Spirituality | Why spirituality (sometimes) fails
You live within an amazing transformative machine. It’s called the body. It has two very different functions. I would guess that 99 percent of people use it only for the first, which is to eat, sleep, excrete, reproduce, have a variety of pleasant, painful, and interesting experiences, and die. The second function usually remains as a hidden potential, not secreted away by any particular rule of law, but put out of sight through culture, time, and humanity’s intense predilection for fixating on the external phantasmagoria that fills our stumbling consciousness. Side by side with the intricate machinery of sinews, molecular reactions, nerve transmission, miles of circulatory tubing, and cellular biochemistry, lies an alternative, even more complex system of bioenergy.
Like the creatures great and small that share this planet, our form is primarily designed for the first function, mundane living. Then our extremely busy and full lives take pretty much every ounce of the biological and bioenergetics forces that we manufacture day to day. Every spiritual path has techniques to generate, condense, gather, and store energy within the body-mind. But that is a story for another day. Here we will first observe the mountainous landscape of life force wasted on purposeless or meaningless activity.
Body
It is safe to say that the average person never relaxes their body fully, completely. It is an art that must be cultivated. We won’t acquire it by modeling parents, teachers, celebrities, or even athletes. You may see it in skilled martial artists or long-time meditators or experienced body-workers, dancers, or actors, who have made it part of their craft. There is a fluidity, balance, yet economy of movement in such individuals, who are “cat-like” in their grace.
Just stop what you are doing at any point in the day and observe how tight various areas of “resting” muscles are. Or watch almost anyone walking or jogging.
Speech
It is a tough contest between who is the greatest energy and time waster in our lives. In terms of the body and voice, it is a close race. Of the 10 traditional negative actions of Buddhist philosophy, four are attributed to speech. So while we are busy with the karma that arises from slander, lying, idle talk, and harsh words, we are also looking at energy inadvertently spilling out of the storage tanks. Excess and dysfunctional use of the voice apparatus siphons off valuable resources that can be used for spiritual breath work, mantras, and the demanding internal sequence of light body transformation.
Mind
Naturally, the mind is at the center of energy conservation. We must decide to use speech wisely and to break the cycle of body tension and to apportion our limited energy. Even before that, we have to accept the reality of our situation. And while we said that energy maintenance was the first major problem, there is yet an additional obstacle that we face. Automatic light bodies, automatic ascension, and automatic enlightenment are not new ideas as humans have been looking for salvation from above for a very long time. Order persists and there is nothing in nature or in our daily experience that mirrors this wishful thinking.
Social
We are social animals, more or less. Being with compatible others can be uplifting, educational, fun, nourishing, and relaxing. We can be much more precise and proactive if we act in line with our understanding of energetics. Will this situation demand a lot of my (limited) energy? Will it leave me exhausted for the day? Simply, is it worth it to be here and with these people for what I wish to give and what they may wish to share? It is a dance to be sure, especially for those in the helping profession, or with family or friends who need our assistance in a variety of ways. Keeping energy in mind, and the fact that emotions are energy, will give us better tools to work with.
Guarding the core
We have touched on some key ways that we lose or waste energy, priceless energy that we need for inner transformation. But we have not said much about the solutions to these thorny issues. The transformation process is not mandatory, not a given, and is, in fact, the rare—the very rare—exception. Our lives are driven by careers, family, hopes and dreams, ambitions and fears. For most, the inner call is a very distant one, an echo heard in silence. Our internal transformational system is also hidden in the recesses of normal body function, a potential waiting to be realized. And so it is only appropriate that our practice be kept in a safe place.
Spirituality | A guided practice to notice what’s present—and what isn’t
A few years back, we stumbled upon the Japanese concept of ‘ma’, which roughly translates to “the spaces between everything.” In western cultures, we might think about the artist’s idea of negative space: the shapes made up of spaces between objects in a painting, drawing, or photograph.
Many wise and creative people know about ma. A poet leaves a pause between words to emphasize them. A musician knows that the silences are what make a song or performance great. Athletes watch the space between players, between the ball and the goal. We think of physical space as rooms, not walls.
That space is important because it’s where anything can happen. Often, it is the empty space that actually gives things a shape and even makes them beautiful. Ancient wisdom tells us “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” If you are curious about the spaces between things, you might notice those spaces are what connect everything. Tuning in to this helps us perceive the world differently, cultivating even more creativity, perhaps, as we explore this concept. Different people and different cultures even perceive artwork differently. Some see the whole, others see parts; some start with the background and context, others with the foreground and subject; some of us see objects, others see the spaces or relationships between them. It’s a useful exercise in mindful noticing to play with these different modes of perception as we take in all that is around us through our senses.
Increasingly, we have taken to deliberately noticing these spaces and how they reveal beauty and potential. It’s the space between the plants in the garden that make it beautiful, like the flowers in the bouquet. It’s the spaces between the notes in the song, or the pauses in a poem. Michelangelo is said to have found the sculpture inside the marble and chipped away the stone to reveal it.
But ‘ma’ can be a space between anything—people, things, time, sounds, emotional space, and even more. It’s the emotional space between friends or the silences in a conversation that bring intimacy. What lives in the emotional space and silences between you and your friends?
Leonard Cohen, a famous musician and meditator, reminded us “There’s a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in.” This, too, can help us see that growth needs space, and how space reveals. The old mindfulness saying from Viktor Frankl suggests that “Between stimulus and response lies a space, in that space is our power to choose, in that choice lies our growth and our freedom.” Lou Reed sang in one of my favorite songs, “Between thought and expression, lies a lifetime,” a beautiful reminder that meditation teaches us about noticing spaces between our thoughts and emotions.
Consider: What do you think about the spaces, the stillness, or the silence between anything and everything? Where else can you notice these spaces? What might you discover there, and what do you think could happen there?
A mindfulness practice for noticing spaciousness
a. Eyes closed or lowered, tune in to your breath at first, then to the stillness between the inhale and the exhale.
b. Listen more deeply now to your heartbeat and the spaces between.
c. Feel where your body makes contact with the world, and the spaces between.
d. Notice body sensations, and places where there is little or no sensation.
e. You might listen now, noticing sounds near and far, left, and right, and the silence in between.
f. Open or raise your eyes, aware of when they go from closed to open.
g. Take a look around at the objects in your field of vision, as well as the spaces and shapes between them. Notice the walls, the corners, and the spaces between rooms, aware, too, of what you might not have noticed before.
h. What else do you see? When does one color become another—red into orange, yellow into green? Light into shadow?
i. Continue noticing these spaces, as well as experiences in your mind. The space between thoughts, memories, or emotions. Take some more time to continue noticing all of these spaces in between.
After you finish the practice you can keep noticing space throughout your day to freshen your perspective. Outside, notice the shapes between clouds, the stars in the night sky, the moment when day becomes night. You can notice the spaces between raindrops, the lull between the waves in the ocean, or where the ocean meets the land. Notice the space between you and others, physical and emotional, and consider the space between meeting someone for the first time and becoming friends; between a joke and a laugh, and a question and an answer; between eating and being full. You might explore the space between waking up and opening your eyes as you start your day. If you are creative, consider what you decide to put between the edges of the camera frame, what you take away to form a sculpture, or what happens between the inspiration in your mind and the final form of your creation. We hope that in the space between these pages to your mind, you can simply let yourself notice the world in new ways.
Spirituality | How mindfulness can heal healthcare
Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare providers around the world have never faced more stress than we are facing today. Even before the covid pandemic, clinicians balanced the art of healing the sick with the business of practicing medicine, amidst countless third parties including insurance companies, government agencies, and pharmaceutical companies. Along with rapid advancements in health technology and therapeutics, those working in health care are expected to meet the rising requirements for electronic health record documentation, billing, and other non-clinical clerical tasks, on top of rising societal expectations for “quick fixes” and for on-demand provision of affordable and high-quality healthcare.
The lack of support available to help them navigate this environment has providers feeling as though they can’t keep up. According to most estimates, nearly 50 percent of doctors in the US are burned out. Many are ready to quit and there is an expected shortage of 120,000 physicians in the US by the year 2030.
As this mental health crisis rages on, there is a rising cry among the healers for a return to the joy, meaning, and connection that initially called them into their chosen profession. Mindfulness can help to achieve this, but not in the way you might think.
Treating individuals or shifting systems?
Traditional “resilience training” offerings directed at healthcare providers included mindfulness training because of its known benefits in helping strengthen self-awareness and self-regulation, while enhancing a sense of ease and well-being. This has been an important start to caring for healthcare workers, yet focusing on individual resilience can become a Band-Aid solution.
As the cultural understanding of workplace mental health grows more nuanced, there has been a shift in the global conversation around healing the healers—one that places the responsibility for creating and maintaining psychologically safe, supportive environments squarely on the shoulders of organizational leaders. We know that mindfulness training can help individual providers face their everyday challenges with more calm and clarity. But, without a top-down approach to shifting in the often toxic culture in healthcare, sustainable change will remain elusive.
Instead of reflexively encouraging individual healthcare workers to be more mindfully self-aware, leaders can also embrace organizational and systemic mindfulness. Just as a person’s mindfulness practice brings attention and care to every aspect of who they are (the physical body, thoughts, emotions, desires, and experiences), organizational mindfulness views the organization as a unified, organic, living entity. Its policies and processes acknowledge that the well-being and efficacy of the entire “organism” depends upon taking care of each person within the system.
In this view, the needs and voices of all providers are heard and taken seriously. Institutional shifts would aim to improve quality at every level—the quality of care and support accessible to healthcare workers, equally as much as quality of care for patients. By elevating mindfulness and compassion to the level of the system, we’re able to create organizational cultures that nurture and empower team members to thrive and function at their best.
Change for the better
What benefits can we expect as institutions begin to practice mindful self-awareness and self-regulation at scale, even while individual caregivers, patients, and leaders train in mindfulness?
Providers will experience better sleep, more engagement in their work, and more skill in navigating difficult conversations. Thanks to a renewed sense of purpose and meaning, their rates of burnout will soon fall. Patients will be more satisfied with their experiences in the healthcare system. As healthcare teams use their renewed capacity toward enhanced teamwork and decision-making, they will ultimately improve patient safety and outcomes, at reduced cost.
Implementing these kinds of mindful strategies will also benefit healthcare leaders. Leaders in other industries have embraced the practice of mindfulness and meditation, with a growing number of Fortune 500 CEOs having a regular contemplative mind-body practice as part of their success strategy. Leaders who practice and train in mindfulness experience improved focus, strategic awareness, decision-making, mastery of core leadership skills relating to emotional intelligence, executive presence, calm, empathy, intuition, and enhanced relationships due to improved communication skills—and that’s even before bringing mindfulness to the systemic level.
Scientific data supporting the benefits of mindfulness practice for individuals across industries and domains has skyrocketed over the past 40 years, beginning in the realm of clinical practice, then spreading to other sectors including technology, arts, sports, education, and law. It’s time for health care to reclaim the mantle of modeling optimal ways of caring, beginning by caring for its own caregivers, so that their cups are full, and they can then more lovingly care for the rest of us.
What do you think? How does your organization treat the practice of mindfulness? Does your organization as a whole demonstrate mindfulness and compassion? And where gaps exist, what can be done to change that?
Spirituality | Trauma Dharma
The greatest obstacle to spiritual development is… not what you might think. Various religions and spiritual pathways talk about our disturbed emotions, our anger, our anxieties, and our past actions. Others dwell on our persistent clinging or attachment to various aspects of our outer world and inner experiences. Still others cite our self-centeredness, our grasping at a self or so-called “ego-clinging.” Each of these is valid in relation to different stages and aspects of the path. And in every case we could also debate their value or relevance, or the misunderstandings that arise with regard to any of these complex issues. Before we can either reject or accept such a notion, we need to define what trauma is, beyond the concepts offered by either the popular press or clinical psychotherapy.
Trauma effects
Trauma can have a wide range of effects and symptoms, as well as extensive metabolic, neurological, immunological, and psychological effects. However, none of these are specific to trauma alone and so the real key is understanding what trauma means for the bioenergetics body, for the intricate web of electrical, magnetic, and photonic forces and fields that make up our subtle body.
Our physical form itself functions as a liquid-crystal matrix, with the fourth, magnetic stage of water being an important part of our composition. Our connective tissue matrix and PVS (primary vascular system) is interwoven through every organ and tissue. Beyond this exquisite network of minute vessels and microscopic collagen, we also have an energy body. Just as there is a network of ever-finer arteries and capillaries, and ever-more-subtle branches of nerve fibers, there is a highly structured energy field. Imagine a polished diamond or some other magnificent gem with billions of facets, intersecting and overlapping in perfect symmetry, reflecting photons carrying complex qualia of information. This network is the formative pattern upon which our physical organism is built. All structure and all function follows these invisible lines of force.
Traumatic channels
Trauma exists within our body, tissues, cells, and molecules. On a physical level there is now tremendous information about what happens within the vascular system and how blockages and distortion, or a lack or excess of angiogenesis (blood vessel building capacity) accompanies or causes disease. Such disruptions also occur within the complex web of energies, the vibrating strings of light and organized fields that belong to each unique organ and tissue. These take the form of weakened or broken lines of forces, distorted or expanded “bubbles” within the body field, or thickened, tangled, or blocked energetic channels. The perfect symmetry and organization of our bioenergetics structure becomes a tangled skein. To make matters worse, these areas, large and small, then form a defensive field, not unlike the physical scabs and scars with which we are so familiar. They become walled off and inaccessible, “safely” stowed away but also becoming a ticking time bomb.
Trauma defense
While we are clearing up past impacts of every description, we may also be busy accumulating fresh trauma! The solution seems straightforward: protect oneself. But how to most effectively ward off these attacks, large and small? Fortunately Vajrayana again is replete with defensive methods and, in fact, a good deal of the daily practice of a tantric Buddhist adept is spent in this way. Daily water offerings, smoke offerings, morning Tara practice and evening protector practice are largely dedicated to preventing harm to one’s health, possessions, sangha, spiritual practice, and the Buddhadharma in general. Also, the extensive and widespread practice of Chöd is a penultimate way of clearing “incoming karma” before it manifests in serious obstacles and difficulties. Then again, merely holding to the identity of the yidam or meditational deity archetype provides ongoing protection, as we discard our habitual identity, the proverbial “magnet of suffering.”
The trauma-resistant form
Inner work of another sort is also necessary and highly effective. That takes the form of building up one’s Five-Element structure, area by area, noting where there are weaknesses and filling in the gaps. The integrity of our five-element matrix is our greatest asset and greatest bulwark against forces of entropy and decay. They are formative patterns of meaning and intelligence that provide a scaffold for bio-photonic light, electricity, magnetism, and eventually a vibrating container built of molecules, cells, and sinews. The Elements should be our first concern in the morning and our last thought at night, providing diurnal protection. If one can achieve full Mahamudra pure light states, do that. But the Elements will still be our guide through the mundane world of apparitions and confused and wandering sentient beings.
