Why Religions Really Do Matter

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

George Bernard Shaw

view from the Saffron Monastery
in East Turkey south towards Syria

Someone had written "They Don't" under the title on the front cover of the book.
I looked at it with a touch of sadness. I wondered if the person who had written that had actually read any of the book to find out why religions do indeed work? Because the "work" in the title, Why Religions Work has three different meanings: first to reflect all the amazing good work that religions do in the world,  thereby cancelling out many times over the negative aspects of religions (because of course anyone can find the negative in any thing that they themselves have no time for.)
The fact is that religions are social capital writ large. 
Secondly, religions do all of this because it is within their teachings to do so; to care for creation and each other, for example.
Thirdly, and somewhat subtly,
they "work" in the sense that they satisfy a spiritual need that is inherent in the human condition and in the sense that science is perhaps beginning to show us some of the reasons for some of our religious beliefs.
If there were no religions established to worship a "Being" mightier than ourselves then we would have to invent one. And there is exciting science emerging that helps us to understand some of the beliefs the religious among us hold dear: discoveries about the nature of consciousness, the way the brain works, and the existence of empathy neurons, for example; together with mystical experiences and evidence from near death and out of body experiences of another existence beyond this one, even evidence for a "soul." These give us ideas as to why religions "work" in that sense.

St Albans Cathedral UK

In this book Why Religions Work: God's Place in the World Today, I wanted to approach the God and religion argument from this new and challenging angle. I wanted to address the lack of respect for religions, particularly in the Western world. I wanted this to be a serious yet accessible contribution to understanding why we all need to support religion as well as spirituality. I wanted to explore the global spiritual awareness we are now beginning to see, that comes with an appreciation of spiritual human inter-connectivity and shared responsibilities. Are ideas of spirituality and advances in the scientific understanding of empathy and consciousness closing the gap between science and religion, between spirituality and religion? Could these same ideas help us find better inter-religious and interdenominational understanding? Perhaps so. 

Such questions matter for the future of our world 

and I try to answer them in the book.

So I could have called the book Why Religions Matter. But that would not have conveyed fully what the reader will find within its covers. Religions WORK. And there are very many reasons why they do!

So I hope that person comes back and reads the book. But I fear he won't!

From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,

From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,

From the laziness that is content with half-truths,

O God of truth, deliver us.

Anon

sunset over the canary islands

Compassion and Empathy part 2

I wrote recently of the need to infuse our lives with compassion and empathy, for a better world. But compassion must not stop with humans. Don't forget the animals!

I am reminded forcefully of this from seeing the latest horrors from Compassion in World Farming  who have a dreadful report on the cruelty pigs are subjected to in Italy  -  don't look if you will be upset by images of pigs that are left in appalling conditions waiting to die, maybe many days or weeks later.

1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States,  an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. Many farm animals are subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? 

By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own. 

I'm sorry if you find this shocking. If you don't find it shocking then I am sorry for you - and for the fate of animals that touch your lives in any way.

Let's all make a difference. Let's all help to put an end to suffering - of humans and animals - let's cultivate empathy and compassion in all that we do!!

Compassion and Empathy

It was Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his essay A Defence of Poetry, who wrote that empathy is different from and goes way beyond sympathy or pity, and requires well-developed imagination, “the great instrument of moral good.”

There is an emerging science of empathy that is demonstrating that we are actually wired for empathy and compassion, that empathy exists at a neurophysiological level and that we are not just the outcome of a selfish gene. We all have the natural potential for showing empathy or concern to others, and this can be nurtured or crushed by the circumstances of our upbringing. But we need that affection from birth. The development of our mind depends on interactions face to face. Neuroscience tells us that specific brain areas respond to kindness and compassion and there is a correlation between the size of a child’s brain and the attention or neglect he experiences. Children who have not received sufficient care and compassion can feel unlovable, and can be high in self-criticism. In other words our social and developmental psychology is affected by the way we are brought up. This of course gives us a totally different understanding of human nature and has enormous significance for our societies. While our religion might teach us to be compassionate and loving, our upbringing might very well take us away from the possibility of such behavior coming naturally to us. It then needs to be re-learned, nurtured and encouraged. And it should be the religions that are there to bring us back on track.

“Empathy and compassion

To the shame of all the established religions, it has taken a secular initiative to kick-start what the world desperately needs and what the world’s religions pretty much all teach through the Golden Rule; that we should all be loving our neighbors as ourselves, showing compassion for all.

The religions’ historian Karen Armstrong was frustrated that not enough was seemingly being done by the world’s religions to promote their own moral codes of love and compassion. Perhaps this was a fair indictment. Compassion manifests itself in the world, she says, not by thinking but by doing and she wanted to bring compassion back to the very heart of moral and spiritual life. So with the support of the Fetzer Institute and a multi-faith, multi-national council of thinkers and leaders who helped with the drafting, the Charter for Compassion was launched globally in 2009. It is an idea whose time had definitely come.

Compassion literally means ‘to suffer with or alongside’ someone. We identify with you in your suffering; we can show mercy or sorrow with you in your pain. Empathy goes a little further and is the capacity to experience what it is like to be someone else. We can bare our own souls and walk in your shoes to share your suffering. That is true empathy, although the two words are often used interchangeably. Scientifically empathy should not be possible, but it is!"

The Charter for Compassion recently launched an International Compassionate Cities campaign, endorsed by a US Conference of Mayors including Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville, KY, and the mayors of Columbia, SC; Des Moines, IA; Nashville, TN; Frankfort, KY; Raleigh, NC; and Westland, MI. This initiative, says the Charter, “has the potential to inspire a fundamental shift in our ability to thrive as human beings.” 

Let's go for it. We live in such a beautiful world. Let's all help  infuse it with compassion and empathy in everything that we do. That cannot be bad!

Trial by Trolls - is there hope for our world?

Isn't it time that each and every one of us started bearing our own share of responsibility in the shaping of our world?

I know that it's 23 years since His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989, but what he said has as much relevance today as then. He emphasized that responsibility doesn't only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. The next day in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture he elaborated on the theme:

"The realisation that we are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering, is very helpful in developing a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood;
a warm feeling of love and compassion for others.
This, in turn, is essential if we are to survive in this ever shrinking world we live in. For if we each selfishly pursue only what we believe to be in our own interest, without caring about the needs of others, we not only may end up harming others but also ourselves. This fact has become very clear during the course of this century. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that by polluting the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some short-term benefit, we are destroying the very basis for our survival. As interdependents, therefore, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility."

Where are we 23 years later? Not in a very good place from where I'm sitting.

I read a piece in yesterday's Sunday Times about "The Torment of Trial by Trolls." For the uninitiated a "troll" is technically someone who deliberately disrupts online commentary with assaults on other contributors or by repeatedly taking threads away from the topic. But as the article points out it has become shorthand for all kinds of internet abuse. First we had road rage. Now it seems that many people are prepared to be abusive, obscene, insulting, mocking, bullying, and so on towards other people when they can hide behind the anonymity and distance of Twitter and Facebook and other social media. What is going on here? Why do we abuse strangers so freely?
Have all these people really nothing better to do with their time than abuse strangers? It seems that some of these trolls are perfectly decent people when met face to face.

Where is that " warm feeling of love and compassion for others" within this kind of beahviour? Is there hope for our world? What about empathy for our fellow beings? And what about the Golden Rule? Treating our neighbors as ourselves?
And not only should we confine the scope of our responsibilities to our own home patch. It is a matter of global justice that we have equal concern for the conditions in which our brothers and sisters live in poor parts of the world.
In December 2001 a Statement was issued by 110 Nobel Laureates on the one-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Nobel Prize. It included a plea for us all to reassess our global obligations to one another. Again it's eleven years ago but it seems we don't learn anything with the passage of time. This is what those Laureates said:
"The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate, and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor."

Eleven years later has much changed? It is a fact that we have the technology and productive resources to eliminate worldwide misery, poverty and injustice. Consider the power of the internet in the Arab Spring, in mobilizing the Occupy Movement.

And it seems that all many of us can do is waste precious moments, hours, days, weeks of our lives in abusive behaviour against our fellow brethren whilst hiding behind the anonymity of that same technology!

Sometimes I feel real despair, ashamed to be a part of the same human race.
Can anyone offer any words of hope?

What would you do?

Imagine the scene. All the family is at home with you for Christmas. You are having a lovely party time – all is merriment and joy. Suddenly your child lunges out at his cousin with the toy sword you gave him from Santa. Blood is drawn and your son shows no sign of stopping. What do you do? You stop him, take away the sword, tend the wounds of the cousin, apologize profusely to the mother and impose punishment or sanctions or both on your son. Of course you do. You do most or all of these things, and peace is restored, a lesson has been learned. You may even think twice about the choice of present another year. You can take some responsibility.You can make a difference.

Now imagine the party scene again, only this time there is a fracas outside your house, in the street. A youth is beating up another and it looks violent. Do you just ignore it? Of course you don’t. If there are enough big strong men in your party they may go out and separate the lads, restore peace: although the police frown upon this vigilante approach, and sadly the good guys may suffer at the hands of the lads. So at the very least you call the police. Don’t you? Of course you do. And if you have any sense of social responsibility at all you would not, should not, resent paying appropriate taxes or rates to fund agents of law and order to keep your home, street, town, county, state or country safe.

Now imagine the party scene one more time – only you have turned on the TV news, just in time to see scenes of appalling rioting, violence and arson on the streets of the town a few miles away.

Or you see scenes of appalling rioting, violence and arson, or murder, or torture, or any dreadful abuse of human rights a little further afield - just across the border, in the next State, County, Country, even in another Continent…global news reaches our front room so quickly and graphically in this digital age.

What do you do?

You may be getting the idea.

Where do we draw the line, the boundaries.

What can we do to relieve suffering elsewhere. Does suffering matter less to us the further away it is, the more remote it is from our own circle of family and friends?

What is our government doing about global suffering? Is it enough? Do we campaign enough? Can we help financially? Can we influence with our vote?

We all tend to live in our own bubble. But not caring about our fellow human beings wherever they live, whoever they are, diminishes us as humans.

Surfing the internet, I came upon the following story told by Amital Etzioni in his blog (July 27, 2007) in connection with his book Spirit of Community.

Five shoppers at a Witchita, Kansas convenience store simply stepped over the body of 27 year-old LaShanda Calloway who lay on the floor bleeding severely. None stopped to ask if she was in need of assistance. None even bothered to call 911. Ms. Calloway died later that day at a Witchita hospital of injuries the result of a stabbing; she had been an innocent bystander, wounded in someone else’s fight.

What can you do to help heal this world?

Let’s bring compassion and empathy back into our lives.

Let’s bring Christ back into Christmas.

I'm taking a few days out from blogging - and I wish all my readers a very happy Christmas. May we all work in 2012 towards a more compassionate World.

Restorative Justice - The Woolf Within

Am just back from a splendid weekend conference organised by the Scientific and Medical Network on the Science of Empathy, the Spirit of Compassion. I’ve written a piece on my other blog Wisdom of Tolerance already, about the Charter for Compassion that was introduced there by Karen Armstrong, its founder.
We covered so much ground, so much of which is relevant for healing this world. I am preparing a detailed report of the conference for the digital magazine Conscious Connections – for 21st century Cultural Creatives worldwide and will probably come back to this again.

During the weekend a film was shown, The Woolf Within , introduced by Janine Edge, an independent mediator. It made a huge impression on many of us.

I quote: “Peter Woolf was a prolific offender, ensconced in a world of violence and depravity, who, by his own reckoning committed about 20,000 crimes. Then he burgled a house, fought with his victim and ended up in prison yet again. This time though it was different. Peter met with his victim, Will, in a restorative justice session that took place in the prison. The meeting changed both their lives for ever…….”

Do please watch it. Perhaps you now have! What is striking is the compassion that victim and criminal were able to show for each other by the end of the process, despite the obvious difference in their social circumstances. This has to be restorative justice at its best, a lesson for us all in how good can come out of bad in our world.
We are all unique human beings, and all equal, regardless of background, education, color, creed, social circumstances etc. All of us suffer, all of us have the need for compassion from the day we are born to the day we die. Deprive children and youngsters of compassion in their upbringing and they will feel they are unloved, valueless, and marginalized. Through evolution the brain has become highly sensitive to kindness received, Neuroscience tells us that specific brain areas respond to kindness and compassion, Ancient Wisdom tells us that compassion is the road to happiness, and Social and developmental psychology tell us that we are affected by our own history of affiliation – i.e. the relationships we experience in our upbringing. So help people love themselves, then help them to understand the suffering of others, and we can change people and society in profound ways.

The spirit of community survival - empathy and imagination

When times are hard people pull together. This was seen in Britain in the Second World War. Is it at all possible that the deep global problems of this new Millennium will engender a similar spirit of community survival? I hope so.
History has shown us that even warring factions can forget their differences in some circumstances. There were the famous Christmas truces in the trenches in the First World War when the German and British soldiers exchanged small gifts, sang carols and played football together.
In the Crimean War British, French and Russians at quiet times also gathered around the same fire, smoking and drinking. And in the American Civil War Yankees and Rebels traded tobacco, coffee and newspapers, fished peacefully on opposite sides of the same stream and even collected wild blackberries together. (1)
On 29 July 2007 millions of Iraqis, Shia, Sunni, Kurds and Christians, became united for a brief interlude to rejoice over their football victory against Saudi Arabia in the Asian Cup Final. Shots were fired in the air in jubilant celebration rather than for political squabbling and killing. Iraq had been momentarily unified by eleven footballers! But the euphoria was short lived. In no time the city had reverted to its politically fuelled bombings and shootings.

The truce in war has a long tradition and is surely a sign of hope for the world?
If we can all unite for sport and athletics, and in No Man’s Land, why can we not work together peaceably for our own futures?

Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer in his book Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press 2000) wrote: “It is difficult to belittle and kill a person whom one knows and for whom one has no personal antipathy.”

Ian McEwan reflected on the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11:

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity [my italics]. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality…The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanizing hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. (2)

That is why I believe that culturing empathy is so important in our world. And any attempts and endeavours to cross boundaries of race or creed, to build networks, to gain knowledge of others’ ways of life, must also surely be of huge benefit for our future, and should be encouraged and nurtured.

1.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/world_war_i/197627.stm
Adapted from the book Christmas Truce by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton

2. McEwan, Ian, The Guardian 15 September 2001, ‘Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers.’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2

Love and Compassion and Responsibility in a shrinking world

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama emphasized that responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually.
The next day in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture he elaborated on the theme:

“The realisation that we are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering, is very helpful in developing a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood; a warm feeling of love and compassion for others. This, in turn, is essential if we are to survive in this ever shrinking world we live in. For if we each selfishly pursue only what we believe to be in our own interest, without caring about the needs of others, we not only may end up harming others but also ourselves. This fact has become very clear during the course of this century. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that by polluting the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some short-term benefit, we are destroying the very basis for our survival. As interdependents, therefore, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility.”

Most importantly, we cannot confine the scope of our responsibilities to our own country. It is a matter of global justice that we have equal concern for the conditions in which our brothers and sisters live in poor parts of the world. In December 2001 a Statement was issued by 110 Nobel Laureates on the one-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Nobel Prize. It included a plea for us all to reassess our global obligations to one another:

“The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate, and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.”

We may need courage to take a stand, and we have to ensure that we are properly informed before making decisions. But surely it is now time that each and every one of us realized that we must bear our own share of responsibility in the shaping of our world, and then turn that realization into action.
Some debate whether war or climate change poses the greater threat to humanity. As expressed above, the two are in some ways linked. It is an unarguable fact that we have the technology and productive resources to eliminate worldwide misery, poverty and injustice howsoever caused. And we can thus remove some of the threats to peace and stability in many parts of the world.

The cult of celebrity

“We think more highly of people such as Simon Cowell than we should do – we’re talking about someone who is essentially trivial. There’s no harm in pop music, but think of the status of classical musicians who earn £70 a gig.”
This is what Lord Robert Winston – Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, popular TV Science programme host and author of more than a dozen books – said in an interview for The Times Magazine for the 4th June 2011.
This celebrity cult, he said, he found depressing.

And I think it is depressing because it has become a huge problem, particularly in the upbringing of our kids, who see celebrities as role models and look up to them in awe, yearning themselves for the same fame and fortune when they grow up.

Sadly this emphasis is also seen too often in the self- help and self-development genre of book that is so popular today. I suspect that quite a few of us have reached in our time to those sections of a library or bookshop tempted by books that promise to ‘change our lives’, or help us ‘succeed’. Many of these are excellent. I have quite a few on my own bookshelves!
But too often they feed the petty ego of self, the selfish desire for individual improvement, the seemingly endless drive for power and wealth. And this style of self-development is often measured by the values of material gain, promotion, or celebrity status. And incidentally the authors are often extremely wealthy and part of the celebrity cult themselves!

Should we not be wary of a self- help industry if it becomes so self-centered on the individual at the expense of others? Doesn’t this approach fuel greed and envy, eschew vulnerability and threaten genuine altruism? I think so.

Unfortunately a huge and profitable industry has built up around this ‘success’ culture. What is more, many such books actively discourage contact with those who are wounded in our society, the vulnerable, the loners, the unhappy, the unsuccessful, the disadvantaged, those who are damaged emotionally. Such weaknesses are too often seen as inhibiting to our own ‘development’.
By not helping such people don’t we dig ourselves deeper into a less attractive future? Don’t we risk divorcing ourselves from experiencing and displaying that empathy and compassion so essential for a better world?

Anglican Bishop Peter Selby observed that ‘the obsessive search for personal growth and inner wholeness without concern for the health of society is distorting.’**
Nowhere is this distortion more obvious, and more potentially harmful than among these books that fuel what has been dubbed the new egocentric ‘Me-Millennium’.

**(Selby, Peter, Liberating God, Private Care and Public Struggle

, London: SPCK, 1983, publisher’s note, back cover.)

“Empathy is a quality of Character that can Change the World” says Obama.

Speaking at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast on May 12th 2011 Obama said that empathy is a source of morality in the immigration reform debate. According to Edwin Rutsch, writing to Members in Let's Find 1 Million People Who Want to Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion, Obama has been talking about empathy and compassion more lately and Edwin thinks it will be central to his 2012 election campaign.
Here is the video posted up as part of Edwin Rutsch’s empathy documentary project. where you will find links to many other videos from Obama and others on the importance of empathy.

Here is some of the text from the video:

"So, yes, immigration reform is a moral imperative, and so it’s worth seeking greater understanding from our faith. As it is written in the Book of Deuteronomy, “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” To me, that verse is a call to show Empathy to our brothers and our sisters; to try and recognize ourselves in one another. ….

That sense of connection, that sense of Empathy, that moral compass, that conviction of what is right is what led the National Association of Evangelicals to shoot short films to help people grasp the challenges facing immigrants. It’s what led the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to launch a Justice for Immigrants campaign, and the Interfaith Immigration Coalition to advocate across religious lines. It’s what led all the Latino pastors at the Hispanic Prayer Breakfast to come together around reform...

I’m asking you to help us recognize ourselves in one another... Obama went on to say ...Empathy is a quality of Character that can Change the World.”

Empathy and Compassion are qualities whose time has come. Here is the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age.

See also Edwin Rutsch's Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
And the Facebook Center for Building a Culture of Empathy and Compassion 
and the cause - Let's Find 1 Million People Who Want to Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion 
and thankyou to the indefatigable Edwin Rutsch who is working so very hard to put all this together and keep it running - and growing!

It is a cause very dear to my own heart and I will be talking in a few days time to a local book group about empathy and compassion and how we need to nurture these qualities in everything we do to heal our broken world.

empathy in medicine

In my last post I wrote of the recognition in some quarters that empathy in the doctor can aid the healing process within his patient. This should hardly come as a surprise. The overriding problem in healthcare today seems to be that too often our doctors are ‘Techno-doctors’and ‘Super Specialists’ in a system that reduces patients to paper statistics and doctors to slaves of machinery, forgetting the importance of the personal, the subjective and the social aspects of care. ‘By their very nature doctors deal with bits and pieces – microbes, hormone deficiencies or tumours – while patients experience illness as the disorders, disruption and possible disintegration of their ordinary lives…Every healing art sees illness in its own terms. Patients need to remember that the illness is theirs and theirs alone.’And physicians need to remember this also.

Apart from the palliative care available for patients at the end of life, it still seems that the different forms of spiritual and religious healthcare (S/RH), complementary and alternative medicine (CAMs) and conventional allopathic clinical practice are not working together as well as they could and should. Many of the CAMs are gaining credibility within mainstream traditional healthcare but the influence of S/RH lags woefully behind.
‘It’s time we heed the symptoms indicating that our medical system is dangerously out of balance,’ says Joan Borysenko. ‘Modern technology is marvelous and lifesaving, and if we can integrate it with the deep wisdom of the past then we can birth a medicine that exalts and nurtures rather than one that is predicated on the fear of death.’
I believe that we are indeed seeing the dawning of a new paradigm in the history of medicine: we are entering an era where the spiritual healing needs of the patient can be met alongside both alternative and complementary therapies and the very best of the latest clinical medicine. There are certainly pockets of excellence across the healthcare establishments, for example the Integrative Medical Clinic of Santa Rosa, California, is at the very forefront of this exciting new world of enlightened healthcare. And in the UK we have the Christian Healing Centre Burrswood House. As in so many fields the USA leads and the UK will in due course follow the lead of America in the full recognition of truly holistic healthcare that is available for all. But much work needs to be done.

 The tableau is from our last Healing Service held in our church.



References:
Helman, Cecil, Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline

, London: Hammersmith Press, 2006
Joan Borysenko, ‘Putting the Soul Back in Medicine’ article sourced at http://joanborysenko.com/html/news_artcl4.html 18 November 2005 now available as chapter 4 in Healing our Planet, Healing Ourselves: The Power of Change within to Change the World, at http://www.healingourplanet.com/

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

Doctors who feel your pain heal more patients

This should hardly come as a surprise to many people but " doctors who feel your pain heal more patients." I quote: "Empathy is often seen as a nice — but nonessential — part of medicine. Indeed, for surgeons in the operating room, seeing the patient as a human being may actually be an obstacle to successful performance. At the bedside, however, doctors who are more empathetic actually have healthier patients, according to a new study published in the journal Academic Medicine.

For earliest man physical illness was inextricably linked with the mind, with spirituality and with religion. The original belief was that disease came from the gods as punishment for invoking their displeasure in some way. Amulets found alongside the remains of Paleolithic man were almost certainly used as charms for healing purposes, a recognition at that time of the importance of the mind to the cause of illness, a precursor of modern psychology long before it was known as such!

Later, but still long before the birth of medical science, man called on his religion to heal his pain and suffering. He sought wholeness of the body, a holistic approach to healing.

Medicine largely lost this holistic wisdom with the advancement of medical science, not to be rediscovered until the second half of the last century. In this new millennium I believe that in time we will come to marvel at how we could have lost this sense of the soul’s healing significance for so long.

Carl Jung understood very well the essential empathic link between doctor and patient when he wrote: "The patient’s treatment begins with the doctor…in any ongoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases that the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. Then the whole being of the doctor is challenged…the Doctor is effective only when he himself is affected…‘the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armour, he has no effect."
Elsewhere he went on to say:
"Without too much exaggeration a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient…It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician."

Jung’s followers proceeded to give the term special significance in their work and thinking and it was Jungian analysts who apparently started referring to the Wounded Healer Archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process.
Jung’s ideas were specifically developed in the context of the doctor and his patient in psychotherapy, but his wisdom articulated in these passages should surely be recognized to be just as relevant today within the context of the general medical practitioner’s relationship with his patient."
Do you agree?

The Jung quotes are taken from:
Jung, Carl G., Memories, Dreams Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995) pp.154-156.
Jung, Carl, from The Collected Works of C G Jung, volume 10 The Undiscovered Self; Princeton University Press, 1970 pp304-305 as quoted in Claire Dunn: Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul An Illustrated Biography (London: Continuum, 2000) p.199.

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

Reclaiming empathy and compassion for human well being.

BBC Radio 4's Start the Week is an excellent weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday and hosted by Andrew Marr, a man in the news recently for other reasons!

Casting that aside, I pricked up my ears a week or so ago to the programme when The Revd Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James's, Piccadilly,  was speaking - "Human well being," she said, "relies upon reclaiming empathy and compassion." And religious sensibility has a role to play, she continued, in creating the Good Society. Precisely! Regular readers of my blog will know that I also believe empathy and compassion to be at the heart of any attempts to heal our broken world, and I explore this in much more detail in Healing This Wounded Earth - with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope.


It is sometimes reassuring to know that others are on my wavelength!

The photo is of me giving a very successful talk and reading from my book at a  local group.

(The Revd. Winkett is the author of Our Sound is our Wound - Contemplative Listening to a Noisy World , the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book for 2010 - another lovely statement she made: "Don't imagine you're thinking when you're simply rearranging your prejudices." !!)

The Wounded Healer - again

However we define and categorize our wounds, we now know that who we are and how we behave as adults is not only a combination of our inherited gene and possibly also our meme makeup. We are also affected by subsequent influences in our upbringing and our experiences as we develop through childhood and beyond. This is what is meant when we talk about ‘nature versus nurture’.  So as well as our inherited physical characteristics, we pick up mental wounds from the collective experiences of our ancestors. The unhealed wounds of mankind inflicted through millennia of evolution by strife and violence and disaster mean that hundreds of millions of people are psychologically, emotionally and physically scarred and wounded and in need of healing. It has even been suggested by some psychologists that ‘human culture as a whole has been saturated by unhealed wounding, which, if unchecked, will continue on a downward spiral toward inevitable disintegration.’* This is not a good thought. 

Books abound, both popular and academic, on the psychological study of why we behave as we do. But I think the bottom line is that we must understand how our wounds manifest themselves in many different and undesirable personality traits. We see greed and envy, craving for love and attention, consumerism, lust for power, superiority, violence, overspending, addictions to work and substances, depression, cynicism, despair. All these come from our unhealed wounds. What we need to cultivate instead is a compassionate trend, always sensitive to the pain of others. We are wired for empathy - we just shut it out a lot of the time! We need an instinctive urge to support the weak and the vulnerable. And we must combat violence, both against each other and against the planet. Violence is probably threatening our very future more than anything else. And the most obvious violence that we inflict upon this fragile planet is consumerism. That I have written of before, and will do again!

I have just found another good blog commenting on the Wounded Healer.
There the point is made that we can all be Wounded Healers. I cannot wholly agree.

Yes we certainly, most of us, have the capacity to become Wounded Healers, but along with many others, I believe that there are stages of healing along the path to the ultimate Wounded Healer when we can do more harm than good. See for example Conti-O’Hare’s excellent book The Nurse as Wounded Healer where she writes of the “Walking Wounded”, and also http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2004/book-beethoven.htm where Clayton Montez reviews Pearsall’s The Beethoven Factor, and writes on the Thriving Response. And there are other stages. The author of the said blog, writing clearly from a medical healing perspective, confesses to a lack of empathy by the bedside. Yes that is certainly true. There is much that needs to be done to reintroduce empathy and soul back to the sick bed, and I have written at some length on this myself elsewhere, re our health services, following in the footsteps of Larry Dossey, Dawson Church, et al. But I also believe that this archetype of the Wounded Healer has enormous social healing significance beyond the caring professions, for healing the world’s greater woes. I will come back to that in later posts.

*see Judith Thompson and James O'Dea "Social Healing for a Fractured World."

Let’s all do one extra compassionate act today.

I have written over the last week of the dangers of remoteness – not linking our behaviour with the effects of our actions. This remoteness is seen at a global and human level, when we do not always associate the extreme manifestations of climate change happening in other parts of the world with our own excessive and consumer lifestyles.
10% of the world’s population is consuming 50% of its resources. 20% of the world’s population has no safe water supply. Observing our speed limits can save a liter of fuel or more per 100 miles. Are we going to slow down, stop using that pressure hose, cut our consumption?

The IPCC said in 2007 ‘that by 2050 up to 2 billion people worldwide could be facing major water shortages. The U.S. used more than 148 trillion gallons of water in 2000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That includes residential, commercial, agriculture, manufacturing and every other use — almost 500,000 gallons per person.’ Serious water shortages in the US are predicted sooner than 2050, caused by ‘rising temperatures and evaporation rates, lack of rain, urban sprawl, waste and overuse.’
We usually take our potable water supply totally for granted, because we have not experienced for ourselves and cannot begin to imagine having to walk miles each day to carry back pitchers of water that is possibly dirty and harmful to drink. The chronic water shortages that hit parts of the South of England in the summer drought of 2006 provoked a positive response from customers to the requests to save water. This was almost certainly because the threat of water standpipes in the roads was seen as a real possibility that would affect us all directly and make our lives quite difficult.

The same principles could equally apply to any of the other resources that we hold dear to us or take totally for granted, such as food, fuel, power. I feel sure that we would be far more interested in being frugal with such commodities if we could only fully comprehend the real risk of us losing them by our inappropriate actions.
In the UK shock tactics have been used to change public opinion. Celebrity chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have both used powerful documentaries on prime time TV to drive home the message about unacceptable and cruel farming practices.
Do we need celebrities to make television programs or videos with shock tactics about every aspect of our lives before we will act responsibly as individuals? I hope not! Change needs to come from a change of heart, a sense of love and compassion and empathy, rather than by the use of shock tactics.



Someone said to me yesterday: “we cannot do anything at all about atrocities happening in other parts of the world except pray.” I was horrified! At the very least we can find out more about the many wonderful charities and other organizations that are working tirelessly in so many places to improve the lot of humankind, to relieve hunger and suffering and to provide education and support wherever needed. So many of us are very privileged. So many of us don’t really have to worry about where our next meal will come from, and we can take for granted our relative safety in our own secure homes and neighbourhoods. We may not be able to become directly involved with the work of aid agencies etc., but we can at least support them financially as well as in our prayers.

Let’s all do one extra compassionate act today.

The Wounded Healer, The King’s Speech and President Barack Obama

I am one of the 75% in Britain who havn’t seen The King’s Speech movie. Our local cinema has been showing it several times a day to meet the demand. I really must go.

But I would not have thought of any link with the Wounded Healer until I read Pythia Peay’s interview for the Huffington Post Academy Awards 2011: Which Myth Will America Choose? with Jungian analyst and psychiatrist John Beebe, lifelong moviegoer as well as psychological teacher, who in his lectures often draws on movies as a way to illuminate Jung's theory of psychological types and to discuss the drama of therapy.

And I would not have linked this immediately with President Barack Obama either.

Now I know President Obama understands empathy. In his superb book, The Audacity of Hope, writing on the difficulties he sometimes experienced in his relationship with his grandfather, he observed ‘that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.’ He goes on to say: ‘I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.” He reaffirmed this message later on the campaign trail, when he spoke of those he had met ‘whose dreams and struggles become my own; they will stay with me in the White House.’
This is the message of a Wounded Healer.

John Beebe takes this further. He does not think it's accidental that "The King's Speech" film came out at a time when a lot of people were worried that Obama was not speaking out enough.
“Obama, who is not interested in resurrecting the hero myth, is post-heroic. He's interested in the archetype of the good parent. He wants us to be better parents, and he wants to protect the infrastructure and take responsibility for the country. But at the same time, Obama has had a reluctance to be assertive in the bully pulpit. Some have felt that he was being too cautious, and that he needed to come forward. He finally came through in the beautiful speech he gave in Tucson and in his State of the Union 2011 address. After hearing from their president, the public brought his ratings up.
King George VI of England needed to master his fear of public speaking,” Beebe continues, “in order to help his people deal with their fears at the terrifying moment that World War II began. By combining courage to lead with the humility needed to face his speech problem, he became a "wounded healer" who helped his country -- the right king for his people at their most trying time. So "The King's Speech" drew on the historical precedent to the situation Obama faced of someone who worked on his reluctance to speak out in order to become an effective father figure for his country -- an example of a collective issue being mirrored and resolved in a brilliant film.”

It’s really worth going to read the full interview between Beebe and Peay, and catching up on Obama’s speeches. Obama at his oratorical best.

A Call for empathy with all farm animals

A couple of days ago I wrote about the dangers of remoteness – how if we saw the results of our actions we may think twice about some of our behavior.

I may have said this before – forgive me if so, but it is such an important topic, it bears repeating. And some readers of my blog are just passing through for the day, so to speak, so will have missed previous posts on this.
1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States, an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. OK I appreciate that many will not be able to afford belonging to every cause that takes their fancy. But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the plight of farm animals. We can vote with how we spend our money on meat. Many farm animals are subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own.
This is not only about cruelty to animals, although that is reason enough to do something to stop these dreadful practices. Organic humanely reared food is better for our health, and usually tastes a whole lot better as well. We could all pledge to eat quality not quantity, cut back on portion sizes but really savour the taste of what we eat. These factory farms are pushing the small family farmers, on farms that have practiced small-scale humane husbandry sometimes through generations, to the brink of bankruptcy. It is said that every new factory farm forces 10 family farmers out of business. With every small family farmer that has to leave the farm, communities lose access to fresh, healthy food and local economies are weakened. And a sustainable environment is threatened with abnormal pollution patterns and disease.

So let’s try to think a little more about the effects of what we do, how we behave, as we go about our daily living. Let's use our imagination and help stop animal cruelty.

Raping nature or finding empathy with nature?

 Every year at this time I get upset by the rape of our hedgerows, as tractors with massive scythes attached drive down the verges hacking at the hedges, reducing their height and/or depth, and causing goodness knows how much carnage at the same time. 

I think of all those animals and birds and even smaller wildlife whose habitats are so brutally and suddenly destroyed with no warning.

 And I think back to when I was a child and the winters on the farm were spent "hedging and ditching." This was the process of clearing the ditches of debris so that the flow of drainage water was maintained away from the fields, and layering the hedges in the old craftsman's way, bending the thin live twigs over horizontally, nicking them at the bend to encourage shooting, and weaving them along the top of the hedge. This over time created hedges that were thick and more than capable of keeping animals in.
 This old skill is still practised on some more enlightened farms, but of course "time is money" these days, and few have the patience and skills required any longer.
 
The two pictures below show examples of some layering of a young hedge. Not only will the hedge become thick and strong, it will become an excellent home for our nesting song birds, and small mammals.

And the craftsman (or woman) will feel an empathy for nature, impossible to feel by any tractor driver dragging a massive scythe through his hedges.

So very very sad!

Hope in healing - How understanding and healing trauma could solve the planetary crisis.

“…(O)ur first responsibility … to ourselves, our families and community, and to humanity, is to heal ourselves of whatever traumas we may be carrying…work to heal our relationships…treat every person…with respect, warmth and dignity…treat the Earth with the care our home deserves. If everyone did the same, humanity and the planet would be healed.”

This is taken from an absolutely fascinating book just out in the UK, (mid March in the USA), Hope for Humanity. The thesis behind this substantial book by Malcolm Hollick and Christine Connelly is that our present global crises are the result of unhealed traumas, both collective and individual. Traumas from the last 6000 or so years are embedded in our culture, inherent in our make up today, and these need healing on a grand scale. As far as modern sources of trauma go, it is clear that nurture of our offspring from “in utero” onwards has a profound effect on our development, on our level of traumatisation and how we develop as humans, with huge implications for the future of humankind. All these traumas, left unhealed, affect the ways we behave, creating more trauma, in a self perpetuating cycle. Trauma begets trauma. Preventing and healing trauma would go a long way towards resolving the crises of our civilisation. We could then start to heal our world and find hope for the future of humanity. Meanwhile the malaise of the human spirit is undermining our intelligence, creativity and mental health.

Read more about this on Malcolm's own blog.

Here we have one of a collection of books currently appearing that in their various ways, sometimes writing from differing perspectives but all with the same underlying message, call for more healing, compassion and empathy in healing the world. They are all essential reading for those who want to understand how they can do something practical towards saving mankind.

A wonderful message of hope.

Empathy threatened by social networking

“By the middle of this century, our minds might have become infantilised - characterised by short attention spans, an inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.” 
Susan Greenfield

Listening to BBC Radio 4's current affairs programme, Any Questions, last Friday, I was curious to know more about one of the panel, SUSAN GREENFIELD. So I went to the BBC website to find out. She is an eminent neuroscientist, a CBE, now Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. "Her research concentrates on understanding brain functions and disorders, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, as well as the physical basis of consciousness." So she knows what she is talking about. And she has spoken out, as quoted above, about "the impact of social networking sites and the amount of time children and young people spend in front of computer screens."


Now that is really frightening stuff, especially if one reads the books around at the moment telling us just how important the nurturing of empathy will be for the future of humankind on planet earth.