There is a factor in your health which is often left out of the healthcare picture: your mind.  Once you realize that your thoughts cause biochemical shifts in your brain, which in turn cause reactions throughout your entire physiology, your mind becomes a health practice.

There is nothing new in this fact.  What is new is the greater degree to which we understand the thought-brain-body interaction.  The most significant interaction is around fearful thoughts which lead to a fearful body.

Fearful thoughts cause your body to go into the instinctual fight/flight/freeze reaction.  Depending upon your emotional style, you react to fear by becoming angry and aggressive (fight), trying to avoid and escape (flight) or by disconnecting and going numb (freeze).   Typically, we go in and out of these reactions several times a day, with their negative effects on our heart, blood pressure, gut, hormones, and neck and back muscles.  If fight/flight/freeze reactivity becomes an unchecked pattern, we show up one day at our doctor’s office with what’s been euphemistically called a stress-related disorder.  In truth, we are showing up with a fear-related disorder.

What’s the answer to fearful thoughts?  Learning how to become skillful with them.

The skill has two aspects.  The first is to cultivate a new attitude toward fear itself.

Fear is natural and normal.  It is a hard-wired warning system in your brain ready to signal you that danger is present.  Brain imaging researchers locate this fear center in the amygdala region of the brain.  The problem is that the warning system is acutely sensitive and most of  the time tells you (in the form of fearful thoughts) about dangers that in fact aren’t real.  The pain in my shoulder turns out not to be bone cancer.   My heaviness and mental fog turns out not to be early Alzheimer’s but instead sadness over a 9/11 anniversary.

You can’t prevent such fearful thoughts.  They come on their own.  They are generated by the plain fact that we are all vulnerable beings in this world.  Our vulnerability is easily stimulated, our warning system is easily triggered, and fearful thoughts come easily into our mind.  With this information, you can cultivate a new attitude toward your fearful thoughts – you can turn toward them with understanding and empathy.

At first, that may sound odd.  Empathy toward your fears?  Wouldn’t you prefer that they just go away and never come back?  Yes, of course, and the quickest way to make them calm down and go away is to treat them with empathy.  Think about a frightened child.  Yelling at the child or ignoring him or her only makes things worse.  Turn toward the child with empathy, and everything is better.

What is the realistic basis for this attitude of empathy toward your own fears?  Your brain is working so hard to protect you, it wants you to survive and thrive, and it’s only sending you fearful thoughts as part of its hard-wired survival job.  In an odd twist, your fearful thoughts actually show how much you love life and how much you want to protect it from harm.

The second aspect of your new skill is the empathic response itself.  What does that actually look like in your inner experience?  You become aware that your mind is filled with a worry which leads to a greater fear, and you realize that your warning system has been triggered.  In that moment of awareness, you literally speak in your mind (self-talk) to the fears, kindly thanking them for trying to help you and empathizing with the tough job they have of trying to protect you from the dangers in life.

This isn’t just a quick self-help technique.  The latest brain research tells us that the executive center of the brain – responsible for calming down the amygdala (the fear center) – is the region of awareness and empathy.  By turning toward your fearful thoughts with awareness and empathy, you are actually activating and strengthening the executive center of your brain.  And every time you do this, you literally, physiologically grow new neurons in the executive center, making it even stronger in its abilities to calm down the triggered fears.

In other words, you will now be noticing and responding to your fearful thoughts without being dragged into them.  You probably already do this naturally, to some degree, but go the next step and make it a deliberate health practice.  Your body will reward you by feeling calmer and balanced more often, and your intelligence will be better able to focus on your positive purpose in this life.

It is a given that stress negatively affects our health. It is therefore important 1) to be aware that we have entered into a state of stress, and 2) to have self-care skills, such as meditation, to reduce the stress state rather than just suffer it. Without awareness, we can live in or near a state of stress all day long, even extending into a restless night and bad dreams.

The list below gives you a guideline to know if you are in a state of stress. You will notice that stress is not just perceived in your body, but in the state of your thoughts and feelings. Use this list to increase your awareness of stress and your signal to practice self-care.

Stress shows up in your mind as

• Hypervigilance
• Judgmental critique of others and/or self
• Inflexible thinking, black and white thinking
• Frantic defense of opinions
• The need to always be right
• Inflated and arrogant self-image
• Worrying
• Chronic refusal to decide, maintenance of confusion
• Inability to focus, numbed mind
• Active search for distraction
• Victimized thinking
• Isolative self-absorption
• Hyper-skepticism, cynicism

Stress shows up in your feelings as

• Easy to anger, rage
• Aggressiveness
• Fake performance of feelings
• Denial of hurt and vulnerability
• Restlessness, impatience
• Desire to dominate
• Helplessness
• Hopelessness
• Overwhelmed

Stress shows up in your body as

• Hypertense vascular system
• Tension headaches
• Gastro-intestinal disturbances such as acid reflux
• Rigid diets, anorexia
• Body armoring and stiffness, e.g., neck pain and low back pain
• Workaholism
• Willful forcing of body to exceed limits (i.e., risk taking, extreme sports)
• Spent, Low energy
• Repetitive self-soothing such as excessive masturbation
• Eating too much, stuffing

If you notice a pattern of any of these stress states in your life, it’s time to learn self-care skills such as meditation. Meditation has solid research proving its positive effect on your mind, feelings and body. In the face of a world filled with sources of stress, we are approaching a point where self-care skills such as meditation are not just a nice idea but a daily necessity.

Richard Schaub, Ph.D., is director of the Huntington Meditation and Imagery Center, Huntington NY.

Brain Research and Higher Consciousness

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands.
— David Brooks, The New York Times

In the past, higher consciousness was considered the property of religion and the territory of mystics. But we are living in a time when it is the scientifically minded seeker, not the religious believer, who is making the breakthrough discoveries about the mystery we all participate in. In Western culture, old models of the cosmos as the province of a rewarding and punishing creator are giving way to a vision of dynamic energies interacting at every level, from macro to micro: out there in an infinite universe and here within our tiny individual selves.

The popular image of the scientist is that of the preeminent rationalist, even skeptic, interested only in objective, quantifiable facts. But in truth, the scientific method originates in mystery: it developed in the 16th century as an alternative to religion, a new way for people to fathom the unfathomable. Before it emerged, university education had been reserved for the aristocracy and the clergy; the purpose of the university was to study philosophy and theology, and the method of study was rhetoric and discourse, not factual inquiry. Seekers such as Thomas Aquinas risked persecution when they broadened their search for truth to include the objective examination of nature, of things as they are.

One modern seeker who bridged science and religion was Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon who pioneered consciousness research in the mid-20th century. His lifelong search was to understand the nature of consciousness as it arose in the physical organ of the brain; he wanted to know if neuro-electric and chemical reactions could explain the human mind. As it turned out, he found no definitive answers, but he believed that one day the mystery would be solved. “In that day of understanding,” he wrote, “I predict that true prophets will rejoice, for they will discover in the scientist a long-awaited ally in the search for Truth.”

A Picture of Oneness

Today, we can look in ways yesterday’s seekers did not dream of. Using SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography), we can photograph the brain in different states—you might say we can photograph the states themselves, yielding a picture of pain or a picture of love.

SPECT imaging visually documents the dramatic differences between your brain in a state of fear and your brain in a state of meditation. If you are worrying, for example, certain areas of your brain become electrically excited, while other areas grow dim; both can be photographed. If you begin meditating—and keep photographing along the way—you’ll see the area of your brain excited by worry begin to quiet down and new areas awaken. Much of this research has been done with the help of advanced meditators who are able to voluntarily quiet certain areas of their brains and awaken others.

It’s quite a feat for these meditators to enter peaceful states of awareness under laboratory conditions. Reading this, you might feel discouraged wondering how you, without years of meditation training, could begin to take advantage of this new understanding of the brain and generate more peace and equanimity in your own brain. You should not be discouraged, though—just the opposite. The meditators are explorers telling us about hopeful new territory that we can all visit one day.

One leading researcher, Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania, has hit upon a specific, important brain state of this kind, which he calls “absolute unitary being” (AUB). In the state of AUB, our self-conscious sense of ourselves as separate beings drops away and in its place we feel and see only connection with all things.

Does this sound familiar? It is the higher consciousness of this article.

Newberg has found a way to photograph oneness—to fix, in the words of one journalist who has commented on his work, the “moments of elevated experience” when we step outside our boundaries and “overflow with love.” He hypothesizes that this state of AUB may actually be the condition that different religions call heaven, nirvana, or paradise—by any name, the ultimate healing experience of human life.

Extensive use of art and images to awaken higher consciousness”

The Way of Art:

Both Roman Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism make extensive use of art and images to awaken higher consciousness. Across all cultures, perhaps the single most familiar image of higher consciousness is the mountain, a symbol of a higher view of reality. Another quietly powerful image is the flower, with the rose or the lotus being two popular choices. The flower represents the animating flow of life energy from the seed underground to the bush to the bud to the opening of the flower itself.Try the following meditation on the opening of a rose and see what opens in you.

Imagery Meditation: The Rose

Read the instructions through and then try this exercise for yourself.

1. Close your eyes and connect with your breathing.
2. Allow your mind to focus fully on the sensation of your breath passing through your nostrils… As soon as you are aware of any other thoughts or sensations, bring your attention back to your breath.
3. Now, in your imagination, visualize a rosebush… Notice it in as much detail as possible.
4. Now become aware of a tightly closed bud on one of the branches… Focus on this bud… Now imagine the force of life gently moving into it and opening it.
5. Now identify with something opening in you at the same time… Stay with this experience as long as it lasts…

It is not necessary for this meditation to produce pictures in your mind. Some of us are very visual in our imagination, while for others the imagination is more easily engaged through words or feelings or kinesthetic sensations. For example, you can imagine a rose opening without seeing it: you can imagine feeling it open, or think about the process of growth and blossoming.

Imagine a rose opening without seeing it

Energy Meditation:

A different form of meditation that can evoke higher consciousness is to focus on the energy of your body. I saw how powerful this form of meditation could be through the illumination of a student named Eileen who came to meditation class to reduce her anxiety, which was based on the cold reality that she had a debilitating and possibly fatal illness. She kept coming to class to give it every chance she could. After four months, she had a breakthrough experience.

She was in class meditating on the energy in her hands when suddenly she began to experience her whole body as an energy field. Then she felt her awareness expanding to experience the whole meditation classroom as an energy field.

Eileen’s awareness kept expanding and expanding until it took in the whole city, then the land and water surrounding the city, and finally the whole planet. Eileen experienced the whole planet as energy with her awareness distributed everywhere throughout the energy field. She could see in every direction and she was pervaded with a dancing joy. Time was gone. Confinement in the body was gone. Eileen, as she had previously defined Eileen, was gone.

When Eileen re-emerged into awareness of the meditation class a few seconds later, her feeling of joy took in the entire the room and all people in it. All the colors were vibrant masterpieces, all the objects perfect. She was experiencing the aftermath of her higher state of consciousness, floating on a sea of gratitude.

The class ended and Eileen started toward home. As she walked, she sensed she had just been changed forever. Over the next few days, the changes kept coming to her. She no longer felt afraid of death. She now felt curious about it. But, at the same time, she also loved life more than she had before the breakthrough and was in no hurry to die.

Her mind had a new clarity and peace. She could pay deeper attention to her work and her friends. She could see other people’s viewpoints completely and felt no attachment to arguing with them because she found it much more satisfying to whole-heartedly experience and understand their view. And she found that when she tried to communicate her understanding of their view, people more easily let go of their view to ask about hers. This new way of being became so noticeable at work that her boss began to ask her to handle negotiations with difficult clients.

She could walk down a street and unexpectedly be in bliss at all of the richness and variety of life. Her understanding of God changed from what had been a non-credible humanoid male super-being in the sky to a limitless interpenetrating spirit of love and order that was present here and now. This new understanding simply showed up in her mind one day without conscious effort, and each time she recalled it, she went into a deeply pleasurable state of gratitude.

Two Energy Meditations:

Stand comfortably or sit in a straight chair.
Gently shake your hands for a minute…

Now place you hands in front of you as if you were holding a balloon, elbows at your sides, shoulders relaxed, the palms about 12 inches apart and facing each other … keep your hands and fingers soft and relaxed as you do this…

Place your awareness into the space between the palms of your hands…

Very slowly, begin to experiment with moving your palms closer or farther apart, but always keeping the palms facing each other…

Keep your awareness in this space, studying the sensations between the hands…

Now rest your hands on your lap and notice how you are…

You may experience the space between your hands as a bringing together of magnets from opposing poles and feel a slight resistance if you try to move them towards each other. Some people describe the space as bounciness or as a liveness. Your hands may tingle, feel slightly charged or hot, or be dominated by pulsations in your fingertips and palms. However, you needn’t feel any of these sensations in order for the meditation to be effective. What you are doing is focusing on a subtle level of energy that can lead to illumination.

• Use a straight chair with a good back.
• Sit close to the edge of your chair holding your back in a straight but not stiff posture… tilt your chin down slightly, straightening the back of your neck… keep your knees at shoulder width… your tongue resting lightly on the roof of your mouth…rest your hands on your legs. Relax into the posture, letting go of any tightening or stiffness…
• And now let your awareness contemplate your body… (Do this for one minute).
• And now slide back into your chair, relax, and notice how you are feeling…Do this for a minute).
• One more time—slide forward to the edge of your chair and repeat steps 2, 3, and 4…

You may find this posture uncomfortable at first. After two or three tries, however, it may turn out to be your favorite meditation because of its potential to introduce you to yourself as a living, dynamic energy field. Remember: this spirit element of your nature is not a metaphor; it is fact.

The Enduring Benefit of Higher Consciousness:

Higher consciousness reminds us that we are participating in eternity

After the initial fascination with illuminative experiences fades away, one benefit remains forever: higher consciousness reminds us that we are participating in eternity. We relax into the amazing fact of the world just as it is, and our being here becomes lighter.

As it did for Eileen, higher consciousness simultaneously changes our relationship to death. Instinctively, we as human beings love life so much that death appears to be our enemy. It is certainly our enemy when it takes loved ones away from us forever. Higher consciousness, however, helps us make a great cognitive leap to the understanding that our human situation is not life versus death. The opposite of life is not death. There is no opposite to life. It is eternal, harmonious, exquisitely ordered, and contains all things, including death. A moment of higher consciousness allows us to taste the eternal nature of reality and to experience “the peace that surpasses all understanding.”

Higher consciousness objectively exists.

It is one of the primary experiences of living.

Roberto Assagioli, M.D.

Spirituality is a human trait with great health benefits.  The goal of religious and spiritual practices is to awaken this trait in you.

The Experience Itself

When your spirituality wakes up, you have experiences of higher consciousness.  “Higher” may not be the ideal word:  “deeper,” “greater” or “expanded” consciousness could be other terms.  Finding the best term is tricky because the experiences take you beyond your normal self and, at the same time, show you more of yourself.

Such experiences are spiritual because they connect you more fully to the non-visible, non-material spirit element of your nature and of all nature.  If you want to use religious thinking, you can say that this spirit element is an aspect of God inside you.  If you prefer non-religious language, you can say that spirit is the universal energy which ceaselessly animates all of life, including yourself.

Higher consciousness is therefore a moment when you become more fully aware of the spirit element of your nature.  In such a moment, you cannot quite tell inside from outside: is the energy in you – or are you in it?  The answer to this question is a matter of degrees.  When the immersion into the energy is slight, you tend to feel that it’s in you: it’s your energy.  When the immersion into the energy is fuller, you feel that you have entered into something beyond your mind, body and feelings.

The study of this vast force of healing has been explored by many people, and they have left us descriptions.  The 13^th Century Islamic Sufi poet Rumi put it this way:

As salt dissolves in the ocean,

I was swallowed in God’s sea,

Past faith, past unbelieving,

past doubt, past certainty.

The 14^th Century Catholic mystical poet Dante put it this way:

Through the living light there poured a glow bright, so bright

that my poor eyes could not endure the sight.

My guide said to me: “That which overcomes you now

is strength against which nothing has defense.

Within it dwell the wisdom and the power

that opens the road between heaven and earth.”

My mind began to swell until it broke its bounds,

and what became of it,

it does not know.

This universal eternal energy reported by Rumi, Dante and other mystics is not a metaphor or a belief:  it is a verifiable fact.  This fact is of immense benefit.  As you merge into the energy even a little, you feel released from your habitual sense of time, vigilance and separateness, and this release brings peace and bliss: “the peace that surpasses understanding,” as it is says in the Bible.

In those few seconds of higher consciousness, you have the immediate realization that you are participating in something which is far, far greater than yourself.  There is a profound surprise, relief and freedom in this realization.  You have been temporarily freed from the small, nervous self driven by self-preservation and social conditioning.  Your entire perspective on reality is altered, and you feel a renewed sense of hope and purpose.  Among many purposes, you now feel a desire to transmit your realization to others.

Communicating the Experience

The spiritual guide, Beatrice, talking to her student in Dante’s Divine Comedy:

“Note well my words – What I have said to you, you will repeat,

as you teach those who live that life which is merely a race to death.”

An experience marked by timelessness, peace, bliss and realization (referred to as satchitananda in the yogic tradition) is clearly difficult to communicate.  Common, consensual terms do not exist for such experiences.  Mystics and sages from every time and culture, such as Rumi and Dante, write extensively about such experiences, but their language may only make sense to you if you have had similar experiences.  Communicating the experience is also difficult because higher consciousness took you beyond your thinking mind.  That aspect of you – your thinking mind – which is usually providing an ongoing internal commentary on everything you’re experiencing, had also merged into the higher state.

In addition to not having common language nor having the thinking mind fully available, a third difficulty in communicating your experience to others is fear of social disapproval.  What will someone think when you say that you now know deep in your bones that you are, and we all are, participating in a harmonious, eternal, interpenetrating, mysterious and non-visible reality?  Have you gone crazy?  Are you saying you encountered God?  If not, then what are you talking about?

In a culture such as ours, with its divergent trends of increased dogmatism and increased secularism, direct experience is ignored or even treated as suspicious.   Perhaps the only intelligent thing to communicate is any benefit you have received from your experience of higher consciousness.  Others will decide for themselves if it motivates them to know more, or not.

Direct Experience

It is one thing to write about higher consciousness.  It is quite another to point you to methods you can use to experience higher consciousness for yourself.

How do we create the conditions for an illumination, a breakthrough, an opening into higher consciousness?

The first thing to understand is that it can occur spontaneously without any preparation. The writer, C.S. Lewis, wrote Surprised by Joy to describe just such a spontaneous experience.  The very fact that people of all cultures in every period of history have had spontaneous experiences could be taken as proof, in itself, of their objective reality.  Take a moment to think back over your own experiences—have you had such a moment of illumination, a transcendent feeling, a sense of deep soulful connection to the world? 

At the same time, creating the conditions for higher consciousness is definitely worth your time and effort.  Many people associate long period of meditating with the possibility of experiencing higher consciousness, but meditation is only one of many methods. My experience is that many people enter higher consciousness through art, particularly through music and/or architectural space.  

Laurie, a student of mine, gave me these notes from her diary after experiencing just such an art-inspired illumination while traveling in Rome. Her experience was both spontaneous and deliberate:  although the illumination itself happened spontaneously, she had deliberately traveled to a place filled with inspiration:

Entering St. Peter’s Cathedral.  Experiencing its hugeness.  Awesome.  Is this structure designed to humble me?  I experience myself resisting it.  All vertical and overbearing.  I feel like I’m in the land of giants.  There is beauty present, but it feels remote and cold.  Perhaps when it is filled with thousands of worshippers, it will warm up and soften.

I find myself drawn to the side chapel where Michelangelo’s Pieta is displayed.  I can’t approach it—it is behind a glass wall, protected from any threat of attack.  It draws my gaze despite the barrier, and I feel myself pulled towards it.  I’m first drawn to the Virgin Mary’s face.  It is the face of a young girl not older than adolescent.  Soft, delicate, yet serenely sad, wise beyond her years, yet innocent and confused by the situation she is in.

My eyes survey the rest of the sculpture.  The soft, translucent white of the marble, the folds of drapery and the large figure of the dead Christ draped across Mary’s lap.  This lifeless body is much too large to be Mary’s child.  I’ve seen many Pietas—paintings and sculptures—why are there tears in my eyes?  I’m drawn back to Mary’s delicate face.  I can’t turn away.  Why is she so young and innocent?  Certainly Michelangelo knew how to sculpt an older woman.  No, there is a reason she appears like this.  Suddenly I understand.  This image is about a human experience.  Mary is a mother whose child has been killed.  Is a person ever old enough to not be completely vulnerable to this loss?

When I first became a mother, I remember being frightened by the intensity of my protective instincts and the degree to which thoughts of my son being harmed terrified me.  I feel joined to Mary’s face.  I can see myself and all mothers.  My tears continue.  The image expands to connecting with the universal fear of death and loss.  Can my spirituality offer me solace in the face of this?  Isn’t loss one of the primary facts that draws us to a spiritual path?  I think about how angry I get when I hear pat answers to the question, “Why?”  Don’t tell me about karma, or God’s Will, or that it’s part of a lesson.  Those answers bypass the sorrow, my experience of grief.  This sculpture before me honors this. Somehow that look of innocence is even more compelling than if Mary’s face had appeared ravaged and racked with sorrow.  She needs compassion.  She needs me to accompany her, be present with her.  This allows me to gain strength from the shared human experience.  I am not alone.

In this moment, I understand the power of the creative moment to transcend time and space—to draw me through the act of creation to a place of truth.  Michelangelo was only twenty-five when he created this work.  What did he know?  I’ve lived twice as many years as he had—yet the place from which his genius and inspiration comes is timeless and universal.  It emerges from the energetic ground of being and includes me in it.

Breakthroughs to the universal can take many forms. Experiences include:

• becoming a field of energy
• becoming conscious of being conscious
• feeling enormous and yet not out of your body
• expanding in all directions
• just pure awareness, endless, boundless
• feeling solid and heavy like a rock
• feeling you could float
• falling without hitting bottom
• a sense of spaciousness
• serenity and contentment
• emotional expansiveness, laughing in a very deep way
• joy bubbling up and pervading all things
• grasping some hidden truth about the universe
• feeling unity with all beings
• having an instantly understood inner vision, an illumination
• feeling an extraordinary inner silence
• inflows of inspiration
• a sudden and important creative breakthrough
• liberation from fear
• a “psychic” experience that causes awe
• a deep feeling of gratefulness
• a clear sense of inner guidance
• an exhilarating sense of dance
• loving all persons in one person
• feeling oneself to be the channel for a stronger force to flow through
• ecstasy
• merging with a work of art
• the delight of beauty
• transcendence of normal time and space

If a pill could give us any of these experiences, it would sell in the billions. The fact that a natural part yourself can give you these experiences is intriguing and a source of great promise for everyone.

Some Spiritual Obstacles

We can have significant spiritual experiences and yet receive little benefit from them. This is because we can have obstacles inside us that do not allow us to accept the experiences as evidence that we are part of the universal. The following list offers you some of the reasons that new spiritual experiences will not be accepted by your mind:

• negative childhood religious training that has left you overly cynical about your spiritual self
• no framework or concept of the universal
• past traumas that destroyed your trust in life
• fear of social disapproval
• fear of “going out there” and never coming back
• fear of going crazy
• fear of getting too “high” through spirituality
• fear of being changed in some unknown way
• fear of becoming indifferent to everyday life
• fear of becoming God-like and grandiose
• irrational and false ideas about spirituality, e.g., it is fantasy, it has nothing to do with this world, it is not scientific, it is strange to be interested in such things, only special people know about it, you’re never angry if you’re spiritual, nothing bothers you if you’re spiritual.

If you see yourself on this list, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Many other people of all times and cultures have been on the spiritual search before you and have run into these same obstacles. By yourself, or with the guidance of others, you can examine and free yourself of the negative effects of such obstacles. Your spirituality is something of fundamental importance to your health and well-being, and it deserves your loving attention and effort.

All of the world’s spiritual and wisdom traditions use some or all of these paths as bridges to the universal.

The Path of Aesthetics and Beauty. One way to think of artistic inspiration is that artists align with some essential insight or truth about the universe and express it through their art. Leonard Bernstein wrote this about his experience conducting an orchestra:

…it takes minutes before I know where I am – in what hall, in what country, or who I am.  Suddenly, I become aware that there is clapping, that I must bow.  It’s very difficult.  But marvelous.  A sort of ecstasy… that is nothing more and nothing less than a loss of ego. You don’t exist.

Think about times when this has happened to you.  Perhaps you were at a concert, or watching a sunset, or rapt in the beauty of a campfire, or at the magnificence of a newborn child. You experience awe and the awakening of a new awareness, something beyond your usual experience of yourself.  The world’s spiritual traditions certainly recognize the power of this path. The art of the world, the greatest architecture, paintings, frescoes, sculptures, music and poetry have all been created for and inspired by recognition of the universal.

The Path of the Body. Physical activities can lead us to freedom from the separate self, to the feeling of being part of something greater. Athletes and QiGong and yoga practitioners know this experience very well, and people can often experience it while receiving acupuncture or other body treatments. It happens when we let go of strained effort and instead give way into the natural flow of animating life energy and wisdom in the body. An experience of the universal can even occur under the most difficult of medical circumstances, e.g., in our time of dying, when we give up fighting our physical experience and just observe it and surrender to it. In the yogic tradition, the natural flow of life energy and wisdom is called prana. In Taoism, it is chi, as in the practices of Tai Chi or Chi Kung (QiGong). In modern Western science, it is now being referred to as subtle energy. These are all references to the life force, the vitalizing force of all living beings.

The Path of Ceremony and Ritual. Part of the richness of ceremony and ritual is the synergy of a like-minded group of people joining together with shared intention. In formalized ceremonies, elements such as special garments, candles, incense, prayers, music, chanting, pageantry, theater, and dance are utilized to draw our consciousness out beyond the confines of our separate self. Meaningful spiritual ceremonies and rites of passage are not prevalent in our present culture. If, as children, we were exposed to ceremonies in a mindless and rote way, they can quickly lose their potential. This speaks to the value of creating personally meaningful ceremonies in your day to day life as reminders of the universal.

The Path of Social Action and Justice. World-changing leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King very directly drew strength from their spiritual self. Martin Luther King spoke of “the love of God operating in the human heart.” The path of social action is a path of compassion and courage. You go beyond your instinctual survival fears and your social desire to be approved of and instead stand up for fair treatment of others. The social action path is about acting bravely in the world while staying connected to meaning and a higher purpose out beyond your own self-interest.

The Path of Service. Unlike the path of social action, which is service on a large scale, the path of service can be simply directed toward one other person – your child, your patient, your student, your sponsee, your friend. The path of service is contributing to the lives of others. In doing so, you experience freedom from the fears and tensions of your separate self and instead experience an inner generation of love toward others. The ancient wisdom, “Give and you will receive,” speaks to the positive benefits that flow to you from helping others, and the latest research on the brain suggests that “social intelligence,” the ability to connect to others, is hard-wired in our system and brings us physical and emotional benefits when we activate it through empathic service. Spiritual traditions have different names for service. In Judaism, it is called a mitzvah. In yogic philosophy, it is karma yoga. In Catholicism, there are religious orders devoted to nursing, medicine and teaching.

The Path of Knowledge and Wisdom. This path is motivated by the mind’s desire to experience the greater truth of reality. We may think of the scientist and the scholar as people on this path. Often, such searchers will consider themselves pre-eminently rational and dismiss the spiritual quest as irrational. But the very origin of the Western scientific method is in the work of Francis Bacon who was trying to bring the search for truth into the world. Knowledge expands our mind out farther and farther, to the infinity of the universe, and deeper and deeper down to smaller and smaller particles of existence, and frees us from limited definitions of who we are and what we are part of.

The Path of Devotion. This path is characterized by surrender, adoration, and worship of the universal. Its premise is that we are too small to know the ultimate answers, but that we can enjoy, even love, the wonders we are part of. The great Sufi mystic Rumi put it this way:

I am so small I can barely be seen. How can this great love be inside me?

Far from the researcher who personally seeks out knowledge, the devotee’s path asks us to give up the search for knowledge and to give in, to surrender to powers greater than us.

The concept of surrender is an inherent aspect of most 12-Step programs. It is not a matter of resignation but rather an empowered awareness that something greater than our separate self is involved in our life and that we need to open to this universal aspect of reality. One of the main forms of practice in the devotional path is prayer. Dr. Larry Dossey, one of the pioneers of alternative and complementary medicine, has been studying and synthesizing experimental research in prayer. His thoughts on the nature of prayer are provocative and offer new possibilities for the devotional path:

The prevailing notion that prayer is asking for something…is woefully incomplete. I want to get away from that common way of looking at prayer.  Prayer for me is any psychological act which brings us closer to the transcendent…Prayer may involve words…It can involve silence, nonactivity.  It can even be done in the subconscious or when we sleep at night. So I prefer the use the term ‘prayerfulness’ to capture those activities we have traditionally called prayer.

The Path of Meditation. After his first heart attack, John, a 58 year old teacher, began to look for treatment of his coronary artery disease.  He decided to try the approach of cardiologist Dean Ornish. Ornish’s patients have been able to reverse coronary arterial clogging, to reduce or discontinue medication, to reduce or end chest pain, to lose weight while eating more, and to feel more energetic and calm. All of this is accomplished without surgery or medication. It is accomplished through the alternative health practices of stress management (meditation, imagery, hatha yoga), diet, exercise, stopping smoking and other addictions.

After trying the Ornish approach for a week, John gave up.  He could not comply with all the lifestyle changes. In frustration, he called Ornish on the telephone and asked him to recommend only the single most important practice in the approach. Dr. Ornish immediately told John, “Meditate.”

John was surprised. He thought surely that diet or exercise would be the priority. John asked Ornish why mediation was the key practice. In response, he was told that meditation counteracts some of the pounding the body takes from a worried mind. The path of meditation is characterized by discipline and an act of will in which you deliberately set out to expand perceptions and attention. In John’s case, meditation will be an act of retraining his mind to not succumb to worry as the dominant way to perceive reality. The physical benefits of meditation have been studied and well-documented in the scientific literature for many years.  Stress reduction is the most studied effect of meditation because we can  quantify reductions in heart rate, blood pressure, muscular tension and stomach acid as evidence of less stress.

In general, meditation techniques can be classified as concentrative, receptive, and creative.

Concentrative meditation emphasizes a single-minded focus on one object – the breath, a phrase, a thought, an image, a repeated movement. In such techniques, the goal is to ignore all other experiences and to keep returning attention to the single meditative object.

Receptive meditation begins with a concentration technique, such as focus on breathing, and then gradually lets awareness open to the stream of experiences, including body sensations, thoughts, feelings, moods, sounds, energy shifts.  This receptive behavior is sometimes called witness consciousness or mindfulness.  As only one example of its benefits, the mindfulness meditation teacher, Shinzen Young, who works with people in recovery from addictions, indicates that an important moment takes place in meditation when the person realizes he can simply observe and let go of thoughts or urges that previously caused him to act self-destructively.

Creative meditation brings the vast resource of the imagination into meditative practice. Two religious traditions that greatly utilize the imagination are Roman Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism.  They both utilize art and images extensively to lead the separate self into identification with qualities of the universal (e.g., Mary as the image of love).  The potential of imagination to expand awareness is also central in the meditation practices of European psychiatrists Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli.

Some of us are naturally inclined to develop our spirituality.

Perhaps we’ve always had questions about how best to live, about the mystery of birth and death, about the way to inner peace and wisdom. Our rational mind, good for many things, is not able to answer these larger questions; and so we become seekers on a search for answers.

For others, a life-changing crisis motivates one to go on a spiritual search. A loss, transition, or illness suddenly disrupts our life and compels us to find a meaning for our suffering and a new purpose in living. But probably for the majority of us, the motivation to search spiritually sneaks up on us during the course of living our habitual, day-in, day-out life. We don’t know why, but we begin to ask questions we never bothered with before.

• What is the point of living the way I do?
• Why should I keep on repeating my life the way it is now?
• Am I settling for a life that’s too safe?
• Am I wasting my time?
• Is this it?
• What am I looking for?
• What’s missing?
• Isn’t there more?

These questions generate feelings of restlessness, confusion, indecision: even the simple things seem complicated. We may start to fantasize that the only answer is to change our life – get divorced, get a new job, move to another part of the country or even to another culture. Drugs and/or alcohol can start to become important to us to provide relief by dulling our mind.

In some cases, the internal stress of our confused struggle can produce physical symptoms, such as nervous tension, insomnia and various other troubles (digestive, circulatory, hormonal), and the first person we go to for help is our medical doctor. The doctor will hopefully be successful in alleviating our stress symptoms, but the core of the struggle is still within us.

We may intuit that something new needs to happen to us, but we don’t know what it is. We become motivated to go on a quest, a search, a journey, in order to find this newness of renewal. The ancient wisdom, however, is that this newness has to happen inside us; our habitual personality self has to cross the bridge to the universal, to experience meaning and the feeling of renewal that we are searching for.

In my next post, I will describe ways to cross the bridge.

I have been working with Richard Schaub for at least 15 years referring patients to him who wanted a combination of Psychotherapy and Meditation. He has a very practical approach to life and spirituality and his wisdom has helped many of my patients gain insights that have helped them move on in life. We are honored that he will now share some of his wisdom with this site.

Spiritual Development

Medical science has documented that spirituality is good for your health. Strikingly, religiosity does not give you the same results; rather, it is an engaged, personally meaningful spiritual practice that benefits your brain, mind, feelings and body.

What is it about spirituality that makes it a health practice?

• Your spiritual self is the part of your nature that is beyond the survival fears of your instinctual self and the approval-seeking tensions of your social self. Spending time in your spiritual self is fear-free and tension-free.
• Your spiritual self is now referred to in brain research as a “higher system,” and in traditional understanding as your bridge to the universal. When you cross the bridge from your individual, separate self to the universal, you have breakthrough experiences of bliss, knowledge and oneness. These states of profound well-being give you a new curiosity, creativity, courage and confidence.

Albert Einstein put it this way:

A human being is part of the whole, called Universe but he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.

In every time and culture, the universal has been given names, including God, the Divine, the Tao, Allah, Brahman, the Source, the Creator, the Great Spirit, the Beloved. Books, music, art, ceremonies, codes of behavior, physical training, prayer, meditation, and other means have been developed to help you to cross the bridge from your separate self to the universal.
Just as you develop your personality to participate in society, you can develop your spirituality to participate in the universal.

In the future I will be writing the following articles which offer ideas and practices to make Einstein’s advice a reality for you.

• Spiritual Motivation
• Spiritual Paths
• Spiritual Experiences and Obstacles to Spiritual Development