Science, Spirituality & Self

In this talk, we discuss the benefits of blending the learnings from science, the teachings of spirituality, and the intuitions of the self to create a more balanced and integrated approach to healing, growth, and self-understanding.

Transcript

My approach to meditation. 2. Self-healing self-help is one of a combination of spirituality, Science, And self. I like to look at the intersection between them all. Now you could say that the way I'm doing this is quite precise or methodical, But I would argue that that's one aspect of it. I look at the balance between them all. I like to find and explore all of the different practices and techniques offered in spirituality, And there are many, And they're multifaceted, And sometimes they are in contradiction, Along with the scientific approaches, Because the scientific approach offers us something Spirituality doesn't. It can be verifiable across a variety of different people and techniques and practices. You remove all the different variables and go, Okay, If somebody does this one thing, It produces this one result. That's great. Because you can sort of see a correlation between action and result. The problem with science though is that it involves you having to remove all of the variables to just explore one. We are not a one variable entity. And spirituality has the benefit of showing it all and being like, Hey, Here's a whole approach. The problem with spirituality is that there is a lot of woo-woo, And there might be things within the tradition or the practice that aren't actually doing anything, But are there because of the time or the place of the origin, Or some quirk of the creator. Or some sort of other thing that means that some of the practices aren't actually doing anything. Substantial. Beyond all of that, Spirituality and religion sort of tends to paint a picture of the universe that is self-serving or self-centered in that you believe in this religion to the exclusion of all else. I don't like that. I sort of look at it from a bit of a logical perspective and go, Okay, There are, What, Eight billion people in the world? A significant proportion of them are spiritual or religious, But they're not all the same religion. If there was a religion or a practice that was the truth, Everyone would be doing it. The evidence, It would be self-evident. So then I look at it and go, This is giving us something. What is within these practices that are producing the result. Okay, We come together in community. We do some sort of mindfulness-based prep. Prayer is almost like a mantra-based practice. We do a ritual of prostration. We find meaning from the sacred texts. We get analogies, We get parables. It all seems to be doing the similar sort of stuff, But. . . For the context and the person, You'll find different ways to find that same truth. So I hold that in one side. I combined that with growing bodies of scientific evidence. There is strong evidence for mindfulness found in just basic mindfulness-based stress reduction from CBT, From DBT, From internal family systems, From mindfulness in general. There's a lot of evidence for the scientific approach. So I hold both of those truths, Science and spirituality, And turn it to myself. What works for me in my context for myself? What makes sense internally? I combine all of that and I realize that to even express this is almost a little bit folly. To express and communicate is done through words. Words are just an encapsulation of brain mush. It's a code. So I'm thinking things, I'm feeling things, I'm expressing them to you by mushing them, Restricting them to words. Whenever I read a religious text or a scientific journal or a firsthand account, I'm aware that I'm not actually reading truth. I'm reading the code of truth, Assuming it's real. Assuming that every book, Every practice, Every spiritual tradition, Every scientific journal is truth, Which you can definitely argue it's not. But even if you assume it is, I'm reading the code of the truth, Not the truth itself. And that code then needs to open back up into me, Turn back into brain mush, Body mush, For me to understand it. So it's all filtered through the self. Long-winded answer to say that my approach is part logical and methodical, But more so, I would argue, Deeply intuitive. There's a reason I call my core practice intuitive guidance, Is because I turn all of that and I go, Okay, Let's put all of that information that has come in, All of the books, All of the stuff. Take that truth beyond because there's just a knowing that I might not be able to draw the exact quote or the scientific literature from, But I can just pull from that source, So to speak. And I've learned to trust my own intuitive process in that space for self-healing and growingly with my one-on-one or group work with people as a therapist. And the final caveat is that I found that it's important to have both science and spirituality because when you're doing this sort of work, There is a real risk that if you don't know the science, If you don't know how to be trauma-informed, You can just open someone up and step on the trauma landmine, So to speak. And there've been a number of incidents where I've been working with spiritual practitioners that don't have the scientific background and they are just totally not trauma informed. And it's like, Let's do some breath work. It's like, What if something's triggering? They're like, Do more breath work, Right? Just do more. That's great, But that's not safe. So I like to find the balance between it all.