Meditation, Mindfulness, & Well-Being Training:
Are they necessarily “spiritual” in nature?
I’ve been preparing the launch of a crowdfunding campaign for my second book “Walking With The Masters”, in collaboration with the platform Publishizer.
Here’s the link to the pre-launch campaign page, if you’re interested in learning more about the book.
Since the book is in the spirituality/fiction genre, I initially focused on rewards that were closely related to the content of the book: book bundles, an e-course on learning how to flow with the Universe, retreat options with me in Portugal, pranic nutrition, etc.
But then I branched out to another area that brings so much joy to my heart:
Well-being training for companies and organizations.
The reason this type of work makes me so happy is because it allows me to use my clinical/science background to reach people that I wouldn’t normally reach. As the science behind meditation, mindfulness, and well-being becomes more robust, it also provides quantitative data that companies should really look at.
As Arianna Huffington says:
“…happiness and productivity are not only related, they’re practically indistinguishable.”
Monks and sages have been saying this for thousands of years but now we have science to back it all up. And that brings so much joy to my heart.
As I was etching out the details of what I could offer companies in terms of well-being training, I got an email from my collaborator:
“Christina, would you consider this spiritual in nature at all? If so, how much?”
“What a great question!”, I thought immediately as I read it. And the answer was very quick to formulate in my mind:
It depends on what “glasses” each of us is wearing.
If I’m wearing green glasses, the world will be green. If you wear blue ones, the world will be blue. But in the end, no matter what glasses we have on and how many times we try to explain to others how we view the world through those glasses, there is always an underlying stillness, a silent space that I call God or Source. But maybe you don’t.
So yes, this type of work is spiritual…to me.
But maybe not to the atheist startup founder. Maybe to him/her, this work is about getting the brain to quiet down, so one can feel peace and be more productive. And maybe this founder uses the term “inner peace” in the same sense that I would use “Source”. Simple as that.
To illustrate this point, let me share a passage from the book “Waking Up: A Guide To Spirituality Without Religion”, by neuroscientist and outspoken atheist, Sam Harris.
Harris is describing an experience he had with a friend, when both decided to take the drug MDMA (ecstasy):
Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear.
In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised me — he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: I wanted him to be happy…
Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own…
And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal — and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love — I love you because… — now made no sense at all…
It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was — as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages — a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?
It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
“The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.” How beautiful!
And this sentence by an atheist author, perfectly describes what I do.
I’m on this earth to love people. That’s essentially what I do. I label myself a “healer” or a “channel” but those are only words. I just put myself in front of people and love them in this unobscured way, as Harris puts it. And that love is healing.
In loving people, I meet them where they are.
I can meet an atheist and talk about the science behind mindfulness, meditation and well-being. And we can spend hours talking about just that. Does it matter to me that the person sees this type of work differently and doesn’t call it “spiritual”? Not at all. I just love.
Maybe that person goes deep into meditation one day and tells me she “found inner peace”. I would smile, my ears hearing instead: “I found Source within me.”
- You’re an atheist and you’re a stressed out mess at work? I’ll meet you there and love you. We’ll talk about the science behind this all and I’ll teach you how to meditate and live mindfully.
- You’re a deeply spiritual person who wants to know more about guides, angels, and the metaphysical parts of the Universe? I’ll meet you there and love you.
- You’re not super spiritual but you’re open to viewing reality in a different way? Maybe you want “see” a different way of manifesting desires or attracting abundance, or flowing with synchronicities? I’ll meet you there and love you.
- You’re an atheist or agnostic who believes that life experiences (such as mine) not falsified by the scientific method automatically make them “crack”, “voodoo” or “New Age garbage”, and all the people that talk about them “frauds”… then perhaps I won’t be able to meet you there. But I will certainly still love you.
So in the end, is well-being training spiritual in nature? It depends on who you ask. But more importantly: “Does it matter?”
If an atheist, an agnostic, a deeply spiritual person, and a “crackpot” (as Harris puts it) can reach levels of deep inner peace with well-being training, does it matter what we call it?
To me, experience transcends semantics. Always.
- If you’re interested in learning more about my new book “Walking With The Masters”, check out the pre-launch page, where you can also sign up to receive updates on the book and campaign!
- For more information on my well-being training programs for companies and organizations, feel free to email me at: info@christina-lopes.com
