23. God, are you there?

Hi friends,

Welcome to the twenty-third dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

Each week, we delve into a captivating, science-based book that illuminates what it takes to live a life of optimal wellbeing. In a previous newsletter, I quoted award-winning gastroenterologist and neuroscientist, Dr. Emeran Mayer, by sharing, “Only a small percentage of people in the United States live in a state of optimal health, a condition that has been defined as complete physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social well-being, with peak vitality, optimal personal performance, and high productivity. In other words, it’s a person who not only has no bothersome physical symptoms, but is also happy, optimistic, has lots of friends, and enjoys his or her work…It has been estimated that these people make up less than 5 percent of the North American population.” (Mayer, pg. 260-263 - Kindle)

For the month of June, I’m interested in the spiritual aspect of this definition, because when it comes to the pillars of human flourishing, spirituality sits at the foundation of meaning and purpose, happiness and life satisfaction, and character and virtue. In fact, I have a working hypothesis on wellbeing and spirituality and I’m curious to hear what you think.

A week or so ago, I pitched break*through to a dream client–a nationally renowned nonprofit focused on empowering millions of young children across the U.S. They wanted to provide more expansive mental health services to their members and were excited to see how scalable technology could help them do this.

During the pitch, I shared insights from my own “wellness journey.” I admitted that in trying different healing modalities and therapies with the goal of calming my nervous system and befriending myself, I’m the first to acknowledge how the best treatments and interventions I’ve had access to are expensive. They also tend to be presented in a cultural wrapper that often seems too weird, too fancy, or too out there for the friends and family I grew up with.

I asked, what are the ramifications of your youth emotionally flourishing, only to feel disconnected and isolated from the people around them? 

I then showed how break*through’s AI wellness champions guide virtual support groups through on-going, age-appropriate transformative exercises and techniques to encourage deeper self-exploration while learning to self-regulate and manage stress. These support groups can be made up of people who know each other or people who want to make new friends with like-minded peers. I showed how our wellness champions are trauma-informed, having been trained on data sets developed by phenomenal wellbeing coaches and cognitive behavioral health therapists like Selma Quist-Møller, whose entire research and psychiatric practice focuses on post-traumatic growth and interpersonal neurobiology. Lastly, I showed how because they are digital, they are also customizable (i.e. can be human or an animal) and are culturally intelligent (i.e. can speak in different syntaxes and are bilingual). 

At the end of the pitch, I looked at the Chief Development Officer expecting to hear about grant cycles and pricing concerns, but instead he asked, “The kids absolutely need this…but, so do we. Would we be able to get it for our employees, too?”

He then went on to share that the majority of their staff were under 25 years old. Most had been a member of the nonprofit when they were children and had returned as employees. He admitted that while the organization did incredible work to find resources for the youth, he worried the staff remained woefully under-nurtured. 

“Working with kids is a different kind of martyrdom and I worry many of our employees are ill-prepared for the emotional taxation involved. Your technology can help us heal the healer.”

I was touched by the empathy, awareness, and acknowledgement–while these young trailblazers may have employment benefits, he understood they needed something deeper.  

This deeper speaks to a critical shift happening in the United States—collectively we are moving (and have been for some time) from seeking meaning and purpose from our religious institutions to seeking it at work.

According to Pew, 83% of U.S. adults say they believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. However, while people believe in “spirit,” there continues to be a decline in traditional religious beliefs and practices. This decline includes a drop in adults who say they believe in God with absolute certainty, attend religious services regularly, pray daily and consider religion to be very important in their lives.

And yet, Harvard professor and epidemiologist Dr. Tyler VanderWeele writes, “a report from the Nurses’ Health Study, which followed more than 74,000 study participants for 16 years, found that women who attended weekly religious services had a lower mortality rate compared with those who had never attended religious services” and that “patients often discover strength and solace in their spirituality, both informally through deeper connections with family and friends, and formally through religious communities and practices.” (VanderWeele, et al. 2017)

My working hypothesis is many of us have a religion shaped hole in our lives, but don’t know how to fill it. 

If we look at mainstream narratives around what makes a good work environment, much of the languaging (“bringing my whole self to work,” “being seen and recognized,” etc.) denotes a deep desire for belonging, self-value, and self-worthiness…which at one point in our very recent history was what we expected to receive from religious institutions. 

And, even if we look at the fight for DEI in the workspace, pre-1980’s this work was largely relegated to religious civil rights leaders and liberation theologists who appealed for justice under the banner of universal love and a unified morality.

The issue here is, at work, we don’t all have the same morals. Sometimes, a colleague can’t “see” you because they want to beat you (or in more Machiavellian environments, colleagues may see you just fine, but they don’t care, are envious, or may use your deep desire to be seen against you). 

This is why I think it’s so important to know what’s reasonable to expect at work (i.e. creating an impact in children’s lives by showing up with confidence and self-leadership) and what’s not (i.e. daily spiritual transcendence sourced from colleagues and environment).

However, like the nonprofit’s Chief Development Officer understood–sometimes we cannot show up with confidence and in self-leadership without our spiritual dimension intact.

This presents a conundrum.

This month, we’re reading Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Dr. Richard Schwartz. In the Internal Family Systems therapy Model (IFS), the “therapist first helps a client to focus on and get to know the [internal] parts that protect them. Then the client asks those parts to relax, to separate their feelings and beliefs from the client in order to open more space inside. As this happens, the client spontaneously reports feeling calm, curious, and compassionate—the qualities of Self—toward their parts.” (Dr. Schwartz, pg. 13-14 - Kindle)

Dr. Schwartz, the founder of IFS, writes, “Actually, the process of focusing on a part of you and asking it to ‘step back’ is similar to forms of meditation in which people separate from and witness their thoughts. For example, vipassana, a popular form of Buddhist meditation, involves simply witnessing each thought or emotional state that arises. The more you notice—step back from—rather than become or identify with your thoughts and emotions, the more you relax into being the ‘you’ who is not your thoughts and emotions...Thomas Merton, one of the most significant Christian scholars of the twentieth century, wrote, If we enter into ourselves, finding our true self, and then passing ‘beyond’ the inner ‘I,’ we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the ‘I am' of the Almighty…Our innermost ‘I’ exists in God and God swells in it…

The Quakers call it the Inner Light. Buddhists call it rigpa, or Buddha Nature. Hindus call it atman. The fourteenth-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart called it the God seed. For Sufis, it’s the Beloved—the God within.

Whether you believe it is God inside you or simply a higher level of consciousness, there is a common belief among traditions around the world that such a place exists within us and that it is not difficult to tap into. The words used by different traditions to describe the Self state—inherent wisdom and compassion, a sense of freedom, lightness, release, stability, lucidity—are some of the qualities clients report and display when their parts step back and their Self is released… 

But that state is not the exclusive domain of spiritual seekers. Nonspiritual practitioners have also recognized the benefits derived from turning down the mind’s noise. For example…the writer W. Timothy Gallwey sparked a wide variety of books, including The Inner Game of Tennis, that describe how much better athletes perform when in this state…This state has been called ‘flow’ by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who found that it characterized the experience of all kinds of creative and high-performing people.

Thus it seems clear that this mindful state of Self is not just a peaceful place from which to witness the world, nor just a state to which one can go to transcend the world; the Self also has healing, creative, performance-enhancing qualities.” (Dr. Schwartz, pg. 29-31 - Kindle)

What I appreciate most about these reflections is that, ever-present and always accessible, the Self dwells within us all. Sometimes, we just need a reminder to let it lead.

With gratitude,

p.s. If you’re curious to learn more, respond to this email and I’ll share the deck I pitched to the nonprofit.

p.p.s. In just three weeks we’re diving into the world of human flourishing like never before with exclusive, 20 minute weekly interviews featuring the authors in this newsletter! Get their top tips for achieving optimal wellbeing and even submit your own questions to be answered!