Spirituality and Mental Health

What is the connection between spirituality and mental health? As I think about this, the prior question interferes. What is “spirituality?” Then there is the next question, “What is mental health?” But I thought I had this neatly tied up years ago. Now, I find that I am struggling with it again. Always beginning again. I began to address this in a blog entry in September. But then other things got in the way.

The financial crisis and the bailout of the elite, crooks on Wall Street. (Oh? Do I have an opinion? Who me?) Also the very important election of the next U.S. president. Not that these are less than spiritual or important to mental health. In fact, they are very spiritual issues. Both directly and indirectly the election of a new president will begin to correct the insanity of the current American foreign and domestic policies and the evilness which has taken over our lives. But I’ll get back to this in a bit.

Ruminating about the subject of spirituality is not a new endeavor for me. This blog has several entries about the subject from theological, religious, psychological, psychotherapy and social perspectives. Lately I’ve had some new experiences and musings that I want to share.

First, I hit a dry spot in my meditation. For a few months I was distracting myself with other concerns. I got caught up in the news cycle, began an intense review of my earlier work in Transactional Analysis, had several new clients with sexual dysfunction and that drove me to focus to catch up with the latest research. (I have done a lot of sex therapy in the past, but for a few years now have been referring clients to a well-known sex therapist whose work I respect. She has retired and is no longer accepting clients. I have searched for others but not yet found someone I am prepared to recommend. In addition, my clients tend to be low-income and not have a lot of financial resources.) With all this, I gradually let take my meditation time wither away.

Eventually, I realized what I had done and what I lost and have reclaimed that energy and time. Zen meditation has always strengthened my life, helping me to both grasp it and let go of my illusion of individuation. It has enriched my walk as a follower of Jesus, as a human being, as a part of all humanity.

The second experience was encountering the story of Jill Bolte Taylor, a researcher at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. Taylor woke one morning with the beginning of a stroke which left her without a sense of where Jill ended and the rest of the universe began. Taylor, neuro-scientist to the end, was able to track her experience and later document it for the rest of us in a book entitled, My Stroke of Insight.

Because Taylor’s stroke incapacitated her left hemisphere or left brain, she was not constricted by her usual limit-setting rationality of time, judgment and ego. What was left operational in her brain put her in contact with, as she later put it, “the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time...My stroke of insight would be: Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.”

Of course, that is not to demean the value of the left, rational, hemisphere. It takes both. A healthy person, and a healthy society, honor and live more or less equally out of both halves of the brain. But most of us, most of the time, again as Jill Taylor says, “The two hemispheres of our brain are yoked opposites: limit-setting rationality (time, judgment, ego) in perpetual interplay with the eternal and unbounded now. Together, and only together, do these two halves of our awareness make our human destiny.”

After hearing Jill Bolte Taylor being interviewed—on KPFA, I think, but I don’t remember—I went to my Internet guru, Google, and looked her up. Of the many references, the one I found most helpful was a video of her talk at the TED conference in February of this year. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is a 25 year old series of conferences. Taylor’s talk is at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

This suggests a hard-wired proclivity for a spiritual connection with the here and now. It touches on the experience of mindfulness and "suchness", both Zen experiences—I almost said “concepts” but they are not concepts because they are not cognitive or intellectual, but experiential.

Third has been a series of sermons by he pastor of the church where I find my community of spirituality, sustenance and social action, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon, California.

Doug began preaching a series based on the passage about putting old wine in old wineskins and new wine in new wineskins. In Jesus day, you had to get this right because otherwise the wine would spoil or the new wine would break the old wineskins. This story appears in all three canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke. It also appears in the Gospel of Thomas as "Nobody drinks aged wine and immediately wants to drink young wine. Young wine is not poured into old wineskins, or they might break, and aged wine is not poured into a new wineskin, or it might spoil."

So Doug was proposing that the story of Jesus was a new wine, but put in the old wineskin of dogma, and hardened doctrine, it has begun to break the container. He has followed by looking at a radical acceptance of the one commandment of Jesus, the commandment of Love. Then quoting 1 John, “God is Love. Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

The sermons that have followed have been practical application of the centrality of love, applied not just to those near to us, but to all people, all communities, all animals, all nature and, ultimately, all universes.

The latest key was a return to my readings of Brother David Stiendl-Rast’s books, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, A Listening Heart, and The Ground We Share (Written with Robert Aitken-Roshi). There is a primacy in the spiritual search. The heart of spirituality—like the heart of prayer—is gratefulness. It is because I am grateful that I search out the path to life, only to find myself already there. Being mindful, I find myself grateful. Being grateful I discover that I am myself the path. That path is Love.

This is not a new teaching. It is nothing that I have discovered. It is there in the bible, in the works of Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Zen monk, in the writings of Thomas Moore the contemporary spiritual teacher, St. John of the Cross, and especially, Meister Eckhart, the 13th century theologian and mystic. Whose words, among other amazing sayings, include these.

• If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "Thank You", that would suffice.
• The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.
• He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere.
• We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.

That does not answer all the questions, but it does provide a framework. Spiritual practice begins with an awareness of the reality that we are a part of all that is. There is not a separation of subject and object, but there is a unity. Gratefulness for this unity of the gift of all that is real and true. The practice of love in all places and times, with those we love, friends and with those we see as enemies, recognizing that we are, in this, loving ourselves. This is spirituality.

But, this is only a beginning and I am a beginner. When I know the full answer, I will have returned to the beginning, and I will not know. And it will be Sacred.