We and our children are precious beyond measure, and at the same time, we are minuscule in an infinite universe.
Our road to spiritual awakening helps us to live the paradox of preciousness and humility and to celebrate life instead of destroying it.
We become turbines of loving energy for our families. Our fuel is our connection with life’s preciousness.
Try looking closely at anything alive. Breathe in the fresh air around you as you take in the beauty of life’s patterns. Breathe out the tensions that weigh you down.
Inhale life’s astounding energy. Exhale life’s exhaustion. Repeat as needed. We get swamped and depleted by placing excessive demands on ourselves. Take in renewal, let go of demand. Take in quiet, let go chaos. Living well is a matter of attitude. See value wherever it hides. Accept your limited place in the universe with grace and thanksgiving.
Our lives can become more spontaneously abundant and generous. Even if we were deprived in our own childhoods, we can make time to intentionally savor the beauty and mystery in a blade of growing grass, the song of a bird and the miracle of sleeping or bawling children. It helps to have a faith that is flexible and nurturing.
The tragedies in some of our lives put to the test our beliefs in a loving God or even a caring human community. We can know great confusion and pain when God allows so much suffering and destruction. Religious intolerance and persecution have been the source of horrendous suffering throughout human history, right up to today. So build your faith around truly loving principles, and give yourself a chance to foster healing.
Healthy spirituality is fundamental to mental health.
Spiritual health grows out of our efforts to treasure our world and acknowledge our interdependence with each other, other life forms, and the Earth that sustains it all. Focus on the good and vital and beautiful, and you will act with a humility and a reverence for life that will show your children how to be generous and reverent, too. As we are good stewards of the abundance of our world, that abundance can last for our children’s children to inherit from us.
Mental health is a state of grace expressed through our capacity to hear, understand and love each other and ourselves, despite categorical differences of age, gender, race, nationality, culture, sexuality, religion, occupation, experience.