, living fully, with love and gratitude, freed him from feeling fear of the unknown. Asked if he had a bucket list when he was first diagnosed with the cancer, Lee replied without hesitation that he really did not. There was no need to travel to exotic countries, climb mountains, jump out of planes. He had lived his life, having loved and been loved. No regrets. This was the basis for his book.
On Sept. 20th, 2011, my husband Lee Lipsenthal–physician, teacher, healer, devoted father of two–passed away from complications of metastatic lower esophageal cancer. The miracle that I had hoped for did not happen. He was prepared to die, but I was not prepared to let him go. I miss him terribly every day. I have read, and re-read Lee’s book many times. I can hear his clear, strong yet soothing voice recounting our story, and my heart aches for him.
But I also take great comfort in reading Enjoy Every Sandwich. I am grateful for my life with this remarkable man, who loved and adored me unconditionally, and taught me to unconditionally love and adore him. I am reminded of our first dates, when at the end of an evening together, my abdominal muscles were sore from laughing. He continued to make me laugh throughout our married life, and I am grateful that he taught me how to savor every aspect of our life. I will always remember his genuine smile and hearty laugh.
Before he passed away, I promised Lee that I would help him spread his life-affirming message of the importance of practicing gratitude, connecting with our loved ones, and living each day to the fullest, to enjoy every sandwich, every ingredient, be it bitter, sour, spicy, or sweet, layered in that sandwich of life–a guaranteed path to a life well-lived.
Ed. Note: Lee Lipsenthal was a longtime IONS board member as well as a gifted integrative medicine physician, who dedicated his life to helping doctors and others find the source of healing within (read our tribute here). He passed away on September 20, 2011, just weeks before his book was published. It is a fitting legacy to a man who touched the hearts of many.
“Being fully alive has nothing to do with the presence or absence of disease.”
—from Enjoy Every Sandwich
In my journey over the last few years, the question of who I really am arose powerfully and profoundly. Am I the physical being I see in the mirror each morning? Am I a soul living in this body that will move from body to body over many lifetimes? Is this life just an illusion?
Defining the self by bodily limits comes into question in a very simple experiment often performed in Psych 101 classes around the country. A person is asked to sit at a table with one hand above the table and one hand below it. On the table is a rubber hand, placed where the person’s real hand would have been. The subject’s hand under the table is stroked with a feather while the rubber hand above is being stroked. The subjects are confused about which hand is real. They feel the tickle of the feather in the rubber hand and sometimes try to pull it away, perceiving the rubber hand as the real hand. When the fingers of the rubber hand are bent backward, these individuals fear pain and withdraw the real hand.
The substitution in the subject’s mind of the rubber hand for the real hand occurs because the brain creates an internal imaginary construct of what the body is and where its boundaries lie. To keep us from hurting ourselves, the brain needs to know where the body is at all times, and to do this, it relies especially on the senses of touch and vision. You need to know how far to extend your arm or withdraw it in any task or emergency, but this construct, created by the brain, can be fooled by a rubber hand. Our definition of the self can get recreated rapidly by the brain, so that even the brain doesn’t know who we are all the time. How can we define ourselves by our physical bodies when this definition is flexible even to our own brains?
In addition, our bodies change over time. Our cells are being replaced constantly as new cells grow and old cells die off; none of the cells in your body are the exact same cells they were a few years ago. You can tell this by looking at an old photograph of yourself. You look different now than you did when you were younger, yet you would say that you are still you. We change, we grow, we gain weight, we lose weight, we get injured, we heal. Our bodies are in flux. Clearly, the body alone can’t define the self.
Can we define ourselves by our thoughts and emotions? Ask yourself if you think about and see the world the same way you did twenty years ago. Have your perceptions changed? Have your beliefs changed? Have your motivations changed? Has your knowledge changed? Your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions change from moment to moment, year to year, and decade to decade, yet you are still you. We can’t therefore say that the true self is defined by our thoughts, beliefs, or emotions.
I love the following exercise. Close your eyes and say the following to yourself, repeating each statement three times:
I have a body, but I am not my body.
I have feelings, but I am not my feelings.
I have desires, but I am not my desires.
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.
I am the self, the center of consciousness.
When I am too wrapped up in a thought, an emotion, or a desire, I do this for about a minute, and it helps distance me from the thought or emotion. During my radiation treatment, I often repeat, “I have pain, but I am not my pain.” It is a simple yet effective way of lessening any experience of pain.
There must be a broader definition of the self that transcends the body, emotions, and thoughts. I like to think of this as the spiritual self, the transpersonal self in psychological language, or the one self—a self somehow beyond the physical, beyond the body or mind. This one self is connected to our sense of spirituality, our sense of connection with others and the universe as a whole. It is to some degree selfless. You might get a sense of the one self while walking in nature, listening to music, praying, or meditating. In that moment, you lose your mundane definition of yourself. You may experience this as a connection with a higher power. You may even have a sense of this one self when feeling love toward another or holding your child in your arms. The usual boundaries drop away, and for a moment you become one, or as Bob Marley sang, “one love, one heart.”
I believe that we evolve naturally toward this one self if we allow it to happen. We begin our lives vulnerable and depend on our parents to feed us, clean us, and comfort us. When we need these things, we cry to get our needs met. Survival is our primary concern; we are always surveying for danger and seeking safety as we age.
In our early childhood we are also social beings. We learn that when we smile, our parents smile. This gives us a sense of protection and safety. Soon we learn to expand this interaction to others, and our community grows. We learn to adopt behaviors that we see in others, allowing us to fit in and feel safe within our community. This gives us a greater sense of safety and enhances our likelihood of survival.
At some time in your life, you begin to realize that you are not made up of just the component parts of your personality. You also realize that you are not satisfied with the life that was prescribed for you by family and community. You realize that something else is needed to satisfy your soul; your one self is calling out to you for something more, something vague, something unknown, something different. You wake up to the feeling that this life may not be enough.
I believe that this restlessness, this pressure to change, moves us to evolve naturally toward this one self if we allow it. Our human capacity to change and grow over time opens a new door of possibility: a more fluid definition of the self. Like a tree that can bend with the wind, we become more able to deal with life’s changes as they arise. As you continue to push and grow, you have more one -self or selfless experiences, connections with nature, with God, with a sense of spirituality, with unconditional love, compassion, and service. You can begin to move beyond simple survival. You are no longer attached to the you of the moment. You become open to all possibilities. For me, it is this one self that is not identified with cancer, pain, or fear. Cancer is just a physical event of the moment—it just is what it is.
What Bucket List?
An event that changed my view of so-called bucket lists occurred in the middle of my treatment. My friend Mark, his wife, Anna, and their family came to visit us from Pittsburgh on one of my chemo breaks. Knowing that my life might be shorter than expected and knowing my love of rock ’n’ roll, Mark asked me one day what band I would most like to see before I died. Laughing, I said The Beatles (I knew I might have to wait until after I died for that one!).
When I was a seven-year-old sitting on the floor, two feet from a round, black-and-white TV, watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, my life changed. The energy, vibrancy, and passion coming out of the tiny TV speaker resonated through my little body, creating a passion for rock ’n’ roll that still lives.
Mark said, “Would you like to meet Paul McCartney?” I said, “Sure,” knowing that this was an impossible task for a guy who is not in the music industry and a difficult one even for those who are connected. He called me a month later to tell me that he was working on it and had a plan. He had gotten in touch with Paul’s pilot, whom he knew from Pittsburgh, and was trying to make it happen.
I was laughing my head off with delight. Although meeting Sir Paul would have been on my bucket list, I had something better: a friend who would go well out of his way to do something to make me happy. Just knowing this was a huge petal in my pocket.
I no longer have a bucket list. I have love in my life. This is far greater than seeing the Pyramids, climbing mountains, eating Thai food in Thailand, or any other physical activity that might be fun to experience. I am loved, and I have loved. My bucket list is complete.
I believe we are all born with the capacity for gratitude, but many times we get in our own way. Two common examples of this are pessimism and perfectionism. Pessimists and perfectionists may have things to be grateful for in life, but they will rapidly find a reason why something is not right or perfect or how it could have been better. Their imaginal minds search for mistakes or flaws. In doing so, they immediately jump to the negative without enjoying even a brief moment of gratitude. “Yes, but . . .” is their language. They can’t enjoy a sandwich because it has too much mayonnaise or too little lettuce or the bread is too hard or too soft.
On the other end of the spectrum are those who ignore difficulty until their lives fall apart. I often see this in people with significant spiritual lives and practices. They blind themselves to life’s realities by diving deeper into their practices: “If I just meditate and do my yoga, this will all go away.” I have seen many people who are not aware of themselves or the harm they do to others and use spiritual practice to avoid their real lives.
My friend Nita and I refer to this as spiritual bypass. People use spiritual practices and beliefs to excuse the harmful things they do to others and avoid or bypass who they truly are. Gurus and priests do this unconsciously to avoid the dark aspects of their personalities. This is how child abuse and sexual affairs can occur among religious leaders. They have not dared to look at their shadows. They can enjoy their sandwiches, but while they eat, the ceiling falls down on them. Ignorance is not always bliss.
Gratitude practice means facing reality and gaining awareness of the many aspects of yourself: your inner self, your one self, your subpersonalities, and those of the people around you. It means understanding and embracing your shadow. It means letting go of a need to control yourself and others, it means growing compassion for those who have hurt you, it means being aware of the difficult parts of your life and still being able to reach into your pocket on a dark, snowy night just before you leap from a bridge to find that small, innocent petal. Gratitude is the ultimate expression of hope.
A healthy practice of gratitude is simple. You don’t need to whitewash the bad; just remind yourself of the good now and then. Remember, what you look for is what you find.
As medical director of the famed Preventive Medicine Research Institute, Lee Lipsenthal helped thousands of patients struggling with disease to overcome their fears of pain and death and to embrace a more joyful way of living. This is his story.
I often teach that Buddhism is about how to be truly happy, so I have been studying the new research field of “happiness studies,” which focuses on the objective measures and causes of happiness. Researchers have found three factors that reliably increase happiness as we grow older — gratitude, generosity and reframing (seeing your situation from a more positive perspective). Not surprisingly, the Buddhist tradition offers these same three factors as spiritual practices for cultivating happiness. I would add two more — curiosity and flexibility.
Gratitude. When I ask audiences what they like about being older, people often answer “Gratitude,” and then say what they are grateful for: grandchildren, good health, free time, wearing what they want, the chance to travel, giving back to the community. One person included the ham sandwich she had just had for lunch. I have an exercise I call the “thank you” prayer. People repeat the words “thank you” silently to themselves and watch what comes up. It’s amazing how many and how readily images of gratitude come to mind.
Generosity. One happiness study reported that if giving weren’t free, drug companies could market a great new drug called “give back” instead of Prozac. It’s scientifically proven: giving back and helping others makes us feel happier and more content. Giving is a universal spiritual value taught by every religion, and the desire to give back naturally increases as we age. It is part of our emerging role as community elders — something we can do into our sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond. Giving is truly a spiritual practice, and it naturally lifts our spirits. My new book Aging As A Spiritual Practice: a Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser offers many tangible methods to cultivate a generous spirit. Among these is a contemplative exercise from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that allows us inwardly picture recipients of our generosity and direct compassionate feeling toward them.
Reframing. Aging includes its share of reverses, losses and sorrows. What makes the difference is our attitude about them. If a bad knee means we can’t jog anymore, we needn’t despair; we can take up swimming. If we lost money in the recession, we can cherish what we still have. If we become ill, we rejoice when we recover. I have developed a meditation called “Vertical Time” that focuses on the positive aspects of the present, rather than regrets of the past and worries about the future. We tend to think of time as linear and horizontal, but it is also vertical — one breath at a time. Vertical Time is really breath-based reframing.
Curiosity. Curiosity is an important attitude to cultivate as we age. There’s a tendency to hunker down in our old familiar routines. It’s good to resist that temptation. Physical exercise grows new muscle, mental activity grows new brain cells, emotional engagement lifts the spirit. Curiosity keeps us young; we need to cherish it. If you see an interesting ad for a wildlife class, consider taking it. If you go into a bookstore, try browsing in sections you don’t usually visit. If you haven’t seen a friend in too many years, reach out. Children are naturally curious, and we can be too.
Flexibility. Things change as we age, and some of those changes are irrevocable. Our youthful stamina is gone forever; a dying friend will never return. In the face of these changes, it’s important that we not become rigid and stuck in our ways. With every reversal comes new opportunity. No matter what the issue, no matter how big the problem, there is always something constructive that you can do. Never give up, never let aging get the better of you. This is how the “extraordinary elderly” do it — the ones who have beaten the odds to enjoy their old age to the very end.
The Spiritual Life. A spiritual perspective on aging is not just for personal transformation; it is a medicine for longevity and health. Research shows that people with an active involvement in church or spiritual community live on average seven years longer than those who don’t.
These five practices for aging well really work; science says so, common sense says so, and every religion says so. Aging As A Spiritual Practice builds on these truths to treat the process of aging as an opportunity for inner transformation. We deserve to enjoy our aging; it is our reward in the continuing adventure of living a whole and fulsome life.
A comprehensive guide for creating a daily spiritual practice, Growing Your Inner Light gives specific advice on developing a unique spiritual path that fits exactly who you are, and what you hope to grow into as a spiritual being. Author Lara Owen clearly shows how a personalized practice can open the doors to living fully with integrity and to feeling connected with the surrounding world.
From the publisher…
As a cardiologist,Dr. Terry Gordon dealt with life-and-death circumstances on a daily basis. He learned that life is precious and tenuous; it can change in an instant. Such a dramatic shift occurred when his son, Tyler, was involved in a car accident, sustaining a severe spinal-cord injury that left him paralyzed. Leading his family through the experience, Terry’s journey resulted in a spiritual awakening to a clearer understanding of life and the truths it has to offer.
