Body mind and spirit?

Working in mental health as I do, I come across the term “holistic” all the time; holistic models, holistic care, holistic assessments, values and what not.

In being holistic we’re supposed to view the person not as a conglomeration of symptoms, but rather as a human being – as a whole and with ordinary human needs. Such as to have meaning, purpose, relationships, physical health, hope and happiness as well as good mental health.

It’s a no brainer really. Quite why anyone would think you can treat a person’s depression (and other ailments) simply with medication, whilst all around them their life falls apart is beyond me.

Anyway, this isn’t my beef for today.

It’s Holistic Medicine.

Because Reiki therapists or the numpties who waggle crystals or the idiots who dilute stuff into nothingness before telling you their wares have potent effects have adopted this word as their own.

Holistic Therapy my arse.

You see, holism works when you think of it in Bio-Psycho-Social terms. When we take into consideration the complex interplay between the body and its brain and how it relates to other bodies and brains, we begin to get a grip of well-being.

These ‘holistic therapists’ however, invoke a fourth, karmic component to the whole – the soul, or the bit of being human that we might call spirit.

Which apparently responds well to lavender.

They work with the bit of the body that simply does not exist. We may think we have a spirit, but we’re mistaken in the same way Descartes was when he argued the mind was distinct from the body.

That isn’t to say having your feet massaged with essential oils has no value. Far from it. Just last week I had my skull rubbed by an Indian Head Massager and I’ve must tell you, I floated out the room in a blissful, wobbly state of mildness.

Having someone make you feel pampered and relaxed for an hour is wonderful. If this improves your ‘holistic’ health then all well and good. But please don’t manipulate my chakras or pretend that my purple energy is out of alignment for fuck sake, because this is nothing more than bullshit and placebo.

Which of course begs the question – if you know that they’re placebo, then does the effectiveness of these ‘holistic therapies’ reduce?

Mind, I’ve arranged my next head rubbing session for the week after next…

Whilst we’re on the subject of holes – I’ll leave you with this thought;

If female pole dancers dance round their poles for metaphorical reasons, then why don’t male strippers dance round a hole?

Hokey Cokey

So to the question - the relationship between 'spirituality' and good mental health. The question I set out to answer long ago with Sans God and subsequently failed to answer in any meaningful way.

I guess the problem, as ever, is in the question. You see, if 'spirituality' is a duff term, then by using the same logic 'mental health' is equally flaccid.

Blood pressure we can measure, liver function can be quantised in the same way an an x-ray can tell you if your arm is broken. But mental health? Is it happiness, conforming to societal norms or a grasp on reality? And what in buggeration is that?

Yet as experts in humanity, we all have an opinion on sanity. Fair play to us too, because psychiatry hasn't cracked it either. So I shall give you my opinion, based upon nothing more than my opinionated opinion. And what better medium to spout unsubstantiated, reductive, self-centered arguments than on a blog?

So let's focus on the melancholics, worriers and scaredypants amongst us and not on those who may lay true claim to the moniker of 'madness' - the messiahs and 'psychotics'. They deserve our admiration and are beyond the scope of my thinking right now.

Feeling depressed and anxious is something common to us all. It's even been argued that they're adaptive traits. Everything in moderation however, for these states can easily get the better of us.

When they do, we can become self-destructive. Regardless of the outward circumstances of our predicament, depression or anxiety is fundamentally about the 'self' and how we see ourselves - "I'm depressed", "I'm inadequate", "Life has got the better of me".

Now, this secular definition of 'spirituality' that we've been exploring (Interconnectivity / Love / Meaning / Beauty), seems to me to be outward, rather than inward looking. The very antithesis of self-consuming neuroses, you could say.

Whilst 'spirituality' is a deeply personal phenomenon, I propose that it helps us mediate our connection with the outside world. As such, it helps us to be less absorbed with ourselves and become more immersed the world about us.

Which is a good thing, and probably better for our mental health than what's inside our heads alone.

The cake is a lie

This 'spirit' that we feel within ourselves - this significance, interconnectivity and meaning is a Gestalt - "A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts."

Yet we're nothing more than meat, bones and interesting connections of nerve cells that interact with the world through fuzzy and unreliable senses. Somehow they make up all that we are. But being human and therefore incorrigibly arrogant, we find ourselves wholly meaningful and significant.

Which is absurd of course, as we live in a universe devoid of meaning.

There are ways to deal with this ambivalence, which for me, are related to the individuals ability to cope with it.

For those who struggle, there is always religion and God, as it imbibes their world with significance, certainty and purpose. They no longer need to struggle with their own unimportance, as they're made in the image of God and so, their little lives are granted equal significance to the entire universe.

There are those who feel this ambivalence in every fibre and wonder what's the point? Depression, withdrawal, revolution or suicide are ways of coping with it.

Plenty don't even think about it. Perhaps the majority don't. I guess there's something to be said in not thinking too hard about stuff.

There's the middle ground of course - that precarious path set in between existential bleakness and religious rapture;

If there's no point to life then it's incumbent upon us to make one for ourselves. If we use the term 'spirit' in this context, then we mean nothing more than how we fashion our own wholeness, interconnectivity and contentment, regardless of its lack of objective significance.

I choose truth, beauty and love. My purpose is to learn all that I can in the short time that I have and perhaps pass some of this learning on. I want to enjoy all that I find beautiful and spend time honing my sense of the aesthetic so that I might enjoy it more.

But if there can be anything significant and with real substance, then it's love and our connection to others. If the world finds me meaningless, then is it unimportant, if someone finds me meaningful? Love finds itself meaningful just for the sake of itself, yet it takes effort to nurture and keep alive. And what better purpose than that?

Who cares if it's a lie.

All & Nothing

What the bejezus is it then - this 'spirituality'? Everything and nothing I suppose - meaning and purpose, God and infinity or nothing but the world and our connection to the soil? Perhaps it's all things to all men then? In the eye of the beholder, for this word will mean something completely different to you than it does to me.

If the value of a term can be measured by its effectiveness to communicate an idea, then 'spirituality' is an old banger - inefficient and leaky. Invoking the word correctly would require a myriad contexts for it to be set within to make any sense at all. It seems like an awful waste of energy.

Yet still the word fascinates me, for I see enough commonalities in spiritual narratives to make me think there is some small value in the term. It's in these commonalities that we might make sense of the concept and give it a meaning that may actually be of some use. Then perhaps, we can loose the word and replace it with something more useful.

Let me give you my own personal definition for a start, and we'll see if it rings any bells;

For me, spirituality is nothing more than the lived experience; That pure, unadulterated lived experience that life seems to get in the way of. Paradoxically, living day to day diverts my attention away from living. Or rather, experiencing life in all its richness is impossible if I think to little or too much about it.

And therein lies the dichotomy; If we live life at full steam, then we don't experience it, yet, if we make the effort to savor what we're experiencing then we become the outside observer - just looking in on ourselves experiencing life.

Things become so easily absurd.

So it's in this fine balance that I find my 'spirituality'.

I planned to give some concrete examples of this, but bedtime is upon me suddenly and I find myself yawning.

Tomorrow perhaps...

Grabbed by the ghoulies

The view from my office desk is stunning. The doorway, coat stand and laser printer lift me up each day, above and beyond my existential futility.

So I've filled the walls around me with photos. Today an associate spots the newest addition to my portfolio and says "Ooh, I like that picture, what is it?"

"Thanks! It's a photoshopped image of the local church yard."

"Hmn, it's a shame, I don't see any orbs." She mused.

"Orbs? What do you mean?"

"Well, you know, spirits. Ghosts."

"Are you taking the piss?"

"No, I've seen them before. They hover over gravestones sometimes."

"Ahh come on, surely not! You're telling me wee ghosties hang around at night ready to be snapped? There's no such thing."

"You can't see them. I can, because I believe in them. They don't show themselves to people without faith."

I lost the will to live after this point.

"Fuck off! Each time I say I don't believe in orbs, does one of them die like?"

"Don't be daft Scott."

Ohh, the irony.

"They're our life energy - it's got to go somewhere after we die."

"Eh? Energy? The energy is dissipated through decomposition surely?"

"No, not that kind of energy. It's like..."

"You mean the soul, don't you?"

Honestly, I could feel my blood beginning to boil. I've always struggled to keep my counsel in the face of flannel like this.

"Yes I suppose. Spiritual energy. Sometimes it gets stuck in this world."

"Come off it. That's utterly ludicrous. Listen, I can provide you with masses of scientific evidence to disprove this crap." I spun around back to the laptop, ready to fire up google.

"You probably could, but my faith is important to me," she said to my back, "it's what I believe."

"But what if you're wrong?" I asked whilst typing scepticism into the search box.

"Don't get me wrong Scott, I'm not a religious nut. I don't go to church, but we all need something right? I've no idea the stuff I'd end up doing if I didn't have my faith."

"So, you'd rather feel safe and secure with your faith than explore the truth."

"That's about the sum of it."

Honestly, sometimes I despair. I really do. I know I shouldn't have gone off on one like I did. But for fuck's sake...

What's the point?

As I've said before, at the root of our modern 'spiritual' plight, lies rampant individualism and the "I" prison. This perception, that we are somehow separate from everything and everyone else, belies the true nature of things. It isn't particularly good for our mental health.

Of course, individualism allows for some self-respect and agency. This is a good thing. We think of ourselves as beings with rights, responsibilities and aspirations. No longer are we the primitive, so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a "self".

As Yi-Fu Tuan noted however, "The obverse of the new sense of disengagement, is a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it."

From this viewpoint, the outside world becomes absurd, meaningless and utterly pointless. Which of course it is. I fail to see how it could be anything otherwise. However, a blunt and singular acceptance of this fact, isn't particularly useful. There is little point, it seems to me, to dwell on it.

This leads to the obvious question - "What now?"

How we best go about answering this question, is perhaps the greatest human quest of all.

Beauty, interconnectedness and 'spirituality' may be inherently pointless, but they represent the best opportunity we have to live our lives without the delusion that there is an inherent purpose (eg God), or within the repression of drugs, banality and denial.

This is a truth, according only to me.

A load of tosh

Prof PZ Myers has had a dig at the word Spirituality. He feels it's another word for lies and empty noise.

In many contexts he's right. The word is so wooley in its definition, it can be bent to pretty much any meaning. That said, it can be of some use; Not everyone who uses the term is a dim wit.

As ususal with Pharyngula, the value is in the numerous comments. I encourage you to go and contribute. In the mean time, here's some of the more thought provoking ones;

Nodoze: people also blather on about art, morality, metaphysics, and a host of other vague things of a transcedent or metaphysical nature that are "real" but defy science and, for that matter, truth. they are the serious business of mankind, in Popper's words the "ultimate questions," and there is no way to distinguish their serious answers from nonsense, as far as science can say. obviously science isn't enough. it has limits. oh well!

Neolotus: PZ, try reading the Introduction portion of Roger Ames translation of "Sun-Tzu: The Art of War" where it deals with the differences between the two-world view of the West and the one-world view of the East or watching "The Last Samurai" or perhaps just learning about Eastern philosophy.

Shorter version of spirituality: treating the living world/universe with respect and humility and learning to live in harmony with it.

The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity. Is there something in this you fail to understand?

Oh, something you might understand is Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" as a place to begin.

Al: There's nothing vague or "transcendent" about art, morality or metaphysics. As far as aesthetics and ethics, science can't tell us the "oughts," but there are certainly reasonable descriptions for why aesthetics and ethics exist from an evolutionary, psychological and sociological standpoint.

As for metaphysics, there are reasonable discussions one can have about epistemology, ontology and other areas of metaphysics while sticking to reason and empiricism and without the need to invoke anything "mysterious," "transcendent," or "ineffable." The latter is the hallmark of bad philosophy anyway, as it just means you've thrown your hands up and given up on attempting to come to an understanding.

MartinC: Too much spirituality can obviously be bad for you. I think the maximum recommended dose is 3 milligrams per kilo. Unfortunately its taking rather a long time to invent a spiritual weighing scale. Don't worry though, I'm sure it will turn up soon, just like Demski's 'Specified complexity measurer'.

SAM: I would have thought the maximum dose for a human was 21 grams. Overdosing woud be more than a spirit could handle without accidentally evolving. Perhaps I am wrong.

Potenilla: Guys, have you ever considered that the consciousness of being connected with something greater than onesself - or, better, the "feeling" or "sensation" thereof, has a genetic substrate and there is individual variation within the human species?

Just because none of you have this consciousness/feeling (and I don't, either), doesn't mean to say it doesn't exist in ohers. Sometimes (often) is gets translated into religion, and sometimes into something more like treating the living world/universe with respect and humility and learning to live in harmony with it.

We would do better in concentrating on reducing the political effects of (organised) religion, and making sure that people who don't have the spiritual consciousness/feeling don't feel they have to pay lip-service to religion, than in wasting our time trying to convince those people who do have it that they are wrong to do so. IMHO the latter is much like trying to convince gay people that they shouldn't be gay. Or, perhaps, to convince heterosexual men that looking at a woman's legs as she walks down the street is ALWAYS wrong and "treating her as a sex object".

Daenku32: consciousness of being connected with something greater than onesself
Does earth count?

An awakening

A small part of my spirit listens to the seasons. During our shortening winters it sequesters away in some warm corner of my 'soul'.

There's a day, that I can pinpoint each year, when it awakens. Today is that day.

I'm not follicaly blessed, so even a glimmering of the spring sun beats down on my skull. Leaving the office early tonight, it was warmed a little. The sky was clear, and yet it was still mild. I noticed the trees beginning to blossom.

Driving home, I found that the sun no longer loomed on the horizon. At last, it had climbed high enough for my sun visor to block. My foot got heavy on the accelerator and the stereo got loud.

I came home to a quiet house. I forgot that both kids were out at friends for tea. Miche was working at her desk quietly. We'd the house to ourselves. Mmn.

Later, I decided to give our front lawn it's first cut of the year. Dom was dropped off, saw me with lawnmover and uncharacteristically ran past into the house. No hello or nothing.

A minute later he clambered out of the front door, dragging his yellow kiddy mower. He must have been rummaging deep in the garage to retrieve it. We finished off the lawn together. Up and down.

With smug self satisfaction, I decided that life is good, and spring is here.

Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage...

In the 1970's Bruce Alexander challenged the dominant understanding of drug addiction. Previous to his research, it had been widely accepted that availability of drugs was the root cause of addiction in our communities. As drugs become more available, we become addicted to them at an increasing rate. Therefore, if drugs were ubiquitous, we'd be a nation of addicts.

This theory had been confirmed in studies of rat behaviour. They went something like this;

Give a rat two choices - 1: Push a lever for a drink of water or, 2: Push a lever for a shot of Morphine.

Unsurprisingly, the rats got themselves stoned. Over and over again. Some of them got so wasted, they ceased to eat or drink. They even started listening to the Velvet Underground. Some of them died.

This proved that mammals, given the opportunity, will spontaneously become addicted to psychotropic substances. They will become so dependent on them, that they will cease to become productive organisms.

Alexander highlighted a flaw in these ideas. He argued that if you put a man in a tiny cage and make him live his whole life in it, it would be a near certainty that he'd choose to get out of his head on smack. What else has he to live for? Alexander thought that this is no different for rats.

So he made the Rat Park. A rat utopia. It was big, interesting and comfortable. Food was readily available, and the rats had ample space to form social relationships. When Morphine was made available to these rats, they chose not to use it.

Even when a rat was put in a cage and forced to become a junkie, when it returned to Rat Park it spontaneously withdrew from opiates. With very few observable withdrawal effects incidentally.

Now, we need to be careful in drawing any firm conclusions from his research, but it does pose some interesting questions about human behaviour.

Do we take drugs simply because they're there? Or do we take drugs for more complex reasons? And if we ever create our utopia, will we still use them?

Personally, I think that Alexander's ideas can be expanded beyond the realm of drug abuse;

For many, daily existence lacks any real meaning and purpose. Many live within a "mindless routine....[their purpose is to] produce the greatest quantity of widgets on the assembly line". It's little wonder then, that they return home to seek out the most soporific diversion available. Diversions such as soap operas, reality TV shows, junk food and pornography.

In a way, this mindless consumption gets us stoned. Like heroin, one-way entertainment wraps us up in a comfort blanket of thoughtlessness. Thinking is the last thing we want to do when we live in restricted cages. Ignorance is bliss.

Unlike Alexander's rats however, we're the architects of our prisons. We can choose to inject the hypnotic, each time we press the next channel button, or we can choose to make something.

This I think, is at the root of human spirituality; The need to make things. The need to be creative and express ourselves is cruicial to our wellbeing. One-way entertainment that's designed to stifle thought, strips these urges from us. It deadens something fundamental in us.

Few of us are talented artists. But all of us can make stuff;

We can make;

• dinner
• time
• love
• someone laugh
• someone think
• an idea
• a phone call
• a heart race
• a move
• a choice

The opportunities our new, read-write web gives us are limitless. For those of you who surf using only your mouse, look down at your keyboards and start to make something...

I'm more important than you

If we consider spirituality then, to be a reaching out from ourselves, we can experience profound connection with others and feel things like love, self worth and purpose.

Spirituality in this respect needn't be restricted to human relationships. Take gardening for example, which many people enjoy because it gives a sense of connection to the earth. Others enjoy literature, as it provides a sense of metaphor and meaning beyond subjective worldviews. And I wonder how many of us have lain under the stars, like stoned teenagers, marvelling at our universe?

Our modern world isn't well equipped in this respect. Living in it conditions us to think individually. This can be seen most clearly when we consider the 'lifestyle' industry. Where else is outward beauty so sacred? Here, we find leather sofas somehow embodying human success. We're told we can buy our own success, in easy installments, interest free over 4 years. Contentment then, becomes inextricably linked to material acquisition.

Now, it's all well and good lampooning materialism, but it does have it's place. I doubt I would be considering notions of spirituality if my family were living on jam sandwiches. I like modern comforts as much as the next man. Not least this overpowered PC, with its broadband connection to the Magic Kingdom.

So, we've built our nirvana well and secured it on foundations of capitalism and individuality. If I'm honest, I think this is a good thing. By and large.

But why is depression so endemic in this Eden? It's estimated that a third of us will report being profoundly depressed at some time in our lives.

Perhaps it's material wealth that's lacking . Whilst it provides for physical comfort, many find themselves searching for something more profound. And this search often begins with introspection.

Which is a risky thing to be doing.

We've been trained to be hyper sensitive to our individuality. If we introspect, often all we can see is 'I'. We find ourselves so wonderfully interesting you see. So much so that we become hypnotised by ourselves.

"I'm too fat, too thin, too poor, too boring, in the right and in the wrong".

More on this later...

The Prisoner of I

There comes a moment in all of our lives when we're imprisoned within ourselves. After which, we're doomed to spend the rest of our lives within an illusion that we call "I". Few, if any of us can recall the moment the prison door shut. In fact, most of us don't even realise it's shut at all.

This incarceration happens when we're young. It begins the moment we realise our actions effect the world around us. If we cry, something soothes us. If we move our hands, we'll find something to grip. We might even put it in our mouths to experience its texture. At this point, we begin to think of ourselves as an agent that can change the world around us.

In this moment, we set ourselves apart from the universe. Nearly everything becomes 'It', and what remains is 'I'. All around us are entities that collude in this delusion. The thing that soothed us, smiles when we call it 'Mummy'. We become happy. We get called you.

The experience of growing up could be thought of as a gradual separation from everything else. In our culture, we become adult once this divorce is complete; once we know ourselves fully as an 'I'.

As adults, we find ourselves in a world of other I's. We've learnt to define ourselves by roles such as father, professional, friend, car driver and debtor. We compare these roles against other people. Other I's; better fathers, richer men, bigger cars and larger incomes.

Of course, in these things we find some form of happiness. Being able to say that I have a big car because I'm a productive worker provides for some satisfaction. But it's not particularly wholesome.

For me, this is where the notion of spirituality becomes important. We could consider spirituality to be a reaching out from our 'I' prisons, into a realm where the 'self ' becomes no more significant than the 'other'.

This is where spirituality becomes esoteric and difficult to think about. Most people struggle to truly differentiate between I, Us, Me and Thou. Myself included - I've yet to experience the epiphany of selflessness that many eastern philosophers describe.

However, I know what they're getting at. Much of what we would describe as spiritual in the west, can be thought of as reaching out of one's self. Reaching out to things like love, altruism, meaning & purpose.

I know that to anyone with a basic working knowledge of the ideas of consciousness, this post will represent nothing new. For this you have my apologies. However, it has helped me restate and understand my goal a little better.

I started this blog to explore the idea of spirituality without god. I began without any notion of a starting point. I guess this post is the closest I'll come to it.

Beyond Belief

If you're so minded, here's a real media stream of a Radio 4 Beyond Belief episode on 'religion and mental health'. It's half an hour long so, for those of you with Digg enhanced ADHD the second half is much more interesting than the first.

It's a fascinating and balanced debate about the nature of religion and spiritual belief in a secular / medicalised world. I urge you to listen, as it's a good antidote to the raging fundamentalism (both theist and non-theist) currently clogging up Youtube and the bloggosphere.

(Did I just say bloggosphere? /Shudder )

A reintroduction

Vjack over at Atheist Revolution asks how to define spirituality Sans God and why we, as atheists should pursue it. He reads quite accurately that this blog is about 'finding spirituality in a godless world'.

In formulating my answer(s) to this interesting question perhaps we should revisit the original goal of this blog.

I'm a mental health professional who works with people who are labelled as having 'severe and enduring' mental health problems. Increasingly in this arena, 'spiritual well being' is being focused upon as a crucial component of good mental health.

Perhaps predictably, many of us in this field struggle to understand what this means, let alone help people in poor mental health improve their spiritual well being. Repeatedly we fall back upon typecast notions of spirituality e.g. Religious denomination and rituals.

A part of me wonders whether this nascent spiritual uprising in psychiatry is merely a smoke screen behind which the old, repressive practices continue unabated. By this I mean the repression of 'schizophrenics' through medication, legislation, misunderstanding and public loathing.

Another part of me feels (quite strongly) that this is an opportunity to be capitalised upon. If we can use this chink in the armour of established psychiatric practice to highlight the human and social aspects of mental illness then the term will be well used.

The UK is largely secular. In my personal experience at least. Actively religious people are in the minority here. This seems to be an inverse reflection of the US experience. I must admit to being quite taken aback by the depth of Christian fundamentalism in the US, having only experienced it in any detail after starting this blog and taking an active interest in the topic of atheism.

I'm thankful for this. Thankful that the church and state are well separated (notwithstanding the Blarite spinned Sunday morning phot-ops). That said, I do feel that the western world is caught in a vicious existential crisis whilst it readjusts to its godless world. I feel that as a society we're missing something fundamental, some meaning that was conveniently provided by religion.

Not all of us are able to cope with the notion that meaning and purpose can only be created subjectively. Frankly, few of us have the capacity, time or motivation to explore this philosophical aspect to our lives. Which is why many of us godless people resort to 'kabalah lite, aromatherapy and self-help.'

Atheism, isn't good enough then. It isn't nourishing enough to the masses to be sufficient in and of itself. In my view, to have a grasp of our human, emotional experience we need to put empiricism to one side. Suspend disbelief if you like. We should feel comfortable that much of our lives are metaphorical and aesthetic and beyond the reach, for the time being at least, of pure logic and science.

This, I guess is where the term spirituality should sit for an atheist. Between bleak empiricism and illogical belief. It's a concept that we can choose to use if we so wish, to help us think about relationships, altruism, love and meaning without getting tied up in philosophical knots all the time. Yes it's a short cut, but one I'm willing to take if it means I might be able to ease the suffering of another person for a while.

Introductions

I guess I'm struggling in the same way that many do do define and understand what keeps us well spiritually. I'm also not sure if we should even bother to try. Does it make sense to differentiate spiritual wellbeing from just general wellbeing? That of being content, happy, sad, anxious or depressed; and even being physically well, secure and loved.

I hope to use this blog to try to understand this subject a bit better. In real life I work as a mental health professional. In this 'trade' there is an obsession currently about Spirituality and its place in a persons mental health. A lot of people talk and write about it. It is a requirement that we 'assess' somebodys spirituality in the same way we would assess someones mood or behaviour. Predicatably, we all struggle with this. Over and over again I see 'spiritual assessments' revert to typecasts such as the religion a person belongs to (but rarely how or if these religious beleifs influence day to day living) and wishes upon death.

I've so many questions to think about. Perhaps you, the reader can help me and post your thoughts I feelings to me on this blog?