Today, we held a Zoom call for aunt. She is in her early 90’s, and looks exactly like my mom who passed away a little over a year ago. It was so nice to talk with her in Montreal, and my younger aunt in San Diego, California, plus us cousins. She lives with her daughter, the only PhD in our immediate family. There are plenty of MD’s, DDS’s, MBA, MA and MS…but PhD carries that special star of having worked really really hard! Actually, my brother-in-law in Austin is a PhD also, and I have only seen him work and study, and trade in stocks in his spare time. Anyway, at the end I asked my aunt what advice she had for us, and she said: be happy and make others happy; take on life with strength and grace. So simple and so universal and so actionable!
It reminded me of a saying that is attributed to Oprah, who saw this in a building that she was entering, and says that it transformed her life: “Please be responsible for the energy you bring into this space”. Another very simple and powerful mantra to remind us how we have the power to bring positivity or negativity at every moment of our lives. Another universal law is that the positivity that we beam out, will come back to us from the most unexpected places at the most unexpected times. I firmly believe that to be true! Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, has shown that how we build our inner lives has so much to do with our well-being, and that we have more control over our habits of thought than we admit. No doubt, life can hit us at any time with tragedies and challenges beyond our worst nightmares, and certainly there is a time for sadness, despair, grief and loss. We can only helplessly witness and pray for miracles, and hope that our spirituality gets us to the other side intact.
I appreciate that the Sufi teachings I am privileged to learn from and the self-development/spirituality/New Age movement webinars and books that I get to partake of, reach the same conclusions. Of course, some people – like Lisa Miller who wrote the Awakened Brain- like to distinguish between religion and spirituality. I can understand why modernists blame religion for much suffering, not just in history, but also today. But that is because it has lost its spiritual soul. Instead of being the container for spirituality, it has turned itself into an identity, like race, ethnicity, or any other label to fight about, which was never the purpose.
I am just so excited to keep reading about the quantum sciences and what they tell us about life and nature, and the spiritual teachings that go back 5,000 years to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and not to mention many other indigenous traditions, and how they are all converging and reinforcing each other. I hope we do take that quantum leap in our behaviors too by finally applying these teachings, individually and collectively. So, keep on smiling and beaming the energy when you can!
Be First to Comment