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January 7 - January 12, 2021
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,
Rituals, in my view, are patterned, repeated ways in which we enact the moral emotions—of compassion, gratitude, awe, bliss, empathy, ecstasy—that have been shaped by our hominid evolution and built up into the fabric of our culture through cultural evolution.
Communities that we studied offered people opportunities for personal and social transformation, offered a chance to be creative and clarify their purpose, and provided structures of accountability and community connection.
What studying these modern communities taught me is this: we are building lives of meaning and connection outside of traditional religious spaces, but making it up as we go along can only take us so far. We need help to ground and enrich those practices. And if we are brave enough to look, it is in the ancient traditions where we find incredible insight and creativity that we can adapt for our modern world.
In the midst of a crisis of isolation, where loneliness leads to deaths of despair, being truly connected isn’t a luxury. It’s a lifesaver.
Lunstad concludes in her 2018 American Psychologist paper that “there are perhaps no other facets that can have such a large impact on both length and quality of life—from the cradle to the grave” as social connection.
While our culture often lifts up the importance of self-care, we’re desperately in need of community care.
Perversely, when we feel far away from one another, our brains have evolved not to foster connection, but instead to strive for self-preservation.
Dr. Brené Brown explains in her book Braving the Wilderness, “When we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. In that mode, we want to connect, but our brain is attempting to override connection with self-protection. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping.
disconnection is about more than our physical and emotional well-being. Our spirits, too, suffer. Without rich relationships and a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, the occasions that could mean the most in our lives feel emptier.
What I propose is this: by composting old rituals to meet our real-world needs, we can regrow deeper relationships and speak to our hunger for meaning and depth.
There are two key concepts here—unbundling and remixing.
Unbundling is the process of separating elements of value from a single collection of offerings.
Where religious institutions have been mistaken, as innovation expert Clayton Christensen might put it, is that they’ve fallen in love with a specific solution, rather than forever evolving to meet the need.
Deep connection isn’t just about relationships with other people. It’s about feeling the fullness of being alive. It’s about being enveloped in multiple layers of belonging within, between, and around us.
Connecting with yourself Connecting with the people around you Connecting with the natural world Connecting with the transcendent.*
It is time to liberate the gifts of tradition so that all of us can live lives of integrity and joy.
three things in any practice or ritual: intention, attention, and repetition.
I’ve come to believe that just about anything can become a spiritual practice—gardening,
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). In this way, rituals make the invisible connections that make life meaningful, visible.
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?
By and large, we are starved of good language to describe what matters most to us, to confidently communicate with others those moments of deep meaning.
Neuroscience, too, tells us that when we can’t fully describe what we’re feeling, we tend to discount the feeling itself as illegitimate or unworthy of our—or other’s—attention.
The word “spiritual,” then, is a pointer to something beyond language. It is a vulnerable connection. As theology and gender studies scholar Mark Jordan puts it, the spiritual is a place of “unpredictable encounter or illumination that cannot be controlled.”
there is nothing that can get between you and life’s deepest connection. Nothing, no matter how powerful, can ever take that away.
we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And this way of life is unsustainable. It is making us unwell.
two transformative practices for connecting with ourselves: 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.
reading is not just something we can do to escape the world, but rather that it can help us live more deeply in it, that we can read our favorite books not just as novels, but as instructive and inspirational texts that can teach us about ourselves and how we live.
imagine these textual ancestors walking along a path and sowing seeds, and now we are able to delight in the resulting flowers.
we think of “sacred” as an adjective, as a synonym for “holy” or “blessed.” It describes something static, maybe a little dusty, outside our day-to-day experience. But it is much better understood as a verb—something that we do.
“sacred” itself comes from the Latin sacrare, which means to consecrate or dedicate.
spiritual practices from antiquity, like PaRDeS and Florilegia, to dig underneath the plot to find unexpected wisdom
theme of commitment. Other themes have included forgiveness, trauma, delight, and love. In every episode we share a story from our own lives that relates to the theme,
empathy doesn’t start with others. It starts with yourself.
In a German study from 2017, participants were taught to recognize different sub-personalities, such as our “happy voice” or “inner critic.” By learning to engage critically our own various thought patterns, we become better able to infer the mental states of others. We become more empathetic.
What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story? What allegorical images, stories, songs, or metaphors show up for you? What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind? What action are you being called to take?
Ignatius’s teaching of sacred imagination—the practice of placing ourselves into the story we read as a character in the text—in order to better engage with the reading. Saint Ignatius’s concept of sacred imagination also invites us to notice all our senses—what we hear, see, touch, smell, and taste.
Jewish communities have long engaged in havruta, a traditional rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a pair of students analyzes and discusses a shared text.
Conviction will help us make it through these trying moments to return once again to our sacred practices of connection.
It turns out that academic discussions are much more fulfilling when you have a sense of someone’s life story before you hear their perspective!
founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self Sherry Turkle in her book Reclaiming Conversation: “first, that we will always be heard; second, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and third, that we will never have to be alone.”
Heschel writes, “We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; but it is the moment that lends significance to things.”
Sabbath isn’t a time to catch up on tasks. Nor is it simply a time of rest to prepare for a busy week. It is a time to revel in the beauty and delight of simply being. The sabbath “is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor,” Heschel writes.
“The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. . . . The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of sabbath.”
There’s no need for a physical temple or a church, or even a beautiful forest. That is the beauty of sacred time: it stretches across all places and is accessible to us, wherever we are.
rest as a form of resistance, because it pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.
After eighty years of research, the scientists concluded that the quality of participants’ relationships with their friends, families, and partners mattered most.
Living in the midst of conflict is deeply destructive for our health, while living in the midst of warm relationships is protective.
Dr. Jennifer Carter, the director of sport psychology at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, has explained that “our bodies can hold tension and negative emotions that can be released during physical activity.”
