Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

As we all know, Steve Jobs resigned on Wednesday as chief executive officer from Apple. Today I received an email from Learn Out Loud with a link to a commencement speech Steve, who never graduated from college, delivered at Stamford University. It’s wise. It’s short. It’s honest. It’s wonderful.

I listened to Matthew Fox on a Sounds True podcast this evening. Fox shared,

“I really think our species is in a great dark night of the soul at this time, because we’re all unsure about what the future holds, with so many decisions ahead of us and so many institutions not working, from government to politics to economics, and many of our religions are in bad shape, education… It is one of these times when there has to be this breakthrough. This creativity has to come out of the emptying. People in AA learn this, too, that the “bottoming out” that happens there is a profound shift in their entire way of being in the world.”

What will emerge from our collective dark night? What will we save, create, celebrate, grieve, reclaim, and love, as we move through the darkness and into the light?

We each face more than one period of crisis during our lives. Encounters that can shake us, break us, and often take us to darker, deeper places than we ever planned on going. I call these encounters BirthQuakes.

In her book, “No Enemies Within,” Dawna Markova describes these experiences as sacred catastrophes and observes, “Suffering is the soil of renewal. The burden and responsibility of learning your way through the ‘sacred catastrophe’ that is a turning point is that you must change the way you are living your life – deep, fundamental changes of the entire system. Often these are made in very small steps, but still they require great strength of heart. Our soul is asking nothing less of us than that we reassert the truth of our true potential.”

Michael Meade refers to such occurrences as initiatory events, encounters that “mark a man or a woman’s life forever.” Regardless of what we name them, when a crisis strikes or the forces inside of us that contain vast amounts of uncertainty (and wisdom) erupt, we all too often resist. And who can blame us, the unknown is generally rife with risk. And speaking for myself here, I’m not a particularly good risk taker. I want to keep my options open, maintain an exit strategy and possess at least two well thought out back up plans. And yet, every now and then, no matter how careful I try to be, I find myself in the midst of some hazy unknown territory without a reliable map. And in spite of all of my training in stress management, mindfulness, positive psychology and learned optimism, I seldom feel prepared to confidently navigate foreign terrain.

My husband and I loved climbing the rocks on the Maine coast and for several years made an annual pilgrimage to Acadia Park in Bar Harbor where we would gaze out over the ocean from the summit of Mount Cadillac in silence and in awe. And then, without warning, in early mid-life, I developed vertigo whenever I looked down from high places. All of a sudden, I became nauseous and the world began spinning whenever I came too close to the edge of places I had effortlessly travelled to before. The edge became a frightening place where the world seemed to spin out of my control.

Poet, David Whyte wrote, “In our personal pilgrimages there are constant edges that we are asked to go to. And if you shy away from these pioneering edges because you feel that they lead through doorways that are too difficult, you stay in a kind of bland middle…There is no human being who can stay at the edge all the time, and you shouldn’t try and force yourself to the edge. We’re creatures of visitation and absence, and we learn through visitation and absence. But, if you don’t spend any time at all in places where you are being broken open, where you are being enlarged, where you are being humiliated, where you’re being re-tooled for a larger world, then you stay in your old life and can become haunted by it.”

For years I attempted to force myself to return to the edge, as close as possible to the precipice where land and air and ocean seemed to meet. And while I succeeded from time to time, the experience no longer contained magic, only misery, and so eventually I gave up. I had to accept that there were places in the world that I could no longer comfortably stand. Something inside of me had been altered, forcing new limits and leaving me both disappointed and humbled as I found myself taking new paths up the mountain, encountering the border between ocean and land from a different perspective.

I began spending more time exploring alternate landscapes, places I’d seldom taken the time to investigate before. I fell more in love with lakes and rediscovered my affinity for rivers. Rivers – unrelenting, constantly in motion, moving passages that wind around and over obstacles, reflecting sunlight and moonlight, and connecters of the past and future while always in the eternal present.

One of my earliest experiences of awe was peering between the bars of a bridge, mesmerized by the mighty Aroostook River. This memory comes with a hazy and yet compelling notion of a dreamer being awakened at that moment within the heart of a tiny little girl. And one of my greatest ally’s in healing four decades later from a lonely and unanticipated grief was the Congaree River as I followed the river walk daily and meditatively along its shores.

When I first encountered the house that we live in now, it had no well or adequate septic system, and no bathtub or even a clean surface anywhere. It was a sad looking house, complete with crooked floors, rotting wood, cracked and broken linoleum, and was threatening to collapse in on itself. The little house would never be a showplace, or well suited for entertaining large groups ofamily and friends, nor would it offer a serene and quiet safe haven as traffic on route 131 ran just steps away from its front door.

I did not choose this house as a permanent residence. I didn’t for a moment want to move over a thousand miles away from the friends, family, and community that I had come to love whole heartedly, or leave my sweet and light filled cottage, and the life that I felt both blessed and safe in.

Moving to this little house in Wayne on Lake Pocasset was accompanied by heart wrenching loss and a longing that has not even now, years later, been completely extinguished. Still, my heart has come to open more readily here than anywhere else I have ever taken shelter. David Thoreau wrote, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” I have felt lost here, alone here, bereft and afraid here, and at the same time this place has both soothed and helped to deepen me. It has become my soul’s home.

Sometimes we lose ground. And at other times we discover that the place in which we first faced catastrophe, has ultimately led us to the brink of discovery; to a country where wisdom lives and the sacred resides. Bless you, bless you where ever you are, and may you come to appreciate that the place where you have currently found yourself, right here and right now, (whether welcomed or unwelcoming) may truly be holy ground.

Yesterday I read Karen Hansen’s article, Voluntary Simplicity Brings Greater Happiness, Sustainability based on a recently published paper by ecopsychologist, Tim Kasser entitled, Ecological Challenges, Materialistic Values, and Social Change

Coincidentally, I had just finished Cecile Andrews book, Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre . As a therapist, I am deeply committed to learning as much as I can about what contributes to our happiness as well as what increases our suffering.

There’s so much pertinent information in Andrews book that I am limiting myself to the following points, otherwise I’d be writing for days.

The greatest indicator of a nation’s health, as measured by longevity, is the distribution of wealth. The larger the gap, the lower the life expectancy. (In his book, “Gross National Happiness” by Arthur C Brooks, Brooks reports that, “Income inequality in the United States is rising, according to most responsible estimates. For example, in 1973, the average family in the top quintile earned about ten times what the average bottom-quintile family earned. By 2003, this differential had grown to fifteen times.”

The consumer society fosters division, destruction and competition. It’s essential that we recognize that the premise of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is being used to manipulate Americans into living consumer life styles leading to behaviors that are destroying the planet and promoting war. Understanding what truly makes us happy will lead to healthier, more meaningful and more sustainable ways of life.

Researchers agree that after essential needs are met, more money does not lead to happiness. “If you’re poor, more money makes you happier. After that? Nothing,” observes Cecile. She also cites the research of David G Myers who reports that today Americans are literally twice as rich as we were in 1957, however, the number of people who say they are very happy has been reduced from 35% in 1957 to 32%. During the same time period violent crimes have quadrupled, teen suicides have tripled, and the divorce rate has doubled.

Tim Kasser points out that simply desiring more money than we have leads to unhappiness. Kasser shares on the website, zephyr.com that, “From my perspective, the most important thing to learn about happiness is that the research shows it doesn’t come from money, from possessions, from fame, and from image — those are all empty pursuits that only bring temporary shots of superficial happiness. Happiness comes from pursuing the interests that you have, from building good relationships with your friends and family, and from contributing to the broader world.” Materialism on the other hand is associated with low scores for both self-actualization and vitality along with high scores for insecurity, anxiety and depression.

Andrews cites the work of additional researchers including Robert E Lane , Robert Putnam, Martin Seligman, Richard Davidson, Barry Schwartz, Peter Whybrow , Richard Layard, Daniel Nettle
, and Bruce O’Hara.

John de Graaf, founder of the Take Back Your Time movement, points out that Americans are working 20% longer today than they did in 1970 and work almost 350 hours more than western Europeans.

Andrews suggests that the psychic numbing that is so prevalent in the United States is “a result of the fact that we do indeed feel guilty because we know we have so much more than the rest of the world. We know we’re damaging the planet for our own gratification. How could we not be profoundly depressed over the state of our soul. Lifton says that the numbing can protect us from going mad when the grief and the threat to our sanity are too great. But there are side effects: Our overall ability to feel also shuts down – including the ability to feel joy.”

We require joy, choice, authenticity, play, and laughter in order to truly experience joie de vivre, a keen enjoyment of living according to Webster’s Dictionary, and an experience all too rare today in the United States.

Cecile stresses that feeling part of a community is essential to our well-being and defines it as “about caring for people, feeling safe, feeling accepted, feeling like you belong.”

She calls for the growth of the slow counterculture where we “try to work less, spend less and rush less. We spend more time with family, friends, and community – or pursuing our passions. We watch less television, avoid malls.”

In The State of the World Report, 2010 Andrews and Wanda Urbanska write, “In the United States, the Slow movement has become a part of the simplicity movement, encouraging people to live deeply by exploring and reclaiming the ancient vision of leisure. People are beginning to find ways to take back their time in order to walk more, talk with their neighbors, and spend more time in local neighborhoods.”

Andrews quotes David Orr who points out, “The plain fact is the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperatley need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

As I take yet another step closer to living a life that more closely incorporates my values, Slow is Beautiful is certainly one of the books that has inspired me. I’ll be writing about other books in the future.