Practice
Practices serve to make practitioner a better person. When we engage in a practice, whether it's religious, spiritual, physical or secular, the experience gives rise to our sense of self and our sense of our place in universe.
Select a practice to explore:
by Raphael Cushnir
Find the Flinch: Identify the aspect of moving forward with your vision that causes you to pull up short.
Cut to the Chase: Discover your worst-case scenario in moving forward, and determine how that outcome would make you feel.
Weather the Storm: Use all your creative powers to imagine that outcome as a reality, then surf the whole cascade of emotions that comes with it....
What does it mean to have a spiritual vision?
It means to envision a world at play in the game of love.
So there is only one vision? Can’t I have my own vision and live in sync with that?
There is only one spiritual vision: an ever–more just and compassionate world where all life is respected and the well being of persons and planets is the ultimate moral and ethical guide. But not everyone has...
Why are spiritual people characterized as having vision? Vision – a glimpse of an idea of how good things might be – requires a long-range perspective and a caring and compassionate attitude. And spiritual practices cultivate both. Meditative practices cultivate our internal shift from a lower-order self that is pre-occupied with our immediate self-centered needs and desires, to a higher-order...
See the world through your pet's eyes
I make pet visits to the local hospital with my golden retriever, Dakota. My schedule has us visiting oncology patients and their families. Dakota's schedule has us visiting everyone. We greet all the housekeeping staff, the people outside the hospital in the smoking area, the office staff, hospital volunteers, and anyone else he sees. When I'm with Dakota,...
In what way does spirituality cultivate unity?
It doesn’t. What spiritual practice does is reveal the essential unity and interdependence of life. Unity is a given. It is only ignorance that perpetuates the illusion that something can exist apart from anything else.
And yet there is no doubt that diversity is an equally obvious fact of life.
Unity is not the opposite of diversity. The opposite...
As Rabbi Rami suggests, spiritual practices reveal the essential unity and inter-dependence of all life. At the level of energy, all living things are complex energetic systems and with intelligence systems that were designed, in direct response to the pressure to constantly require energy to survive. Our sensory systems transduce light energy into sight, and sound wave energy into sound,...
Before her transformation, Byron Katie, a mother of three and self-employed businesswoman, described herself as "completely depressed, suicidal, stuck in total pain and self-loathing." Sometimes she couldn't get up for days or weeks to bathe or brush her teeth. Eventually, her self-esteem became so low that she didn't feel she deserved to sleep in a bed and began sleeping on the floor.
One...
We often speak of spirituality as being transformative, but I am not quite sure what to make of this. Am I being transformed from one thing to another?
There is no fixed you from which to be transformed, and no fixed you into which you can be transformed. There is just transformation, on–going never–ending change. While we often speak of having a willingness to change, the fact is, willing or...
Our sense of our self arises from the activity of a neural network self-representation in our brain, and this self-representation arises from neural networks that represent our experience. When we’re operating from a particular self-representation, it’s determining the information that our brain is using to create our reality, and it’s generating our behavior and influencing our future...
by Judith Orloff, M.D.
Silence is filled with positive energy. Our spirits flourish in silence, have space to breathe. I treasure these still moments. Unobscured by noise, a spiritual connection can be felt more easily.
As a psychiatrist, I understand our aversion to silence. Not talking can make you feel strange, lonely, and anxious. To our "to-do list" mind, being silent is like going to...
I truly enjoy silent time, and extended silent time on retreats. It allows me to listen more deeply to my own thoughts.
Using silence to listen to our own thoughts is a step in the right direction, but silence means more than refraining from speaking aloud; inner chatter is still chatter and not yet silence.
Yes, I know. True silence is the ending of thought, but how do I do that?
There may be...
Language is the immediate neural-mental building block of thought. Spiritual people tend to embrace silence because when we generate or process language, we automatically activate thought processes; and our thought processes are neurally yoked to a self-representation. It’s physically impossible at the neural level to be both thinking and in a state of ‘no self’. This is why so many spiritual...
by Tara Brach
As with any addiction, the escape from pain of our shadow self only increases our suffering. Our strategies amplify the feeling that something is wrong with us and stop us from attending to the parts of ourselves that most need our attention to heal.
One of Carl Jung's key insights was that the unfelt parts of our psyches are the source of all neuroses and suffering. A vicious...
Doesn’t spiritual practice eliminate our shadow, our dark side?
We live in a binary world of yin/yang, on/off, good/bad, light/dark, etc. You cannot have one of these without its opposite. There is no “up” without “down;” you can’t have “fronts” without “backs.” As long as you live you will live with light and shadow.
So what is the value of spiritual practice regarding the shadow?
Spiritual...
Our conscious experience lags behind the neural even that created by a few milliseconds. Before the calculus of our brain generates a conscious experience in our mind, the selfishness of our motivation is already associatively translated into a socially acceptable explanation for our behavior. In order to even begin to see our own selfishness, jealousy, envy, and hatred, we have to operating...
by Bradford Keeney, Ph.D.
Make a list of three things that you can't possibly imagine yourself worrying about. For each worry-free item, select a color. For instance, you might come up with something like this:
- Opening a book that you are not interested in reading: Blue
- Washing a sidewalk: Green
- Reading a phone book: White
When you have made your list and color assignments, select three...
I don’t usually think of religion and play as going together. By linking spirituality and play, are we saying that being spiritual is qualitatively different than being religious?
Think in terms of sports. When you are a kid you tend to engage in sports for the play, for the fun. Then adults begin to organize your play and things become more serious. Now there are fixed and competing teams,...
Here again, when we’re operating from a higher order self-representation, or from a neural-mental platform of ‘no self’ or ‘universal self’, the thoughts and behaviors we generate are arising from networks that don’t carry the negative weighting of those that we’re encoded when we were pre-occupied with solving the problems of our individual, ego-centric life. In these cultivated states, our...
