Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

On December 29th from 7:00 to 9:00 I’ll be offering a free class at SagePlace entitled, ““What Happy People Know:The Art and Science of Happiness.” The class will explore lessons taken from both ancient wisdom and modern science about what the happiest people know, do and believe and how we too can achieve the greatest level of well-being.

To sign up, just call 207-620-0792. I may also offer a free online course in the future as well.

Worried about the earth and the economy? Spend five minutes viewing the above video produced by The Center for a New American Dream for some excellent information and inspiration based on Juliet Schor’s excellent book, “Plentitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.” You can also read her blog , view her lecture , and read more about her book.

We need to continually be inspired right now as we live through this tumultuous time in history, and we need to seize hold of our sense of purpose far more than we need to hold onto our fear and anger.

As protests rage on around the world, I am reminded of the following true story about A.J. Muste, pacifist and activist who stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle during the Vietnam War. One rainy night a reporter asked him, “do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?” To which Muste replied, “Oh, I don’t do it to change the country, I do it so the country won’t change me.” As more and more of us stand together in peaceful protest, I am hoping that we ask ourselves, “How has our current consumer culture changed us, what profound price have we paid to sustain it, and what is it now that we must reclaim?

The above is a presentation by Andrew Solomon, author of “The Noon Day Demon” at Beth Isreal Hospital talking about his struggle with major depression. Solomon gave the following advice to those struggling with depression during an interview with PBS.

“First piece of advice: Deal with it early. Don’t wait until it escalates out of control. Like any illness, it’s easier to treat before it becomes acute.

Second piece of advice: Find the right therapist and psychopharmacologist. Sometimes that’s one person and sometimes it’s two people; seek the best. There a lot of bad treatments and too many incompetent shrinks, so if you’re not getting better, try seeing someone else. It’s exhausting and annoying shopping around, but as in all other areas of life, there are some people who are highly skilled and others who just aren’t very good. There are also people who work well for one patient and aren’t right for another.

Third piece of advice: If you have a chronic condition, treat it in the long-term. Have the courage to stay on your meds, and don’t be tricked into thinking that brave people get better on their own. If you had lung cancer, you wouldn’t try to cure it by breathing carefully. Don’t trivialize depression. Remember that it can be fatal: A large number of depressed people commit suicide.

Fourth piece of advice: Don’t keep it all a big secret. Depression is stressful and keeping secrets is stressful. But tell people selectively and carefully. Some people can deal with it and others can’t. And get yourself a support structure. Love won’t cure depression, but it will make it a whole lot easier to tolerate.”

You can watch the PBS program, “Out of the Shadows” which featured Andrews here.

As a grandmother, I’m always looking for things to do, places to go, ways to teach, and resources to enhance Skylar’s and Willow’s well-being. Here are two that I want to share with you today (every now and then I’ll add more.)

The first is Raising Happiness a terrific website that provides a great deal of information for parents and describes itself as, “Science for Joyful Kids and Happier Parents.”

You can watch one of the many videos available at the “Raising Happiness” website at the top of this post.

The second resource is the CD, “Be Happy: Fun Music For Fun Kids” by Stacey Crumrine, founder of Positively Kids. Willow and Sky particularly love the song, “Doggie” and “I Feel Great.” Willow insisted on listening to the CD in the car on the way to pick apples yesterday. And we all had fun ‘chair dancing’ to the tune, “Happie Boogie,” which most definitley put each of us in a positive frame of mind!

Few words have moved me more than the following written by poet and author Ellen Bass,

“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
― Ellen Bass

I read those words and something inside of me opened up and whispered, “Yes. Yes! This is our most necessary practice, our deepest calling -to take our own ordinary/extraordinary lives into our arms and hold them close to our hearts. Even when they hurt. Especially when they hurt…

Krista Tippett interviewed neuroscientist Richard Davidson in an episode entitled, “Investigating Healthy Minds” on one of my favorite public broadcasting programs, Being

On the program Davidson spoke with Tippett about how discoveries in neuroscience are demonstrating how we can change our brains in ways that can not only improve the quality of our experiences, but can also significantly improve the quality of our lives.

I encourage you to listen to the broadcast and will include here Davidson’s comments on psychotherapy copied from the broadcast transcript.

“Ms. Tippett: So, you know, I know that you’ve been honored by the American Psychological Association, and I wonder how does your work inform the work of psychotherapy? You know, are you learning things about actually changing the brain, about influencing the mind and influencing ourselves biologically with behaviors that might, I don’t know, circumvent, transcend, or somehow enrich the ways we already know to work with, who we are and how healthy we are and how we live?

Dr. Davidson: Well, you know, I’d like to believe that some of the work that we do may have some implications or relevance for kind of on-the-ground, in-the-trenches psychotherapy or related strategies for behavior change in several ways. One is a kind of meta-level which helps a client or patient understand that, based upon everything we know about the brain in neuroscience, that change is not only possible, but change is actually the rule rather than the exception. It’s really just a question of which influences we’re going to choose for our brain. But our brain is wittingly or unwittingly being continuously shaped. Another thing is the idea of practice. The classical model of Western psychotherapy which is, you know, a client coming to a therapist for an hour a week for a 50-minute session without doing daily practice in between just flies in the face of everything we know about the brain and plasticity.

Ms. Tippett: That’s really interesting, isn’t it?

Dr. Davidson: It is. So if we want to make real change, that’s not a good prescription for doing it. If we want to make real change, more systematic practice is necessary, in my view. This is something that comes directly from neuroscience. And I think that certain kinds of psychological therapies are now understanding that, so certain kinds of cognitive therapies, for example, do assign specific kinds of homework or practice for people to engage in on a daily basis. So I think there’s growing recognition of that.”

As a therapist, I’m acutely aware of the limitations of psychotherapy without practice, and the growing body of knowledge that supports these findings provides challenges and hope to therapists and clients alike. May we embrace them both.