Centre for Vital Elders

“A lot of people, in the face of serious illness, look for hope and find their way through religion or spirituality or meditation or reiki or whatever helps them,” said Suzanne Swan, director of education at To Life. 

  
“We have asked speakers to touch on peoples’ idea of spirituality and what it is,” Swan said.

Each person’s definition of spirituality varies.

“Spirituality doesn’t have to be religious,” said Dr. Beth Netter of the Center for Integrative Health and Healing in Albany, one of the panelists. “The core is about finding the connection with their inner spirit.” She practices physiology, along with faith and healing.

For Rabbi Rena Kieval, the leader of Congregation Ohav Shalom, the connection between healing of the body and healing of the spirit is about being a “whole person.”

“It is part of the Jewish prayer,” said Kieval, another participant.

Mary Beth Toomey Dunne, 52, will provide insight from the perspective of a cancer survivor. She had “stage four colon cancer that had gone to her liver” when doctors gave her six months to live. That was five years ago.

The parishioner at St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Albany asked people to pray “not for a cure, but for me to accept whatever God had in mind for me and that I would go to the right doctors and that they would be instrumental in providing whatever is meant for me.”

She was treated locally at St. Peter’s Hospital and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. She underwent two surgeries and chemotherapy, and had healing prayer services at her church and a home Mass with healing prayers.

Today, Dunne attributes her improved health to both the medical treatment and prayers. “I think that prayer and positive attitude puts you in the optimal situation for medical care,” she said.

When people do healing work, they look for what is lacking, said Netter. “I often think of disease as ‘dis-ease.’ When they connect to their inner spirit, people realize they have found what they lacked in their lives. That helps their immune system and gives them positivity,” she said, explaining that she does reiki — a Japanese form of alternative healing — to help people “re-recognize” they have energy with the world around them.

When people go through trauma, like breast cancer, “they are able to appreciate that the trauma has brought them closer to themselves and to their families,” said Netter, adding that the idea of oneness is at the core of every religion.

Other panelists include Robert L. Miller Jr., a professor at the University at Albany School of Social Welfare; Leslie Neustadt, a volunteer chaplain and cancer survivor; and Sister Mary Anne Rodgers of Mission Integration.

Kieval believes people are more comfortable with the spiritual approach to healing these days. “I also find that people who don’t identify themselves as religious find great comfort in prayer when they are ill,” she said. “They have a sense that there is someone larger than themselves.”

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Are we happy yet? Suzy Freeman-Greene ponders the wisdom of the ancients in the search for happiness and how our expectations have changed over the centuries.

THE HAPPINESS INDUSTRY is in overdrive. There has been an explosion of books about happiness. There are conferences on happiness, laughter clubs and happy hours. A Harvard academic teaches a course on happiness that is the university’s most popular subject. Happiness is the subtext of most ads, the promise hidden in a shoe or soft drink. Everywhere we go, we’re told to have fun.

For a long time the main way of measuring happiness was to ask people how they felt. It was purely a subjective thing. Today scientists can use brain scans or electrodes to compare reported feelings with brain activity. They’ve found that when people experience positive feelings (say, while looking at smiling baby photos) there’s more activity on the left side of the brain. Some see this as proof of the objective nature of happiness.

Yet while our tools for measuring happiness have grown more precise, the evidence shows most people in the West are no happier today than those surveyed 50 years ago. This is despite average incomes having more than doubled in this time. Many of today’s happiness analysts seek to grapple with this. They ask what are the things that make us happy, and how, as individuals and as a society, can we better pursue them? Writer Alain de Botton has played a big role in the resurgence of literary interest here. He is a stylish and accessible interpreter of our inner yearnings. As he notes in his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives.

But has the contemporary obsession with being happy helped create a new kind of discontent? This is the startling question asked by American historian Darrin McMahon in his book Happiness, a History. McMahon traces ideas of happiness in the West from the ancient Greeks, who saw a person’s fate as largely at the whim of the gods, to contemporary societies, where happiness is viewed as a right. He suggests we now worry we’re not happy enough - which may make us miserable.

McMahon observes that by the end of the fifth century BC, a new, less fatalistic perspective was emerging among Athenian thinkers. It held that humans might hope to influence their lot through their own actions. Happiness was equated with virtue. Through self-control, wrote Plato, the “better elements of the mind” could prevail.
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“The key to our inner resources is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is gained by personal development - that is by collecting experiences out of which new insight and wisdom are born.

“In fact, this comes close to being the meaning of life. Consequently, the raison-d’être for a company is to supply an environment in which personal development of the human beings involved in the company can best take place…

What a precious gift to humankind and to our planet it would be if the remarkable knowledge we have achieved should be united with wisdom. Then our planet would be the paradise it is meant to be. Business-life has the opportunity to bring that gift forward.”

Rolf Osterber, President, Svensk Filmindustri   

“In ancient times, various holistic sciences were developed by highly evolved beings to enable their own evolution and that of others.

These subtle arts were created through the linking of individual minds with the universal mind. They are still taught by traditional teachers to those who display virtue and desire to assist others.The student who seeks out and studies these teachings Furthers the evolution of humankind as well as her own spiritual unfolding.The student who ignores them hinders the development of all beings.”

Have you noticed how freedom affects our ability to be creative in our lives and work?

I’m talking more about the ‘inner’ freedom we have, or don’t have, to express ourselves rather than the ‘outer’ freedom where we perceive others to limit us, and I acknowledge that these are closely inter-related.

So what has freedom to do with creativity? For me, freedom has a lot to do with self expression and it is through our self expression that we manifest our creativity.

You can read a little more about this in The Man in the Yellow Jacket.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced the times when we feel really passionate about something and we break free of all limitations.

It’s a great power we have to be imaginative, innovative and play with all possibilities.

And sometimes we find ourselves stuck, or the groups we are working with get bogged down and not able to see a way forward.

This would be the time to bring forward this energy of freedom and creativity within us, and too often it seems we are not able to. For some reason we do not feel free to express ourselves, to say what needs to be said to unblock the blockage and move on.

It seems to me our organisations are deliberately designed to maintain the status quo, and we put structures and policies in place to make sure nothing changes too much. And we let these limit our freedom of expression.

Indigenous cultures recognised this challenge and how dangerous it was for the people to get stuck in a rut and become less passionate about their lives. In some cases they would have a society within the tribe whose role it was to ensure the people kept breaking free from any self limiting beliefs they created for themselves.

Maybe we could do with this in our communities and organisations. Call in the court jester or the sacred clowns!

In what ways are we free to tell the truth and what compels us to tell lies?

These questions came to me out of a recent discussion, Truth and Lies, where for me, there was an element missing, or at least not well represented.

This element is the ‘inner self’ and how free we are. In the many decisions we face in our lives there is no one holding a gun to our head telling us we must lie to get what we want. But it seems to me there might be a facet of our inner self that is having the same effect and taking away our freedom to be who we are.

And the freedom to be who we are is, from my perspective, the primary freedom.

It feels easier to discuss lies in connection with the outer world. For example people increasingly lie about their qualifications on job application forms. Does this lie develop from an inner lie these people are holding about themselves, about their identity perhaps. Maybe they cannot be happy with just who they are, they believe they can be happy if they pretend to be someone else with more qualifications. Is this not just another lie?

Another aspect of lying is not telling other people the truth, what you really believe, because of some concern you have about how they will react.

It seems to me that this is very arrogant and disrespectful. Am I alone in wanting to take responsibility for my own responses? Surely if some engages with me through their concerns about my reactions, they are not actually engaging with me at all but with some false image of me they have created.

What if we taught ourselves and our children to take responsibility for our own emotions? What difference would this begin to make in the world?

So what is needed for us to share more of who we are with each other?