SPIRITUALITY: FINDING MEANING IN LIFE AND DEATH

1. SPIRITUALITY:FINDING MEANING IN LIFE AND DEATH Chapter 11

2. WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY? • A person’s connection to self, significant others, and the community at large. • Involves a personal believe system or value system that gives meaning and purpose to life • May include belief in and reverence for a higher power, which may be expressed through an organized religion. • May include nonreligious ideas, becoming centered on a personal value system that may be reflected in activities such as volunteer work • Provides feelings of participation in something greater than oneself and a sense of unity with nature and the universe.

3. Maintaining connectedness • Spirituality involves connectedness to self, to others and to a larger purpose • Involves being responsible for yourself and taking charge of your life • Affects your capacity for love, compassion, joy, forgiveness, altruism and fulfillment. • Connectedness with significant others through positive relationships • Characterized by mutual support, respect, good communication and caring actions • Connectedness to and participation in the community • Enjoying constructive relationships

4. Developing a personal value system • A set of guidelines of how you want to live your life • Values, the criteria for judging what is good or bad, underline moral principles and behavior • Your value system becomes your map, providing a structure for decision making that allows flexibility and the possibility of change.

5. Finding meaning and purpose in life State of transcendence, and sense of well being. You have found purpose and meaning in life. • Why am I here?

6. Lab • Characteristics of the self-actualizing person

7. BUILDING A SPIRITUAL LIFE • The quest for self fulfillment often begins with the question Who am I? • Answer this question begins with self-exploration • What are my abilities and talents? • Which are my interests and passions? • What are my core values and guiding principles • Several approaches to self-exploration exists to help us broaden and deepen our self-knowledge and self-awareness.

8. Practicing mindfulness “Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now” ThichNhatHanh • Practice of living fully in the moment, concentrating on what is happening right now. • As you learn to focus on the present moment, you can be more in touch with your life as it is happening. • When people learn to live fully in the moment, they sometimes experience a phenomenon known as flow, a feeling of being completely absorbed in an activity and a moment • When you learn to be mindful and live in the moment, you are more likely to experience flow in your daily activities

9. Meditation • A way of quieting the mind • Involves introspection, self-exploration and self-discovery • The ultimate goal is to relax your body, let your feelings and thoughts come and go as they will and just “be”.

10. Journaling • Record your feelings, thoughts, breakthroughs, and desires in a private journal to understand yourself more clearly. • James Pennebaker has found that writing about emotional upheavals can improve physical and mental health, and suggests writing about the following: • Something that you are thinking or worrying about too much • Something that you are dreaming about • Something that you feel is affecting your life in an unhealthy way • Something that you have been avoiding for days, weeks or years. • Journaling is an effective way to learn about who you are and where you have been.

11. Experiencing Retreat • Retreat is a place of refuge, seclusion or privacy or an activity in which you can create quiet space for raising your personal spiritual awareness. • May involve solitude or group withdrawal for meditation, prayer, exploration or study. • Retreats stimulate the mind, enhance self-awareness and refresh the spirit

12. Experiencing the arts • Experiencing arts – sculpture, painting, music, poetry, literature, theater, storytelling, dance or some other form- is another way to build a spiritual life. • Experiencing art can inspire you to think about the purpose of life and the nature of reality. • By engaging your heart, mind and spirit, art can give you fresh insights, challenge preconceptions and trigger inner growth.

13. Living your values • Bring your deepest believes and intentions into the world - live your values. What is the most important to you in life? Are you living or acting in accordance with it? Write a purpose statement that will remind you of who you truly are and why you believe you are here on earth. Do you stay on purpose in your daily interactions and activities?

14. SPIRITUALITY AND HEALTH • Spiritual wellness includes the ability to • Examine personal beliefs and values • Search for meaning and purpose in life • Make connections with other people • Appreciate natural forces in the universe • Your ability to develop spiritual wellness lies in the choices you make everyday on your own behalf.

15. Daily behavior choices to promote your spiritual wellness • Your physical health • Over the ages, various spiritual traditions have thought of the human body as the temple of the spirit. • If you neglect or abuse your body, it is difficult if not impossible to reach wellness. How can you better respect your body?

16. Daily behavior choices to promote your spiritual wellness • Your mental and emotional health • Spiritual health overlaps with your emotional and mental health in numerous ways. • Feeling that you are part of something greater in the universe can help you handle many daily changes, provides a perspective and helps to find creative ways to deal with problems.

17. Daily behavior choices to promote your spiritual wellness • Building resilience • The ability to bounce back from adversity is known as resilience. • By developing qualities of resilience, we become better able to deal with an unpredictable world and more flexible in facing the unknown. • Resilience often means developing new abilities simply to get through an unfamiliar and stressful experience.

19. There’s no great sense of foreboding, no premonition, you just wake up one morning and something’s wrong in your lungs, or your liver, or your bones. But near-death cleared the decks, and what came after was a bright, sparking awareness: time is limited, so I better wake up every morning fresh and know that I have just one chance to live this particular day right, and to string my days together into a life of action and purpose. If you want to know what keeps me on my bike, riding up and alp for six hours in the rain, that’s your answer. Lance Armstrong

20. Daily behavior choices to promote your spiritual wellness • Finding joy in everyday things. • Sometimes we are trying so hard to reach out big goals that we miss daily opportunities to appreciate ordinary things. • Joy is an attitude, a state of mind that can be developed and nurtured.

21. Daily behavior choices to promote your spiritual wellness • Creating balance • We are conditioned to think that doing more will lead to greater success. • A more successful strategy is to prioritize the important things and delegate or forego the rest. • Another approach to creating balance is to view your life from a broader perspective • “Begin with the end in mind”

22. ACTIVITY:Write your own obituary • What did you accomplish? • What did you want to accomplish but didn’t? • What were the happy moments? • What were the sad times? • What would you do again, and what would you not do again? • Did you live out your deepest values?

23. Health benefits of spirituality • Physical effects • Can prayer cure cancer or slow its progression? • Can it lower blood pressure? • Does spirituality speed healing after accidents or help people recover from surgery? • Do religious people live longer? READ “Does Spirituality Improve Your Health? (337)

25. Health effects of spirituality • Mental effects • People who are spiritually involved tend to enjoy better mental health as well as physical heath. • Religious people tend to be more forgiving and more connected with themselves and their beliefs. • Spiritual practices promote positive emotions, such as: love, hope, contentment and forgiveness, which can result in lower levels of anxiety.

26. SPIRITUAL AND COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT • Spirituality involves connectedness to the community, which in turn promotes recognition of the interdependence of all people and all living things.

27. Service learning • A way to connect classroom activities to community service and community building • Gives the opportunity to master new skills, build self esteem and enhance self image • Teaches people how to extend themselves beyond their enclosed world, taking a risk to get involved in the lives of others.

28. Volunteering • While helping others, volunteers may experience the euphoric feelings that athletes often describe as being “in the zone”. • Just as the high of helping creates enjoyable immediate benefits, the calm of helping may result in significant long-term health benefits.

29. Social activism and the global community • Some people connect with their communities through social activism and find it meaningful to participate in global citizenship by joining organizations. • They claim that contributing to community welfare and striving for justice are the ways to a rich inner life. • Some social activists have transcended their religious and social conditioning and become universal spiritual beings, ready to serve all.

30. Spiritual rituals and ceremonies. • In virtually all cultures, faith and its accompanying belief system provide individuals and groups with rituals and practices that foster the development of a sense of community • Rituals and ceremonies feed our spirits, making them richer and deeper.

31. Nature and the environment. • The impulse that propels people to the mountains or seashore for their holidays is the same impulse that drives pilgrims to sites of religious importance – the need to reconnect with the natural world. • Being close to nature energizes and strengthens us • Daily activities that incorporate environmental values might include recycling, composting, and walking or riding a bike instead of driving.

32. DEATH AND DYING • Death and dying have a great spiritual significance for people in all cultures. • Studies suggest that religiously involved people at the end of life are more accepting of death than those who are less religiously involved. • Religious involvement and spirituality are associated with less death anxiety.

33. Healthy grieving • Grief is a natural reaction to loss. • We might grief for many kind of losses in our lives: divorce, relocation, traumatic experiences, loss of health and mobility and even expected life transitions. • Grief is expressed by feelings of sadness, loneliness, anger and guilt, all part of the process of healing. • It is important that you give yourself permission to feel the loss and take time to heal. • Spiritual believes and rituals help people cope with the loss and move through the emotional work of grieving.