The Vagal Path to Compassion
Students of biology or medicine will likely be familiar with one of the largest single nerves in the body, called the vagus or “wandering” nerve. The nerve emerges from the brainstem and is one of the most important contributors to the parasympathetic nervous system, having important effects on the heart, lungs and intestines. The vagus causes the heart to slow, the intestines and kidneys to become more active and the bronchi to constrict. The vagus also has profound effects on metabolism: it has been known for more than a century that stimulating the base of the brain with opiates can cause the release of glucose from the liver, an effect mediated by the vagus. The nerve is also involved in the interaction of the immune system and the brain.
In recent years a technique called vagus nerve stimulation has been found to help some people with intractable epilepsy or treatment resistant depression. Many of the techniques of yogic or Taoist breathing as well as some techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness by eye movements or stimulating specific points on the ears all revolve around vagal stimulation. Some of these techniques have been shown to produce a sustained reduction in blood pressure.
I would like to focus upon the effects of the vagus on the heart. The heart is a physical location of an aspect of our emotional functioning. In Chinese Medicine it is known as the repository of Shen or Spirit. The heart is more than just a pump. It is also an important endocrine gland, and there is some evidence that it is also a sensory organ, with a sophisticated system for receiving and processing information. The neural network within the heart enables it to learn and remember. The heart constantly communicates with the brain, influencing key areas involved in perception, cognition and emotional processing.
You or someone you know may have had a baby. In which case you or they will have had intrauterine cardiac monitoring. Normally the baby’s heart rate varies from minute to minute. Some forty years ago it was discovered that if that variation stopped, it could be a harbinger of doom. Obstetricians knew this, but the rest of medicine forgot about the observation until 1991. Since then there has been enormous interest in the phenomenon of heart rate variability (HRV), because if it is lost, it can be a potent predictor of health problems. HRV reflects the tone in the autonomic nervous system. If this system becomes unbalanced, it can have effects on most of the major organs.
In the Ageless Wisdom the vagus is called our psychic antenna. We all have one, but not all of us have relearned how to use it. Many psychic stressors can produce physical effects via the vagus nerve. When doing acupuncture or energy healing it is very common for the patient to get a slowing of their heart rate and abdominal rumblings, which are sure signs of vagal activity. Psychics often get problems with their intestines while working with people, not from upset, but because they are exercising their skills.
There has been some interesting speculations about the role of the vagus in social behavior. Researchers have found
that children with high levels of vagal activity are more resilient,
can better handle stress, and get along better with peers than children
with lower vagal tone.
There is a project underway at the University of California at Berkeley to see whether the vagus nerve might be the seat of compassion. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and coeditor of Greater Good, a magazine about prosocial behaviors such as compassion and forgiveness. He has been examining the novel hypothesis that the vagus nerve is related to prosocial behavior such as caring for others and connecting with other people.
In his laboratory, Keltner has found that the level of activity in people’s vagus nerve correlates with how warm and friendly they are to other people. Interestingly, it also correlates with how likely they are to report having had a spiritual experience during a six-month follow-up period. Vagal tone is correlated with how much compassion people feel when they are presented with slides showing people in distress, such as starving children or people who are wincing or have a look of suffering on their faces.
Perhaps a key to compassion is to be found in the heart and the face.
Compassion is crucial to our survival. But compassion leavened with wisdom.
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
–The 14th Dalai Llama (a.k.a. Tenzin Gyatso, Tibetan Religious and Political Leader, 1935-)
“Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives."
–Bhagavad Gita
Religion and Health
I have written and spoken about the association between spiritual and physical health in my books and CDs, and on this blog.
There is yet more confirmation of this link in a paper that just came across my desk. This was an analysis of the published data on religious activity and health.
This was what they concluded:
“Religious intervention such as intercessory prayer may improve success rates of in vitro fertilization, decrease length of hospital stay and duration of fever in septic patients, increase immune function, improve rheumatoid arthritis, and reduce anxiety. Frequent attendance at religious services likely improves health behaviors. Moreover, prayer may decrease adverse outcomes in patients with cardiac disease.”
Since they were looking only at religious interventions rather than spirituality in general, the investigators did not pick up a lot of research into psychiatric illnesses, pain and cancer. That does not detract in any way from this important publication.
As I’ve said before please don’t ever lose touch with your spirituality. It is essential to your health and well-being.
Learning from a Master
I’ve collected hundreds of teaching stories from all over the world.
Here is a delightful tale that appears in many forms in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and Sufi teachings.
___________________________________________________
Once upon a time, there was a man who wanted to change his life, to understand the nature of things and to learn all there was to know. And so he sold all his worldly possessions and went far away to a distant land to study in a secluded monastery.
After traveling for days and nights, he came to an ancient stone building at the edge of a rocky cliff that was jutting out of a steep mountainside.
He went up to the heavy wooden door and knocked.
The door creaked open and an old man appeared wearing a long robe and holding a wooden staff.
"What do you want?" asked the old Master of the monastery.
"I want to know everything there is to know." Said the man.
"Everything?" said the Master.
"Everything." Said the man.
The old monk looked hard at the man and said, "Come in."
He entered the monastery and the old monk lead him down a narrow stone hallway to a small door on the right side. He entered the room.
Inside the room there was a stone bed, an old wooden table with a huge wax candle, and all around were stacks and stacks of books piled from floor to ceiling, filling the entire room.
The man happily began to read the books. He read from early morning until late into the night. Whenever he was not attending to his tasks at the monastery, he read.
After a few weeks had passed, one day there was a knock on his door, and the old Master with the staff entered his room.
"Well,?" said the Master. "Have you learned everything there is to know?"
"No, Master, I have not." Said the man. At which point, the Master took up his wooden staff and began beating the man about the head and shoulders…and then he left.
The man was stunned…and then he got down to studying even harder. He studied long into the wee small hours of the morning, before his duties began. He barely took time to eat or sleep. He read and read and read.
After a few weeks had passed, again there was a knock on his door, and the old master with the staff entered his room.
"Well,?" said the Master. "Now, have you learned everything there is to know?"
"No, Master, I have not." Said the man. At which point the Master took up his staff and began to beat the man about the head and shoulders…and then he left.
Time went by, and every few weeks, the Master would come to the mans room and ask him the same question. And the man would give the same answer, and receive the same beating about the head and shoulders.
Many wearisome months went by like this, again one day, there was a knock on his door, and the old Master with the staff entered his room.
"Now,” said the Master, "Today, do you know everything there is to know?"
"No" said the man, "I do not.” At which point, the Master took up his staff and lifted it high in the air… but this time, the man put out his hand and stopped the staff in mid-air.
Suddenly, the Master burst out laughing.
"Master" said the man, "Why are you laughing? I have failed miserably. It is impossible. I will never know everything there is to know."
"I am laughing " said the Master, "because I am happy for you. For today, you have learned two things, my son. One, that you will never know everything there is to know. And two, how to stop the pain."
Spirituality and Personal Well-Being
It is no coincidence that most us involved in fashioning the new model of health care are also deeply involved in spirituality. People including Deepak Chopra and Larry Dossey have recognized that health and spiriruality are inextricably linked.
Healing, Meaning and Purpose was written and recorded to support a spiritual journey as part of a comprehensive approach toward wellness.
As I travel the world I am constantly astonished by the ever-increasing interest in spirituality, health and well-being.
A new study has just been published by researchers from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Using data from the 2001 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, they found that what they called "alternative" spiritual practices could be divided into two groups: concerns with personal well-being and interest in divination. They found something that we have also discovered in the United States. Women, particularly if they are educated, are particularly interested in applying spirituality in their lives to promote their own well-being and the health and wellness of their families. This fits in with other data that have shown that in every culture studied, women are more likely to seek health care, whether they have a skin rash, depression or cancer.
Your spiritual health is essential to the health of your body and your relationships. Please don’t ever neglect it.
Some Memorable Quotations
Regular readers will know that I often find that quotations can inspire and educate us and can amplify points.
My own quotations database, lovingly crated over many years, contains almost 30,000 entries. Here are some that I think are wonderful, but for which I can find no reliable attribution. The first was said to have been written by a victim of the Holocaust, but I’ve not been able to confirm that.
If anyone can help with authorship please do let me know, and I’ll edit this entry, giving credit where it’s due!
I hope that you find these as inspirational as I have.
I believe in the sun, even when it isn’t shining.
I believe in love, even when I cannot feel it.
I believe in God, even when He is silent.
In the end, all I have of ultimate value is my word
And His Word.
I choose them carefully.
Yet my beliefs and mistakes abound
In a universe where justice prevails.
Let me be judged by my choices,
Not by the voices of condemnation
Shouting down errors
They cannot see in themselves.
Reality has rules whose breach does not go unnoticed,
Each violation creates a debt that must be paid.
All of life a striving toward this balance,
Frenzied futility, apology, pretense, denial,
And seeking of forgiveness and mercy.
The universe is just and accountable.
We seek formulas
God has the answers.
Let me love and be loved, even when it goes unnoticed,
And if my feelings and beliefs and vain wonderings
Figure into the solution,
Cast them as adornments
To the ledger of mercy and justice.
Along the journey of life
The longest distance is the foot
Between the heart and the head.
Step forward into the separation of powers,
And travel into eternity.
Chronic Fatigue, RNase Deficiency and Spiritual Development
I was very sorry to hear that Ken Wilber, whose work I admire enormously, has recently been very unwell. While weakened by an underlying chronic illness, he took a nasty fall that has left him pretty badly bruised, and with some possible neurological problems. Fortunately he is already somewhat better.
According to Ken, his underlying illness is a form of chronic fatigue syndrome called or caused by RNase-L Enzyme Dysfunction. People with the problem develop a number of bizarre symptoms apart from fatigue, including muscle weakness, fevers and immune dysfunction. The RNase enzyme is normally activated when a cell has to deal with viruses, some toxins and some bacteria. There is a good introduction here.
There is a growing literature on the subject: investigators from Brussels have recently shown a link between exercise performance and immune dysfunction in some of these patients. It may be that elevated RNase-L enzyme activity may provide us with a biological marker for some cases of chronic fatigue syndrome. Despite this research, I still have many colleagues who continue to say that chronic fatigue syndrome and a probably related condition, Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, are purely psychological problems.
I am quite sure that they are wrong.
Not least because there are very few illnesses that can be reduced to just psychological or just physical causes. These artificial distinctions do little to help people suffering with genuine problems. (You may be interested to have a look at a brief piece that I wrote about this artificial distinction.)
I do know that the most difficult problems that I have ever faced in clinical practice have been the chronic fatigue syndromes and a possibly related problem: interstitial cystitis. The only things that have helped have been approaches employing the five dimensional approach: physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual.
And now I’m going to go out on a limb and do something that normally I do not. I will normally not make even the broadest comments about someone’s diagnosis and treatment unless I’ve seen them myself: there are few things worse than people trying to diagnose at long range and when they only have half the information. But when I see symptoms like these: fatigue and fever, physical weakness and sometimes profound psychological effects, I have to ask whether the biochemical markers are actually telling us something different: that some people with these problems may actually have what used to be known as “diseases of discipleship.” An old-fashioned term used to describe some of the physical challenges and changes that may accompany spiritual evolution. If I am correct, I would predict that Ken – and many other sufferers – should also have profound disturbances of their normal circadian rhythms, some predictable but subtle endocrine disturbances, and otherwise inexplicable sensations roughly corresponding to the channels identified in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine.
One of the most startling recent discoveries in medicine has been that some of the time-honored laws of healing are changing, because we are ourselves changing very rapidly. In Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I spent a long time talking about some of the reasons for coming to that understanding, and how to use it to improve our health and well-being. I fully expect to spend the remainder of my career showing people how these new laws and principles can help us all, as well as ensuring that appropriate research continues to help us develop these new understandings about health and wellness.
So I’m going to suggest that Ken’s problems might never have happened if he hadn’t been on such a deep spiritual quest, and if he hadn’t been turning up a lot of answers that matter.
Get well Ken!
Technorati tags: Ken Wilber Chronic fatigue syndrome RNase deficiency Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome Interstitial cystitis Spiritual development Circadian rhythm Integrated medicine Integrative medicine Laws of Healing
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Concentric Key
Physical, psychological and spiritual health are all inextricably linked. We are plagued by ill-defined illnesses whose origin lies not just in our genes, but arise from our spiritual disconnection. And on some level we all know that.
Thirty million Americans describe themselves as spiritual seekers. Why is it that so many are seeking but not finding? The answer to that is more subtle than you may think and also far more satisfying. The information that we need is all lying out there in plain sight. It’s just that most of us has never learned how to access it.
The writer Doris Lessing once observed that we now all have access to thousands of books and other documents that were once hidden or available only to a select few. Some of the most sacred texts are now either available on line or on inexpensive CD-ROMs. Most of these thirty million seekers can probably teach us about prayer, karma, chakras or spirituality. Why do so many people feel spiritually disconnected and why is it that most people are either unwell or not as well as they could be? So very few are able to achieve their full potential because of physical or psychological difficulties? So what’s the problem?
The trouble is that many of the ancient books and manuscripts on which our knowledge is based were written on several levels. Yes, they contain information about our spiritual nature and our subtle anatomy. But that is only level one.
They also contain other levels of knowledge and sophistication: keys and solutions that have until now only been taught to a few.
Textual analysis and interpretation, scriptural exegesis, and numerological research have all been going on for millennia. People were trying to find hidden codes in the ancient manuscripts of India and China two thousand years before the birth of Christ. And for more than four hundred years there have been people poring over the strange quatrains of Nostradamus to find auguries of the future. You may also have heard of modern attempts to find secrets in the Bible using numerical codes. I’m a bit skeptical only because most mathematical analyses have so far failed to confirm the existence of these hidden codes.
But there is another method of penetrating into the mysteries of the Universe, using books and manuscripts handed down over the centuries. It is known as the Concentric Key method and has been in use for centuries. If you do a Google search for those words, you will find no more than a dozen or so entries. The reason is straightforward: the techniques have been handed down in a largely oral tradition. But the time is right for the techniques to be made more widely available.
It has been claimed that some of the works of Shakespeare were written using the code. There is a book – The Secret Doctrine – that is widely regarded as being a bit odd and eccentric. Yet there is a problem with that evaluation. This massive tome, which runs to almost 1500 pages, contains page after page of extraordinary insights. They are not always obvious at first reading, but if you follow a specific set of methods, you can start getting amazing intuitive insights about the nature of reality.
The book was transcribed by a highly controversial person called Helena Blavatsky, who taught a small number of students to use it for enlightenment, and they in turn passed on the secrets. If you just read the book like a textbook or novel, it can look rather silly and disorganized. That is until you realize that there are other levels of meaning that need a lot of brain stretching. But as you understand them you begin gradually to change for the better. It is like the basic proposition of Dan Brown’s novel, the Da Vinci Code: if you know where and how to look there is a treasure trove of information there. But unlike the novel with its rather implausible ideas, studies using the Concentric Key have generated highly reproducible results.
The point of the story is this. There really are diamonds under our feet: insights and revelations hiding in plain sight in books that you may have on your own bookshelf. As a youngster I used to read a great many books, and usually quite quickly. It took time and some very patient teachers to show me that there are some books that repay quiet, slow, contemplative study.
Try and spend a few minutes every day with a spiritual quotation or a paragraph from a favorite spiritual work. If you would like me to post daily quotations, I would be delighted to do so: I have thousands which may be new to you.
And if your intuition draws you toward it, then the next stage is to start working on texts in detail using the Concentric Key technique. I shall post a great deal more about this if you are interested.
Technorati tags: Ageless Wisdom William Shakespeare Secret Doctrine Concentric Key Spirituality Helena Petrovna Blavatsky DaVinci Code Bible Code
Revisiting Resilience
“I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”
–General George S. Patton (American General, 1885-1945)
Resilience is the process of being able to adapt and to thrive in the face of adversity, stress, trauma, tragedy or threats. A resilient person is les likely to succumb to any of these life events and is less likely to develop mental illness. But resilience is more than a passive strength or resistance to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: it is a dynamic capacity that not only protects us, but enables us to turn adversity into strength and an opportunity for growth.
Despite our extraordinary health care system and a multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry, the rates of depression are increasing throughout the Western world. A recent book has suggested that boredom was unknown before about 1760: the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All this tells us that something is seriously wrong with our resilience.
“The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.”
–Plutarch (Greek Biographer and Priest to the Oracle at Delphi, A.D. 46-c.120)
In Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I pointed out some of the incredible changes that have taken place over the last one hundred years, and their impact on health. To try and apply the principles of the past to the problems of the present and future is unlikely to be crowned with success. We need to adapt. Buddhists do not normally eat meat. Except for Tibetan Buddhists, who need to eat some meat in order to survive at the high altitudes of the Himalayas. I have a good friend who created the finest integrated medicine clinic in the world, the Hale Clinic in London. Normally an abstemious vegetarian, when she was embroiled in business meetings, she would often take some meat to remain grounded. I have done the same thing myself for years. I prefer not to eat meat. I have not had a steak in more than thirty years. But if I am to do a lot of traveling and need to work with politicians and business people, a bit of chopped up fish or poultry can be essential.
The changes in our lifestyles over the past century have dramatically reduced the level of physical activity necessary to provide life’s basic resources: our effort-based rewards that are intimately involved in the regulation of mood. If you think about it for a moment, if your great-grandparents wanted to eat, there was probably a lot of effort involved. Our brains still contain a huge number of circuits that evolved to play roles in sustaining the kind of continuous effort that would be critical for the acquisition of resources such as food, water and shelter. So what happens when we suddenly on longer need much physical activity to obtain those resources? What happens to those parts of the brain that have millions of years evolving? There will be reduced activation of those brain regions essential for reward, pleasure, salience, motivation, problem-solving, and effective coping strategies. The practical consequence of that is that these systems will not sit there idling: if under-stimulated, since these systems are so heavily involved with our emotions, we would expect to see people becoming depressed. And we know that depression has been increasing throughout the Western world. Of course, many people need to stimulate these regions of the brain artificially, as with drugs, pornography or extreme sports.
Effort-based rewards are an essential component of resilience to life’s stressful challenges. Purposeful physical activity is important in the maintenance of mental health. It therefore makes sense to put more emphasis on preventative behavioral and cognitive life strategies, rather than relying solely on psychopharmacological strategies. Our strategy is geared toward protecting people from developing depression, and compensatory behaviors. One of the very interesting new ideas in pharmacology is that antidepressants and antipsychotics may act to enhance resilience at both the cellular level and in the whole person. This is a very different concept from thinking of medicines as chemicals that simply block symptoms.
Our aim is to improve resilience and gradually to increase activation of all those under-used systems of the brain to treat and then to prevent problems. All the things that mother always said were good for you: healthy exercise, meditation, a balanced diet, charity and kindness, and actions aimed at fulfilling your personal and Higher Purpose have already been shown to treat and to protect.
Here are some proven methods for improving resilience:
1. Learn to be adaptable: the heart of resilience is the ability to take things in your stride and to be able to surf the ocean of change, rather than trying to hold the hold it back.
2. Be aware of the blockages in your mind or in the subtle systems of your body that are preventing you from bouncing back form adversity
3. Attitude: avoid seeing a challenge as an insurmountable problem
4. Accept that change is part of life: you can do little about it, but you can do a great deal about how you react to change
5. Ensure that you have meaningful goals that are consistent with your core desires and beliefs, and that you are moving toward them
6. Do all that you can to work on establishing your own Purpose in life. You can create a purpose for your life, but also be aware that there is a Higher Purpose in you life
7. Take decisive actions: even if the first action may not be the best one. Any action is usually better than denying that problems exist, and hoping that they will evaporate while you are asleep or watching television
8. Develop and maintain close relationships. Even if you are not a sociable person, relationships are one of the most potent way of protecting yourself from life’s ups and downs
9. Look for opportunities to learn more about yourself, and how you react to situations. This doesn’t mean becoming an introvert or a rampant narcissist, but it does mean taking a moment each day to review where you are and what you can learn form things that are or have happened in your life. This is a big subject, but there are many good ways to answer the question, “Why is this happening to me again?” and from preventing habitual problems and routine self-sabotage. (I shall be publishing an eBook and CD about this crucial topic in the very near future)
10. Work on developing a positive self-image. I have had some harsh things to say about the excesses of the self-esteem movement, but it has now been replaced by something far more valuable: the science of positive psychology. We have a great deal of empirical data on how to improve a person’s happiness and resilience. Again, we can speak about that some more if you are interested.
11. Maintain hope for the future. We have done research that has shown that one of the best ways of predicting a positive outcome with major mental illness, or of reducing the risk of recurrent substance abuse is to instill hope. Again, there are techniques for doing this, even when the whole world seems to be against you.
12. Maintain perspective: do not blow things out of proportion, and remember that this too shall pass.
13. Take care of yourself, physical, emotionally and spiritually. Listen to yourself: what does your body need? What do you need emotionally? What do you need from a relationship? What do you need spiritually?
14. Are you giving others what they need from you? If you have a nagging sense that you are not giving a child or a spouse that they need and deserve, it can dramatically reduce you resilience.
15. Rather than just thinking about and worrying over your problems, or problems that may turn up in the future, get into the habit of thinking of yourself not just as an individual who is going through problems, but as a boundless spiritual being who is learning a lesson.
16. Never forget to think about the legacy that you are going to leave. Not just to your family, but to the world at large. If you can’t think of one, this is a good time to begin to create one. That is an enormously powerful perspective on the world and on your problems.
“I am an old man and have had many troubles, most of which never happened.”
–Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer, 1835-1910)
Technorati tags: Resilience Life event Life balance Legacy Stress management
Human Evolution
For more than a century, the received wisdom has been that humans finished their physical evolution between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago, and that there have been only minor changes in cognitive abilities over most of that time.
I have always found those assertions to be fundamentally flawed. Our bodies have changed beyond all recognition in the last few hundred years, as I’ve pointed out in my last book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose. Even more than that we have changed and are changing mentally. If we were to go back in time ten thousand or even one thousand years, we would find that people were cognitively, emotionally and morally quite different from modern humans. Not simply because of technology and the explosion of knowledge about the external universe, but because there is a dynamic relationship between our development as a species and our creations, with each feeding off the other.
It is only recently that a number of theoreticians, philosophers and psychologists have begun to look at the ways in which we are continuing to develop and what it means for all of us.
The German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers first pointed out the great moral leap forward in what he called the Axial Period, between about 700-200B.C.E., during which the foundations of many of the world’s great religions first appeared, probably in response to the prevailing violence and unpleasantness of the time. More recently the Polish-born Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser started developing intriguing models of the transformations of human consciousness. In the United States, the psychologist Clare Graves developed a revolutionary concept of developing levels of development of the personality, that has evolved into Spiral Dynamics. (You may be interested to look at a review that I have just written about an excellent CD program detailing the latest developments in this field.)
And then there is Ken Wilber whose work in this field is remarkable, and whose creation of the Integral Institute promises great things. To these luminaries I now add Dudley Lynch a writer whose work I have only recently discovered.
Dudley recently wrote a very sensitive blog item about the efforts of a person with a mental illness trying to keep himself integrated in a sea of psychic chaos. He was kind enough to publish my brief response, which needs a little more detail.
The reasons for raising these points about continuing human development are these:
1.The manifest physical changes in people over the last few hundred years have enormous – and largely neglected – implications for clinical medicine.
2. It is likely not just peoples’ physical bodies that have changed, but also their subtle systems. I pointed out in my last book and CD series that the chakra system has developed to its current point only within the last few thousand years. This continuing development is also one of the reasons why some therapies that once only worked occasionally are now becoming more stable and predictable, and why some new forms of therapy – like the tapping therapies – are now being discovered.
3. It is because of these profound changes that new forms of therapy are now being developed. Not just using a supplement here, or a breathing exercise there, but precise combinations that help guide the healing of every aspect of an individual and his or her relationships and spiritual connections.
4. Some people who appear to have psychotic illnesses are moving into new developmental stages without having passed through the necessary intermediate stages. I have just read a first person account of an English journalist who could easily have been diagnosed with a manic illness, but was almost certainly undergoing a spiritual emergence.
5. Major emotional, cognitive, moral, conscious and spiritual shifts can be profoundly frightening to many people, and are doubtless one of the reasons for the profound feelings of social dislocation and violent reactions that we are observing throughout the world.
6. It is no surprise that new spiritual pathways are now emerging. Many will doubtless be very helpful to many of the thirty million Americans who count themselves as spiritual seekers, but have not yet found what they are looking for.
7. Taken together, these new understanding about the longitudinal development of people, relationships and whole societies are already having extraordinary effects on our ability to guide them all in more healthy and integrated pathways.
Technorati tags: Human evolution Axial period Ken Wilber Karl Jaspers Alternative medicine Complementary Medicine Integrated Medicine Chakras Subtle energy
Presence and Charisma
I was reading a heart-warming story reported by the BBC of a unique case of a young woman who had a heart transplant at the age of two, and when, ten years later, her adolescent body began to reject the heart, the transplant was removed, and her original heart, which had been resting for ten years, was able to take over. A medical first, but that was not what attracted my attention. Neither was it the lymphoma that she developed several years ago, perhaps because of the original illness that damaged her heart, or perhaps because of the anti-rejection medicines that she has had to take all these years.
It was instead the smiling face of Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub (I just love the pictures of him here.) who did the original operation and who consulted on this new operation. He recently turned 70 and no longer operates himself. I cast my mind back almost 25 years, when I was working at the National Heart Hospital in London and first met him. There are two things that I remember about him. The first is that he was the person who allowed me to show the successful use of acupuncture to treat people who had gone through open-heart surgery, and still had pain in their chests. And the second is the reason for today’s item: Magdi had the most extraordinary personal “Presence.” When he walked in a room, everyone would notice him. Most had no idea who he was, or his extraordinary achievements; they were just drawn to him.
I have met many people who have this “presence” or “aura.” In the Eastern world it is often thought of as another manifestation of “Qi.” Closely related to “presence” is charisma: a compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. In the ancient world charisma was thought to be a divine power or talent, and the word comes from the Greek word kharis meaning “grace” or “favor.” There is a small scientific literature on this phenomenon of charisma, which often flows from having a strong presence. Some of the research is summarized here.
There are clearly many types of charisma: Political, sports, performance, business, spiritual, literary. scientific and so on. The only two people whom I’ve met who knew Einstein told me that people would usually all stand up when he entered the room. Charisma is more than just a personal characteristic; it can also be conceptualized as the way in which certain groups interact with each other. There is a fascinating book entitled Charisma and Social Structure by Raymond Trevor Bradley, that has a fascinating discussion of the transformative and transcendent power of charisma. It must also not be forgotten that there are those who have used charisma for evil ends: three of the most wicked people of the last century were also possessed of extraordinary personal charisma.
Clearly some people have presence and charisma. The question is whether theses characteristics can also be developed. The answer is yes, they can be. Presence is created by an overall impression constituted of posture, eye contact, stillness, silence, self-confidence, competence and serenity. People with a strong presence are often a little mysterious, in the sense that they tend not to reveal much about themselves or their accomplishments. I have also felt if very strongly in people who have worked to develop the subtle systems of their bodies. One of the most potent examples was a Korean Ki-Master who spoke not a word of English, but whose presence could be felt the moment he entered a packed room. Work on your subtle systems will likely cause you to be more still and serene and to have a better posture and that’s a great start.
There are a number of things that you can do to improve your own charisma:
- Create a strong first impression by developing your presence
- Develop a good impression when you speak
- Be a good active empathic listener who connects with other people and asks pertinent questions
- Be supportive of other people and their aspirations
- Be persuasive
- Be resilient and adaptable
- Expand your vision of what is possible
- Practice thinking creatively
- Use humor
- Be committed and courageous
- Initiate persistent action
- Instill hope in the people around you
Technorati tags: Sir Magdi Yacoub, Charisma, presence, empathy, acupuncture
