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November 30 - December 1, 2021
digital new world of connecting and sharing but a different kind of new world defined by anxiety, loneliness, endlessly comparing oneself to others, and perhaps surveillance.
Our era of fragmentation has paved the way for an era of anxiety.
The Science of Happiness. Over the twenty years of this engagement, I have been asked one key question: How might I find deeper happiness?
Find more community. Deepen your connections with others. Be with others in meaningful ways. Find rituals to organize your life. It will boost your happiness, give you greater joy, and even add ten years to your life expectancy,
Create sabbaths in your life, from work, technology, social life, and our frenetic, often overscheduled hours of the day.
there is much freedom and promise in this fragmentation,
connected and safe
Characters are totems of how I want to be—or not be—in the world.
taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating—by thinking of them as spiritual practices.
where do you go to find community?”
“CrossFit is family, laughter, love, and community.
Discipline, honesty, courage, accountability—what you learn in the gym is also training for life.
Think about giving your life in the service of something greater than yourself and what that means for those left behind.
Rest in peace, my friend.”
old patterns of community were finding new expressions in a contemporary context.
Vulnerability and empathy expert Dr. Brené Brown explains in her book Braving the Wilderness, “When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves.
community’s collective intelligence.”
atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”
deepen your rituals of connection across four levels: Connecting with yourself Connecting with the people around you Connecting with the natural world Connecting with the transcendent.
new questions. How can we truly find rest in a stressed-out 24/7 world? How can we remember our “enough-ness” in an economy that always pushes for more? How do we cultivate our courage to stand against injustice?
three things in any practice or ritual: intention, attention, and repetition.
The world is full of these rituals!
We just need to be clear about our intention (what are we inviting into this moment?), bring it our attention (coming back to being present in this moment), and make space for repetition (coming back to this practice time and again).
Think about your own life. When was the last time you felt deeply connected to something bigger than yourself? Where were you? What did that feel like? And what words would you use to communicate that experience?
At least one in six American adults are on antidepressants, antianxiety medications, or antipsychotics, as reported by a study in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016.
sacred reading and sabbath time.
What I mean by connecting with our authentic self is less about stripping away the parts of ourselves that we don’t like or focusing only on the bits that seem more spiritual, and more about integrating the fullness of who we are.
rejoining our soul and our role
“the self selfing the self.” The idea is that we need time and attention to integrate our experiences, ideas, and identities to be who we are.
We can treat a book as sacred not because we’re going to believe that the storylines within it somehow explain the mysteries of the universe, but because they help us be kinder, more compassionate. They help us be curious and empathetic.
This is the power of reading books as a sacred practice: they can help us know who we are and decide who we might want to become.
Just imagine these textual ancestors walking along a path and sowing seeds, and now we are able to delight in the resulting flowers. And who knows, perhaps by engaging in these sacred practices in our own ways today we’ll be planting seeds for others to enjoy when they travel this road in years to come.
What can we learn about suffering? How can we better understand mental illness? What does the text ask us to do in our own lives?
SACRED READING BRINGS US HOME TO OURSELVES
Reading is a path to greater awareness. To courage and commitment. To helping us see our mistakes, and to finding a better way forward.
Lectio divina, literally meaning sacred reading, is one such ritual.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Stage 1: What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story?
Stage 2: What allegorical images, stories, songs, or metaphors show up for you?
connecting unexpected dots and layering in new associations. But at this stage we’re delighting in a bundle of ideas—next
Stage 3: What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind?
Stage 4: What action are you being called to take?
explore whether reading might be a practice that speaks to you and brings you a sense of connecting with your deeper self.
Ashley Ramsden’s rendition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Xmas carol
HUMANITY WAS MY BUSINESS!”
to embrace our common humanity,
story could inspire and instruct us to live lives of meaning and purpose, connection and joy.
This is the wisdom of treating a text as sacred. It brings us closer to who we are, deep down. It helps us integrate our experiences. It helps us see beyond ourselves so that we can then turn back and see ourselves more clearly.
They act as a mirror in which we confront attitudes and behaviors that we want to let go of. They can inspire us and ennoble who we want to become.
Making time for ourselves is more and more difficult.
