Category Archives: The Missing Curriculum

How to be Spiritual

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Religion and spirituality are explosive and highly political topics (especially at the moment), and a lot of emotion gets attached to them. This post isn’t about trying to argue you into affiliating with a particular label, though. Instead, I’d like to zoom out and look at how religion and spirituality in general interact with people’s actions and emotions, and then zoom in to some open questions for you about how that might apply in your life.

I’ve been doing occasional posts lately based on ideas in Peterson’s A Primer in Positive Psychology, and this is another. It’s based on his chapter on institutions which enable positive psychological outcomes.

Extrinsic and intrinsic religiousity

In that chapter, he mentions the key distinction drawn by Gordon Allport back in 1950 between “extrinsic religiosity” and “intrinsic religiosity”. Extrinsic religiosity is most simply defined as religion used as a means to other ends (money, power, social status, security, belonging), while intrinsic religiosity is religion as an end in itself.

A few years later, Allport and his colleagues tried measuring these two orientations (Allport & Ross, 1967). It’s often reported that they found that extrinsically religious people were most likely to be prejudiced, but what’s less well-known is their other finding: intrinsically religious people were least likely to be prejudiced.   This is still the case 45 years later.

Now, obviously in late-1960s America the people they were surveying were primarily Christians, and we can’t automatically generalize to other religions or other countries based on that evidence. What I would argue, though, is that every major religion (that is, every religion which is important enough in a society that belonging to it potentially brings external benefits) will end up having an extrinsic and an intrinsic form, just because humans are the way we are.

Let’s take Islam and Buddhism, which in the west, at least, have opposite reputations. Within Islam, the various Sufi movements have worked and still work for peace, tolerance and inclusiveness, while in Sri Lanka, for example, the name of Buddhism has been used to justify persecution and repression.

Every religion has its two sides. There are people for whom religion is a club (in both senses: a group to socialize in and something to hit people with), and people for whom it is the way by which they express, and reinforce, their highest positive values.

Two sides? Or two ends of a spectrum? I believe it’s the latter. I know for a fact (from personal contact) that there are people who have thoroughly internalized their religion in their day-to-day behaviour,  who are kind, generous and loving people, and yet will express political views that contradict their personal character because those are the views of their religious institution.

Benefits of religion

And regardless of your internalized commitment or otherwise to the basic teachings of your religion, there are advantages to belonging to a religious group. Young people who are involved with formal religion show, on average, greater emotional self-regulation, less aggression, better academic performance and less likelihood to use drugs and alcohol, and delay their sexual involvement. Adults involved in religion show similar results and also are individually happier and have greater family wellbeing. Religious people are more likely to volunteer in their community, and faith-based organizations are effective in providing social and community services.

This is not to say, of course, that nonreligious people are never like this. Many are, including some who specifically reject supernatural beliefs of any kind. But before we generalize the excesses and failings of televangelists, bigots and know-nothings who loudly proclaim their affiliation to religion, let’s consider that they may not be representative of religion as a whole.

To consider only Christianity, certainly it produced the Crusades and the Inquisition. There’s a long history of institutional Christianity accumulating, defending and abusing wealth, power and privelege. But it also produced dedicated campaigners against slavery and child labour, and for women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, racial equality, peace between nations and universal education – campaigners who were motivated by their faith. To look at only one of these two sides (either one) is to walk around with one eye closed.

Happy V-Day!
Markus Bollingmo / Foter

Spirituality

But what if formal, organized religion isn’t for you, for whatever reason?

Spirituality has become a popular term for the specifically non-institutional and mostly non-dogmatic aspects of faith. Disillusionment with the externals of religion, with the organizations and the people who organize them, has led to a form of faith that takes away those aspects and keeps what is personally meaningful.

I’m someone who has continued, however tenuously, to connect to a faith tradition. Having been burned by religious institutions myself, I can fully appreciate why people leave them entirely, and I think that can be the right decision. To me, though, connection to a tradition with depth in time and breadth across a connected community still has value. It provides a centre and a grounding that can easily be missing from a personal spirituality. At its worst, “spirituality” becomes rootless, a drifting from one experience to another, and because there is nothing making people stay and do the hard work – because there’s nothing to push against – it can end up in a different kind of superficiality and become a way of avoiding growth.

Of course, any setting can provide that. I can hide from growth behind religious jargon and institutional involvement just as easily. But because one of the rules of the new spirituality is that you never criticize how someone is doing it, avoidance of growth is one of the big risks.

Questions and exercises

I’ve been saying a lot of theoretical stuff. Let’s move from the theoretical to the practical and personal.

If you’re a member of a faith tradition:

  • What can you find within your tradition – what practices, what approaches, what methods if you like – to strengthen the force of the core teachings of that tradition in your day-to-day life? Do you chant, meditate, pray, perform physical movements, do something every day that connects you to the heart of your faith?
  • In what ways do your faith tradition’s institutions currently accumulate, defend and abuse wealth and power? Can you do anything about that?
  • What can you learn from talking respectfully and curiously to people in faith traditions other than your own, or to people who have a non-religious spirituality, or to people who explicitly have no faith but practice love and compassion towards others? In what ways are they your cousins and fellow-travelers? Could any of their practices or ways of thinking about things be helpful to you?

If you are “spiritual but not religious”:

  • Is there a regular practice that you have that challenges and changes you, that you stick with even when it’s hard, that doesn’t let you take the easy way out and hang on to your issues? Can you work with someone else – perhaps even someone from a faith tradition – who will be hard on you and not let you avoid growth?
  • Chances are that your spirituality is something you have a hard time putting into words. Have a go anyway, recognizing that the words are provisional and inadequate, but that you may gain clarity and insight from them regardless. Try to use your own words, not somebody else’s.
  • Talk respectfully and curiously to someone who is intrinsically religious and involved in their faith tradition about what that’s like and why they value it, and to someone who is a “good person” but doesn’t hold any supernatural beliefs about why they feel and act as they do. See what you can learn from them.

If you are not a person of faith, but hold strong personal values:

  • Are there any practices which might help to strengthen your ability to work out your values in your daily life? What might such practices look like?
  • Read about the lives of people of faith who worked for causes you believe in: William Wilberforce, Kate Shepard, Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller, Dorothy Day. Reflect on what motivated them and how.
  • Talk respectfully and curiously to people of faith and to people who hold spiritual beliefs but are not involved in formal religion. Ask yourself and them what they are gaining from their beliefs.

I welcome comments, of course, especially if you’ve done any of the above and want to report on how it went.

How to be Happy

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How to Enjoy Life

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I’m sitting here on my deck, in the sun, with my cats, listening to the birds. It’s my birthday. I’m 45.

And I’m thinking about my life up to this point, as you do. It’s been fun.

Certainly not always, or I wouldn’t have learned as much as I have. But there have been a lot of good times.

Part of that, I think, is that I’ve had a lot of different experiences and been exposed to a lot of new things. One of the reasons that novelists often get seriously started in their 40s is that by your 40s you have a lot more to draw on, a lot more to write about.

In his book The Deeper Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams gave us the word “pulverbatch”, meaning that list of odd jobs and experiences that a writer traditionally gives on the back flap of the book. Why was that even something he could point to and have people nod and smile in recognition? It’s because having diverse and unusual experiences makes you more creative and more interesting.

Now, I’m not a physically adventurous person. I don’t bungee jump or climb mountains. But adventure is where you find it.

I’ve been fortunate to have a series of day jobs that exposed me to interesting people, places and things. (The jobs themselves weren’t always interesting, but very few jobs are interesting all the time.)

My first career was as a freelance writer and book editor (eventually, in-house for a large publisher). I did mostly nonfiction projects, and learned about wine, travel, gardening, famous people, fishing and cooking, which are some of the most popular nonfiction topics. Except for the fishing and the famous people, I became interested in those things too, and they added to my enjoyment of life.

My next career was as a technical writer and, eventually, corporate trainer. Writing manuals and training material sounds dull, and it can be, but I got to travel to remote parts of the country, live amid beautiful mountains or natural hot springs at someone else’s expense, and visit giant hydro dams, sawmills and paper factories. I worked on revising the national manual for probation officers, and learned about the law and the people who deal with those who break it. It was fascinating.

Martin F
Life As Art / Foter

I’ll always remember standing in a sawmill in a hard hat and high-visibility vest and thinking, “So this is where a master’s degree in English gets you!”

I even got to go to Malaysia to help my contracting company bid for some work there, and spent a wonderful week eating every kind of Asian food imaginable.

You get to understand a system pretty well when you spend a couple of years documenting it and training it, and in early 2000 I took a job as a systems analyst, and eventually an IT consultant. It’s taken me to more sawmills and paper mills and forests, a coal-fired power generating plant in Australia, a fertilizer factory, treatment plants for drinking water and wastewater, and most recently behind the scenes of the city where I live.

I’ve had the chance to talk with, and work alongside, the dedicated, unsung people who keep a modern society functioning in unglamorous but indispensable ways. I’ve been places that few people get to go. (And I’ve been well paid for it.)

None of that was planned. I never sat down and made a bucket list that said “Visit a hydro dam, learn about the ins and outs of keeping city parks running, and eat sushi in Kuala Lumpur”. But just by hanging loose and taking the opportunities that came to me, I got to do all those things.

It’s made for an interesting life, so far. It’s given me a depth of background for my fiction writing that you’d be hard put to achieve through any kind of curriculum. I say this as a devoted reader: I’m glad to have learned so much that isn’t in any book and never will be.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting here very often lately. I used to post once a week, and now it’s been six weeks or so between posts. That’s because at the moment I’m letting myself follow my interests, rather than flogging myself to produce a bunch of content that means nothing just because I feel like I have to. (Or worse still, filling up the silence with poorly-written guest posts.)

I’m in a fiction writing phase at the moment. I think it might last a while, but I try not to predict these things.

When I have something to say about personal development, this is where I’ll say it. It’s not impossible that I’ll come back and post regularly again here in due course, but for now, enjoy the archives, take a look at the resources page if you haven’t lately, and think about this:

What is there in your life that you can look back on and think, “I’m really glad I had that experience”?

How to be Happy

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How to Keep Going

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Perseverance – keeping going, not giving up – is one of the great secrets to success. I’m more and more convinced of it the more stories I hear about successful people.

Sometimes, in fact, keeping going, hanging in there during stressful times is the success. Sometimes, getting through tough times is the task in front of you, and success consists of still standing at the end.

I’ve done mostly project work for more than 20 years now, so I’m familiar with the “we just need to get through this” experience. And that’s standing me in good stead at the moment.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife is currently having health problems. She’s had rheumatoid arthritis since the age of six, and has multiple joint replacements, and one of them got infected late last year and had to be removed. She’s now had it replaced, and is currently on five or six weeks of bed rest (that is, she can’t get out of bed) in hospital, after which they’ll probably keep her in for roughly as long again.

It’s a long, hard journey for both of us – her more than me, obviously, but me too. So I thought, while I’m still in the middle of it, I’d share with you some of what I’m doing to keep myself well and keep my spirits up so that I can continue to support her and do the other things that I’m committed to doing.

1. Eat well

I know that if I go the easy way and eat junk food at odd hours I’ll make myself ill and won’t be able to cope. So I’m going the other easy way.

My programme at the moment is that I go up to the hospital after work, spend a couple of hours with my wife, and then go home. At the weekends I spend most of the afternoons with her. There aren’t any facilities for me to heat food there or anything, so I’m living largely on sandwiches. But they’re good sandwiches.

I’ve noticed that I feel better after eating pesto, or anything with basil in. It’s probably because it’s high in iron. So what I do is, when I go shopping at the weekend, I buy the fixings for pita pockets: hummus, pesto, felafel mix, olives, cheese and of course pita bread (wholemeal). I spend about an hour cooking the felafels and assembling five days’ worth of sandwiches, and I put them in the fridge and pull one out each day.

At the hospital, if I haven’t brought food for whatever reason and I need to eat, there’s a Subway outlet. It’s fast food, but it has vegetables in it.

And with breakfast, I’ve started drinking vegetable juice (it’s not V8, but it’s a direct copy with the exact same ingredients).

Now, fresh vegetable juice is better than bought vegetable juice, and the vegetables themselves, unjuiced, are better still. Any nutritionist will tell you that. But fresh vegetable juice is not an option that’s on the table, in a time-pressed, stressed context. Bought vegetable juice is better than no vegetable juice, and those are my realistic options.

If I do get home at night in time to cook, I’m usually eating steamed frozen vegetables (a mix of broccoli, peas and beans that I buy packaged at the supermarket) and microwaved and then steamed frozen Chinese dumplings (wholemeal). Again, fresh stuff is nutritionally better than frozen, but when I don’t know how often or when I’ll be eating them, and I have limited prep time, fresh stuff is not much of an option. Frozen vegetables are better than no vegetables.

Canned vegetables are also better than no vegetables. I’ve made a very nice meal (or actually about four or five meals) by emptying two cans of lentils, a can of tomatoes with onions and garlic, a can of baby corn and some frozen chopped basil into a pot and simmering it for a quarter of an hour or so.

I feel much better for having some vitamins and minerals in my body, even if they’re less than I’d get from all fresh food that I spent hours preparing. I don’t have those hours, so quick and nutritious beats quick and non-nutritious.

I eat fruit – fresh and dried – too.

Question: What small things could you do to improve your nutrition within the time and money you already have?

2. Exercise

I don’t have a lot of spare time or motivation at the moment, and injury issues have put paid to some of the exercises I used to do. But what I have done is structure my day so that exercise just happens.

The current project I’m on for the day job is located in the city. I park in a secure carpark (since my car was stolen a few months back from an insecure one) that’s a bit under 1km from where I work, and walk downhill through a park. I do this every day, regardless of the weather, because it’s easier to keep parking in the same place.

how to keep going
moionet / Foter

After work, I walk up to the hospital, which is about 1.7km including a steep hill. And after spending time with my wife, I walk back to where I parked, down the third side of a triangle, just under 1km again. That’s a total of around 3.5km (2.2 miles) every weekday. At the weekends I park in the same place, so it’s a bit under 2km.

At first I was tired, and sometimes I still am, but on the whole I feel really good on it. I just bought a new pair of walking shoes that also look OK at work (Rockports, if you’re wondering), because the old shoes were starting to hurt my feet. Expensive, but worth it. I enjoy the walking (apart from the passive smoking that walking down city streets involves), and it’s doing great things for my energy and ability to keep going through the stress.

Question: How can you structure your day to include moving your body more?

3. Meditate

I’ve been meditating regularly for over a year now. It’s less impressive than it sounds. All I do is, before I get up in the morning I use a little app on my iPhone called Soto Timer to mark out a 10-minute period, during which I focus on my breath. The app makes a Tibetan bell sound at the start and end of the 10 minutes.

You’d think that would do nothing at all. But I definitely notice the difference if I miss a day, and I’ve been noticing the long-term difference from doing the regular practice.

So have other people. At work the other day, someone told me – not privately, but in a meeting – that I’d been assigned to support the more… challenging users of the system we’re implementing “because you don’t get upset easily”. People who knew me years ago would be surprised at that, I think.

Question: Will you trade 10 minutes a day of simple practice for the ability to stay calm?

4. Stay positive

There’s a lot around about positive mental attitude, and some of it is outright snake oil. If I see the word “manifest” being used I generally switch off immediately. But there’s also good research that says that what you think does influence the outcomes you get – and, of course, how much you enjoy the process of getting them.

In the midst of what isn’t a great situation, I don’t want to be Pollyanna, but I do want to look for a positive spin. I’m getting to spend a lot more time with my wife at the moment, under circumstances that strengthen the bond between us, for example. She’s alive, she’s recovering well, she’s (in general) being well looked after, and we don’t have money worries.

One of the most important things is to decide for yourself what are the most important things.

Question: In what way might the way that you think about your situation be making it harder than it needs to be?

5. Sleep well

I’m not always sleeping well at the moment, but I generally get a good sleep. The exercise, of course, helps with that. The good nutrition probably isn’t doing any harm either, or the meditation, or the positive attitude. I have plenty of stress management techniques that I can use if I need to. And I use the techniques in the Sleeper’s Checklist to make sure I get good, restorative rest.

I don’t operate well on poor sleep (I don’t think anyone does, really, but other people are better than me at pretending). I know I can’t get through this stressful time well without that resource.

Question: Can you find one thing on the Sleeper’s Checklist that you could implement to improve your sleep?

How to not give up

“But Mike,” you may be saying, if you’ve read much of my stuff, “these are the same things you always bang on about. Nutrition, exercise, meditation, getting your head on straight, sleeping well, managing your stress. That’s your answer to everything.”

Well, yes. Yes, it is. Because it works.

Look back over the questions I’ve scattered through today’s post, and find one thing you can implement today. It’ll help you keep going through the tough times.

How to be Happy

Do you want to be amazing? Become an Amazing Member and get immediate access to member-only resources like the How to be Happy ebook.

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