Soul Vitamins for the Long Haul
Thank you for coming this far with me. It has been a tough read and I appreciate your time and attention. At this point, something has shifted internally. Perhaps you are less embattled or maybe you have grown accustomed to the daily struggle.
It may feel like you are living from the inside out, like your heart has been scraped raw, similar to when you skinned your knee learning to ride a bike. Your knee healed long ago but these soul abrasions may hurt all day. Yet you can function, just as you can with a low-grade fever. You might not be on top of your game, but somehow, things get done.
You probably continue to ruminate on how things were before that day, wishing you could time travel back to twenty-four hours before the event, as if time could have stood still for a precious moment. Knowing that you can’t intensifies the recognition that your physical, financial, and emotional losses are now more complicated than you realized.
Spiritual PTSD
Working through grief gets exhausting and can lead to spiritual PTSD.
At a seminar on complex traumatic grief given by the New York Mental Health Association two years after the September 11th attacks, we were taught that sudden, unexpected death takes away more than a person, place, or things you loved. Those dreams about the future you were going to spend together were also killed, and just as suddenly. The loss of those dreams needs to be acknowledged, respected, and mourned—simultaneously and independently from the physical losses.
Spiritual PTSD is not a clinical term. Nick Arnett, a first responder who published Stress Management and Crisis Response, distinguishes it from acute stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms of spiritual PTSD include the following:
Physical symptoms can include feeling like a part of you is missing, emptiness in the abdominal or solar plexus area, chronic nausea, and difficulty focusing.
When Travel Is Made to Be Easy
Living in a state of spiritual PTSD drains energy to the point of depletion. Life becomes so exhausting that you can barely move. Fatigued and demoralized, you exist in a netherworld of soul burnout.
You are like a baby bird that has fallen out of the nest, too weak and fragile to fly back. If you have ever found a baby bird in that state, you probably remember feeding it liquid vitamins through a glass dropper until it regained some strength. Now it’s your turn to treat yourself like that baby bird. You need to learn how to feed yourself soul vitamins so that you can regain your energy and the will to live fully.
The eleventh-century Sufi mystic Rumi wrote, “When travel is made to be easy, its spiritual purpose is lost.” Humility and patience, the first two gifts, can empower you to accept that exhaustion is your starting point, with the understanding that you cannot anticipate how long it will take to get your full strength back. As with severe illness, the process of healing zigzags from bursts of energy to moments of collapse. Getting angry because you cannot will yourself to push through it at your old pace will sabotage the pace of healing. Patience gives you the grace to slow down and let your soul catch up in its own time and in its own way. Now you can take a first step to an unknowable future.
Your Healing Intelligence
You have been through quite enough and the prospect of “exploring” probably makes you cringe. But this particular phase of the journey opens the way for you to reclaim and redefine what life means to you. The purpose of a soul wound is to wake you up so that new truths can become apparent. Just as there is no change without loss and no loss without change, it is equally true that healing and wounding reflect an inherent duality in nature. You need to be wounded in order to trust that your ability to heal is programmed into your biological operating system. Your conscious mind does not have to instruct it because your healing intelligence is an app that works perfectly on its own.
Examples of duality—light and dark, or north and south poles—occur all around you. Just as a coin has a head and a tail, the flip side of a soul wound is growth. The fifth gift frees you up to look toward the future instead of viewing your life through the filter of the past.
At this gentle turning point, you begin to understand that in taking away whom or what you love, loss can declutter the soul, making room for new beginnings.
“Self-reflection and self-growth are not something that should be on our bucket list at the end of life,” says Alex Pattakos, PhD, coauthor of Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work.
A Holocaust survivor and author of the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor Frankl believed that having a sense of purpose empowered him to survive four separate concentration camps. After the war, he developed logo therapy, a school of thought that focuses on finding purpose and creating a meaningful future rather than dwelling on events in the past.
“Logo therapy comes from the Greek word logos, which means, meaning, but it also means, spirit, so you are basically getting into the core of your human spirit,” says Dr. Pattakos, who was mentored by Dr. Frankl. “When you go through crisis, other doors open up. There was a reason for that event to get you to where you are now. It makes you stronger and wiser.”
Fear of Change
After a violent or unexpected event, nothing returns to where it was before. Like it or not, we are forced to change. Some of us don’t like that very much—so much so that just thinking about it is frightening, although the fear of change is often more painful than the change itself. In less extraordinary times, it’s easy to hold on to the illusion that we can control change. Sometimes we can, but there are such forces beyond our control, such as the weather, the economy, and random events. Nothing stays the same, no matter how much we try to cling to the status quo as we remember it. “You can change without growing, but you cannot grow without changing,” says Dr. Pattakos. “A lot of people change locations, relationships, and jobs but twenty-five or thirty years later they haven’t grown or learned. One of the problems we have is that we don’t spend time going inward to gain insight into you as a human being.”
A Conversation with Dr. Wayne Dyer
Dr. Wayne Dyer, a father of the New Thought movement and author of more than a dozen New York Times bestsellers, once told me that “When you are sitting at your table, so to speak, and you feel so comfortable, that’s when God rips off the tablecloth. That’s because He has something else for you to do.”
I was interviewing Dr. Dyer for a column about his protégée, Immaculee Ilabagiza, who had survived the Rwandan genocide and gone on to write Left to Tell: Discovering God in the Rwandan Holocaust. Our interview took place a day after I had learned that the New York Times was closing its regional sections: Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Westchester. This meant that my column “Long Island at Worship” would die. Losing a monthly column for the New York Times was not a disaster but it was a milestone in my journalism career. I enjoyed my dual career in media and psychology; however, I found losing my column to be more upsetting than I would have expected. My colleagues felt much the same way but the decision was outside our control. Looking back, I can appreciate how Dr. Dyer’s words that day helped prepare me for bigger unwanted changes down the road.
Katabasis: A Journey to Hell and Back
Stepping into a new way of understanding how life has changed you can be compared to traveling to a new place where some landmarks are familiar, yet the overall landscape is somehow different. In your day-to-day life, you wake up, go through your day, and return to where you started. But when your perceptions shift, the internal process that helps you sort through and organize your experience changes the way you perceive even day-to-day routines.
As one of my clients describes this stage, “It’s like being in a new place but not really.”
The difference is that now you are stripping away old beliefs, values, and patterns that are no longer working and replacing them with new models of truth. The process of deep diving into yourself to uncover something you had not realized before is called katabasis.
Linda Lappin is the author of Your Journey to Hell and Back: The Greek Concept of Katabasis Can Provide Analysis and Structure for Creating Strong Narratives.
“This going down into, or katabasis in Greek, entails journeying into the deeps of the earth or into the depths of oneself,” she writes. “It is a time of solitude and doubt, mourning and danger, anguish, fear, alienation, often estrangement from what we hold most dear: our sense of who we are.”42
The journey begins with a wake-up call. Perhaps your old (pre-disaster) model of the world is not helping you navigate real-life situations. It’s confusing, but that’s a good sign. The conscious mind hates feeling confused, which motivates you to start doing research that goes way beyond Google. Since the goal is to acquire information that will resolve confusion and strengthen you for whatever comes next, don’t be surprised when the sources of information come in surprising ways: a synchronistic meeting with someone who shares an insight that clarifies your confusion, or perhaps a weird coincidence, such as finding a book that opens to a page where you find a paragraph that rewires your thinking. Or you may have an “Aha!” moment, a flash of insight that suddenly and spontaneously repositions your understanding of the hell you have been through.
“The first step is probably just becoming more aware of where you are at the moment, where you are in your personal life and in your work life so that you can start to see around you and start to observe and put in perspective where you are, relative to other people: your coworkers, your neighbors, your family, and so forth,” says Dr. Pattakos, adding that “It’s more important to be aware than to be smart in the traditional sense of the word.”
Power Questions
You have probably seen the Socratic method in courtroom dramas but you don’t have to be a lawyer to use powerful questions to generate new ideas. Dr. Pattakos suggests starting with the last question on the list; however, there is no specific order. You may start with any one on this list or come up with your own.
10 Power Questions for Discovering Meaning
Reframing Crisis
Power questions speak to the creative unconscious, the part of the mind that can synthesize data and ideas into new patterns of understanding. The creative unconscious deep-dives into paradox, seeking new perspectives to help us find the light in painful realities. Learning to mind-shift determines whether you live in hell or are living through a crisis that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
After a disaster, life can become so overwhelming that you want to give up. “But let’s not give up hope,” says Dr. Pattakos. “If you can’t change what you observe with your five senses because those are conditions out of your control, you can shift your own position as the observer. This is not to marginalize or minimize the value or the suffering you might be enduring. If we can get out of our mental prison, so to speak, we increase our likelihood that we might find a solution to our dilemma.”
Author Deena Metzger shows us how in her brilliant reframe of sickness:
“A sacred illness is one that educates us and alters us from the inside out, providing experiences and therefore knowledge that we could not possibly achieve any other way.”
The same principle can be applied towards the event—or injury, as it is sometimes called—that wounded you.
Empathy and Meaning
Viktor Frankl used to say, “The meaning of life is meaning.”
“What that means is that it’s a process, a journey of self-discovery,” says Dr. Pattakos. “It’s not something that basically has a destination to it. Meaning can come in the form of moments of joy.”
When you find yourself facing a tragic event that is not of your own choosing, try to take a step back and ask yourself, “Where in this situation are the seeds of meaning?” This will show you a different path through the post-disaster landscape, one that will give you more wholeness, integrity, and a sense of purpose. Having learned something by shifting your perspective, you might be surprised to find that the third gift—empathy—naturally moves you to reach out and help other people find their way along with you. Whatever the circumstances, there are seeds of meaning in every moment, up to our very last breath.
Soul Vitamins
Soul vitamins are moments when you feel that you are fully alive. You can experience them in survival situations, through vigorous exercise, or by shifting your attention from the outer world of people, activities, and things to your inner world of concepts and ideas—where you can reflect, regroup, and regenerate an optimistic mindset. Maybe the best you can hope for now is “cautiously optimistic,” but that state of mind still works to inch you forward.
Just as you would not pressure a baby bird that fell out of its nest, this is not a time to pressure yourself with a major self-improvement program. Nor is it the time to stop smoking, lose weight, get married or divorced, change careers, or move—unless extreme circumstances demand it.
Soul vitamin time can be a few minutes where you consciously give yourself permission to relax fully. Some people like to go on mental vacations by listening to ocean sounds with their eyes closed. Sit in a garden, take a walk, ride a bike, or go for a drive.
Make a List of Positive Futures
You will recognize when your emotional baseline is calmer. Sleep becomes refreshing and insomnia diminishes. You wake up without abdominal spasms due to anxiety. You are able to push any underlying terror to the back of your mind.
Now is an opportune moment to start envisioning a positive future full of multiple potentials.
“I recommend listing ten positive things that could happen,” says Dr. Pattakos.
One of his readers, who described himself as essentially negative, asked how could he become a positive thinker by listing ten positive things that could happen.
“I told this man he could go beyond the ten positive things,” says Dr. Pattakos. “By doing that, you start to loosen up and see some of the silver lining, even in a catastrophic situation.”
Two months later, the same man described how his wife had been diagnosed with cancer. The man said that it was the first time he had been able to apply the list of positive futures to his family situation. In his return email, Dr. Pattakos suggested that the man try to reduce his amount of stress so that he could at least be a better spouse, a father who takes care of the kids while his wife is going to treatment, and so forth, and that he could choose to have hope about his wife’s prognosis.
His reader replied, “My wife and I came together more closely. We found out who our true friends and family members and loved ones were that came to our aid. My wife actually has a positive attitude herself, our children have been supportive, and I started to find positive things in my life.”
None of this takes away the significance of his wife being diagnosed. To Dr. Pattakos, it was equally significant that this man was not only able to raise his energy level in a more positive way, but he became a little more enlightened about the significance and the miracle of life. He came to truly appreciate his life, his wife’s life, his family, and his connections more intimately and authentically than before.
Journaling Tools
Although you might not consider yourself a writer, and, if asked, you might even say that it’s not an activity you like, taking a few minutes a day to write down your thoughts and feelings offers another way to nurture yourself with drops of soul vitamins. The act of writing shifts attention from the world around you to the world within. Picking up a pencil or pen opens a circuit between the mind, the heart, and the hands. Sitting in a quiet space releases words, images, feelings, sensations, and ideas that help you to retrieve experiences and impressions.
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain,” wrote Carl Jung in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Writing with your hands instead of tapping on a screen is more effective. Something about the kinesthetic elements of watching words form and listening to the subtle sound made by touching pen to paper is more effective in reaching more deeply into the self.
Journaling requires very little: a pad or notebook, pencil or pen, and ten to fifteen minutes when you are not going to be disturbed. Even people who say they hate writing have reported that sitting quietly, pen or pencil in hand, can be comforting even if there isn’t much to write that day. It is more important to sit with your pen and paper for five to ten minutes a day, whether or not you actually write.
There is a stage of the creative process called “incubation” in which the unconscious mind explores, aligns, and synthesizes what remains unspoken into a form that can emerge smoothly through the writing process. On days when nothing comes, let it go. Incubation takes time. When you plant seeds or bulbs in the soil, do you get angry at them if they do not bloom right on schedule? Or do you water your garden, watch the weather, and trust that new growth will appear all on its own, in the right time and the right place?
A “News and Goods” Journal
One of the simplest soulful writing activities is keeping a “news and goods” journal. I learned about the “news and goods” process through Harvard Medical School’s Institute of Mind-Body Medicine, where I completed clinical training in mind-body medicine with New York Times’ best-selling author, Dr. Herbert Benson. Since then, I have incorporated “news and goods” with groups dealing with the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Hurricane Sandy, and a random shooting. Anyone who tries it for more than a week has reported it is a great way to focus on seeing things in a new light.
To keep a “news and goods” journal, you simply need to find one nice moment every day. Even when you are struggling with physical pain after an incident, flashbacks, anxiety, or nightmares, you will be surprised to find that when you look for it, there is always at least one moment of “niceness” in the course of even a hellish day. For example, someone you didn’t know smiled at you, the sun came out, you took a nap, you joined a friend for coffee and enjoyed your time together, your kid drew a funny picture, or your mom cooked dinner.
Paying attention to such moments on a daily basis goes a long way toward relieving stress and anxiety while opening the way for optimism to begin flowing again.
A Couple’s Journal
Paul Schweinler, the critical incident stress management team leader who gave us his self-care regimen in Chapter Three, suggests that keeping a couple’s journal can relieve tension and reopen communications when partners are shut down. Its purpose is to create a safe way to communicate honestly.
Here are the steps to start and maintain a couple’s journal:
1. Choose a notebook.
2. Put it in a safe place agreed upon by both partners.
3. One person writes first: anything he or she wants to get off his/her chest. Feelings. Concerns. Thoughts. Ideas for the future. Anything.
4. Return the notebook to its safe place.
5. Within 24 hours of the notebook’s return, the other partner will take it and write.
6. Return the notebook to its safe place.
7. Within 24 hours of the notebook’s return, the other partner will take it and write.
8. When it feels right, you will both be more comfortable talking about what you have written.
Celebrate Your Life
If baseball is a game of inches, life is a game of seconds. The short amount of time it takes to answer that phone call or respond to an email can make the difference between life and death. Call it coincidence, call it synchronicity—a meaningful coincidence, according to Carl Jung—call it luck or God’s will or divine timing, but it takes only a few seconds for the course of destiny to shift in such a way that your life is forever altered.
“Had I caught my usual train, I would have arrived at Windows on the World on top of the World Trade Center before the first plane hit,” says Ed Gersh, a divorced investment banker who would have been killed the morning of September 11, 2001, if he hadn’t been having sex with his girlfriend.
“It was an unexpected moment of intimacy,” he says. “But it saved my life.”
Gersh arrived at the World Trade Center concourse shortly after the second plane hit.
“I saw rubble in the street and about two dozen people falling through the air. I might have been one of them had I made it to that seminar,” he says.
Gersh’s colleague, who was already there, died in the attack.
“We used to joke that I was always early and he was always late,” says Gersh. “It just happened that I was fooling around when I should have been on the train. I kept asking, ‘Why me?’ and I felt guilty. But I would not allow it to break me down.”
A refugee from the Soviet Union, Gersh was fifteen when he and his parents came to this country.
“I was always grateful for my family but I was a workaholic, putting in one hundred hours a week,” he says. Attributing his strong survival instinct to having grown up in a repressive communist regime, Gersh found himself shaken after witnessing the 9/11 attacks.
“It was a waking moment for me. I starting asking myself, ‘Is this what you want?’”
Believing that “something in the universe wants me to do something greater,” Gersh made a commitment to celebrate his life.
“September 11th gave me humility and grew my sense of empathy and connection to others,” he says. “It gave me patience to cope with my daughter’s health issues as well as my own. I realize that my life does not just belong to me. It belongs to those I love and care about. Every day I wake up and appreciate that life is not an entitlement.”
Can you look around and find something in your life that deserves celebration, especially now, after all you have been through?
Find Your Music
In The Roots of Buddhist Psychology, Jack Kornfield talks about a man who used to play his cello in the main square of Sarajevo. It was the early 1990s, the height of the war in Bosnia.43,44
Every afternoon, as the bombs and sniper bullets flew around him, he would stand there playing his favorite pieces. When people told him he was crazy and asked why he chose to put himself in danger, he answered, “Because the world needs music more than anything.”
Now is the time to find your music. It can be whatever nurtures your spirit and awakens your heart. Find a way to let it flow so that others can be moved.
Now is the time. We need you.
Keys for the Long Haul