Mind & Spirit

Spiritual Development as a Health Practice
Richard SchaubAugust 05

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
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    I wish people would stop dragging Albert Einstein into their arguments for religion or spirituality in an attempt to give them some kind of scientific or rational weight.

    May we assume that the articles, ideas, and practices you will offer to make Einstein's advice a reality for us will be based on mathematics, physics, and astronomy?

    —

    “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” Albert Einstein – March 24, 1954.