Spirituality

As many of you know, our MEA faculty member Dacher Keltner’s research has shown the most common way of feeling awe is to witness moral beauty - compassion, resilience, courage, equanimity, humility - and I have to say that this week’s Santa Fe workshop with Christian mystic Richard Rohr was full of moral beauty, including this exquisite human, Dorothy, who experienced her 91st birthday with us on the first night of the workshop. We may have learned as much from Dorothy as we did from Richard.

Are you a “None,” as in None of the Above, when it comes to religion? 27% of Americans classify themselves as "nones," 17% of whom identify as atheist, 20% as agnostic and 63% as "nothing in particular." This is quite a change from the past. In 1960, 2% of Americans identified as “other,” a category that includes the nonreligious. In 1980, 10.2% did. In 2000, 19.5%. By 2016, it was over a third.

Sometimes, looking for advice from your dog isn’t good enough. Nor is talking to your best friend, coach, tarot card reader, or hair stylist. We’re looking for what our shaman Saul calls “spiritual wifi,” some inspiration from an otherworldly source that feels perfectly blended with our gut instinct that we’ve been ignoring.

I’ve spent most of my career as a crossing guard at the congested, complicated intersection of psychology and business. My books and blog posts have profiled psychology wizards from Carl Jung to Viktor Frankl to Esther Perel.

“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.” ― Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

I learned ballroom dancing in 6th grade at Call’s Dance Studio in middle-class Long Beach, California. It was quite a production as it was as much about learning masculine and feminine roles and etiquette as it was learning the mechanics of ballroom dancing.