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5 Ways Your Spiritual Life Can Affect Your Success

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5 Ways Your Spiritual Life Can Affect Your Success

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Does your spirituality have an impact on your success? I would argue that the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Spirituality is something that impacts your entire life, work included. Here are 5 ways, both good and bad, that your spiritual life can affect your success.

  1. Increased Positive Energy Can Improve Your Relationships With People

People who are more spiritually in tuned tend to have more highly developed empathy skills. This may mean that you are better able to read people, and better able to relate them in ways that makes them feel valued, respected, and heard.

In a practical sense, this can increase your ability to make sales, and convince people to be loyal customers. However, this isn’t the only benefit. Your people skills can also contribute to better morale among the people you work with. 

  1. Karma And Desire For Overall Good Impacts Your Decisions

As with anybody else, you want to be successful. However, as a spiritual person, there is more driving the decisions that you make than a desire for success. Your desire to stay on your spiritual path will often have a major impact on the decisions that you make.

For example, if you are faced with making difficult budget decisions, you may know what the best thing to do is, in a practical sense. On the other hand, your spirituality may cause you to step back and think about the situation in terms of karma and contributing to the greater good.

This may cause you to make decisions that are viewed as wrong by those who aren’t on your path. However, you may find that giving your spirituality a role in your decision making process works out better than you expect.

  1. Meditation And Prayer Can Help You Deal More Effectively With Conflict

The more you pray and meditate, the more centered and at peace you are with yourself. This inner peace can make you better able to deal with conflict in the workplace.

The reasons that workplace conflict often becomes so problematic is that the people involved tend to see the conflict only from their point of view; they often become territorial and they take things personally. Your inner peace may help you to avoid these patterns. 

  1. You May be Driven to Adhere to Rules That Change Your Path to Success

One of the interesting things about being a spiritual person is that you may not be able to, in good conscience, follow the easiest route to success. To put it simply, there may be things that you are not willing to do that may impede your path. Fortunately, this rarely means that you cannot be successful.

Sometimes, your path may be altered because there are things that you cannot allow yourself to do for moral reasons. It may also be that you choose to dedicate more time to spiritual pursuits than others. If this is true, you may also have to accept that your spiritual commitment may slow your career growth.

  1. Your Lifestyle May Not be Compatible With Your Coworkers or Employees

If you work with people who are not spiritual, or who do not subscribe to your particular form of spirituality, you may have trouble finding points of compatibility. This can be a struggle for you, because much of the relationship building and loyalties that are important in the workplace actually happen after hours.

Your spirituality may impact your lifestyle in a variety of ways. For example, you may avoid certain foods, refrain from certain activities, or simply live a life that is starkly different from the people you work with. This can cause a variety of problems, including:

  • Giving the false impression that you think you are better than others
  • Missing out on opportunities to bond
  • Not having shared hobbies or experiences in common
  • Having to deal with the assumption that you have no desire to relate to others

Fortunately, much of this can be mitigated if you find other ways to reach out to the people around you to let them know you are interested in creating positive bonds.

Harvard neuroscientist: Meditation not only reduces stress, here’s how it changes your brain

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Harvard neuroscientist: Meditation not only reduces stress, here’s how it changes your brain

By Brigid Schulte May 26, 2015
Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found surprised her — that meditating can literally change your brain. She explains:Q: Why did you start looking at meditation and mindfulness and the brain?

Lazar: A friend and I were training for the Boston marathon. I had some running injuries, so I saw a physical therapist who told me to stop running and just stretch. So I started practicing yoga as a form of physical therapy. I started realizing that it was very powerful, that it had some real benefits, so I just got interested in how it worked.

 The yoga teacher made all sorts of claims, that yoga would increase your compassion and open your heart. And I’d think, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m here to stretch.’ But I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others’ points of view.

I thought, maybe it was just the placebo response. But then I did a literature search of the science, and saw evidence that meditation had been associated with decreased stress, decreased depression, anxiety, pain and insomnia, and an increased quality of life.

At that point, I was doing my PhD in molecular biology. So I just switched and started doing this research as a post-doc.

Q: How did you do the research?

Lazar: The first study looked at long term meditators vs a control group. We found long-term meditators have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex. Which makes sense. When you’re mindful, you’re paying attention to your breathing, to sounds, to the present moment experience, and shutting cognition down. It stands to reason your senses would be enhanced.

We also found they had more gray matter in the frontal cortex, which is associated with working memory and executive decision making.

[Related: You’re missing out on your experiences: A meditation expert explains how to live in the moment]

It’s well-documented that our cortex shrinks as we get older – it’s harder to figure things out and remember things. But in this one region of the prefrontal cortex, 50-year-old meditators had the same amount of gray matter as 25-year-olds.

So the first question was, well, maybe the people with more gray matter in the study had more gray matter before they started meditating. So we did a second study.

We took people who’d never meditated before, and put one group through an eight-week  mindfulness- based stress reduction program.

Sara Lazar on how meditation affects the brain

In this excerpt from the documentary “The Connection,” which tells the stories of people adding mind-body medicine to their healing practices, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar talks about the connection between the mind and body during meditation. (The Connection)

Q: What did you find?

Lazar: We found differences in brain volume after eight weeks in five different regions in the brains of the two groups. In the group that learned meditation, we found thickening in four regions:

1. The primary difference, we found in the posterior cingulate, which is involved in mind wandering, and self relevance.

2. The left hippocampus, which assists in learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation.

3.  The temporo parietal junction, or TPJ, which is associated with perspective taking, empathy and compassion.

4. An area of the brain stem called the Pons, where a lot of regulatory neurotransmitters are produced.

The amygdala, the fight or flight part of the brain which is important for anxiety, fear and stress in general. That area got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program.

The change in the amygdala was also correlated to a reduction in stress levels.

[Related: Science shows that stress has an upside. Here’s how to make it work for you]

Q: So how long does someone have to meditate before they begin to see changes in their brain?

Lazar: Our data shows changes in the brain after just eight weeks.

In a mindfulness-based stress reduction program, our subjects took a weekly class. They were given a recording and told to practice 40 minutes a day at home. And that’s it.

Q: So, 40 minutes a day?

Lazar: Well, it was highly variable in the study. Some people practiced 40 minutes pretty much every day. Some people practiced less. Some only a couple times a week.

In my study, the average was 27 minutes a day. Or about a half hour a day.

There isn’t good data yet about how much someone needs to practice in order to benefit.

Meditation teachers will tell you, though there’s absolutely no scientific basis to this, but anecdotal comments from students suggest that 10 minutes a day could have some subjective benefit. We need to test it out.

We’re just starting a study that will hopefully allow us to assess what the functional significance of these changes are. Studies by other scientists have shown that meditation can help enhance attention and emotion regulation skills. But most were not neuroimaging studies. So now we’re hoping to bring that behavioral and neuroimaging science together.

Q: Given what we know from the science, what would you encourage readers to do?

Lazar: Mindfulness is just like exercise. It’s a form of mental exercise, really. And just as exercise increases health, helps us handle stress better and promotes longevity, meditation purports to confer some of those same benefits.

But, just like exercise, it can’t cure everything. So the idea is, it’s useful as an adjunct therapy. It’s not a standalone. It’s been tried with many, many other disorders, and the results vary tremendously – it impacts some symptoms, but not all. The results are sometimes modest. And it doesn’t work for everybody.

It’s still early days for trying to figure out what it can or can’t do.

Q: So, knowing the limitations, what would you suggest?

Lazar: It does seem to be beneficial for most people. The most important thing, if you’re going to try it, is to find a good teacher. Because it’s simple, but it’s also complex. You have to understand what’s going on in your mind. A good teacher is priceless

Q: Do you meditate? And do you have a teacher?

Lazar: Yes and yes.

Q: What difference has it made in your life?

Lazar: I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, so it’s had a very profound influence on my life. It’s very grounding. It’s reduced stress. It helps me think more clearly. It’s great for interpersonal interactions. I have more empathy and compassion for people.

Q: What’s your own practice?

Lazar: Highly variable. Some days 40 minutes. Some days five minutes. Some days, not at all. It’s a lot like exercise. Exercising three times a week is great. But if all you can do is just a little bit every day, that’s a good thing, too. I’m sure if I practiced more, I’d benefit more. I have no idea if I’m getting brain changes or not. It’s just that this is what works for me right now.

To find out more, Sara Lazar has put together lists of Frequently Asked Questions and how to find a good teacher. Click here.

It Works: New Study Outlines What Meditation, Yoga, & Prayer Can Do To The Human Body

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The medicinal benefits of meditation and yoga are now firmly established in scientific literature. One of the latest studies to emerge on the matter comes from Harvard researchers working at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). They determined that meditation literally rebuilds the brain’s grey matter in just eight weeks. It’s the very first study to document that meditation produces changes over time in the brain’s grey matter. (1)

Another promising study has recently come out of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). These researchers conducted the very first study where the use of the “relaxation response”was examined in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), and the first to investigate the genomic effects of the relaxation response in individuals with any disorder. The report was published in the journal PLOS-ONE. (source)

When it comes to ‘prayer’ or ‘distant healing’ — directing human attention on physical systems — significant results have been obtained that warrant further investigation. For a selected list of downloadable peer-reviewed journal articles reporting studies of psychic phenomena, mostly published in the 21st century, you can click HERE.

Scientists over at the HeartMath Institute have demonstrated that when a person is feeling really good, and is full of positive emotions like love, gratitude, and appreciation, their heart beats out a different message that’s encoded in its electromagnetic field, which in turn has positive health effects on their body overall. You can read more about that here.

Factors associated with human consciousness (thoughts, feelings, emotions, perception, intention) have long been studied to see how they affect and interact with our physical world. You can read more about that here.

The Power Of Meditation, Yoga, & Prayer on Human Health

Meditation, yoga, and prayer are all grouped into a category (in medical terms) called ‘relaxation-response techniques.’ These techniques have been subject to several studies which clearly show that regular practice directly affects physiologic factors such as heart rate, blood pressure, stress, anxiety, oxygen consumption, and more. It was first described over 40 years ago by Herbert Benson, Director Emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute and co-author of the paper presented in this article.

The new study, out of the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, from the Institute for Technology Assessment and the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) for Mind Body Medicine, found that people participating in the ‘relaxation-response program’ actually used fewer health care services in the year after their participation, compared to how many they used the previous year.

The Harvard gazette reports that relaxation response techniques, such as meditation, yoga, and prayer, could reduce the need for health care services by 43 percent.

“Our study’s primary finding is that programs that train patients to elicit the relaxation response — specifically those taught at the BHI — can also dramatically reduce health care utilization. . . . These programs promote wellness and, in our environment of constrained health care resources, could potentially ease the burden on our health delivery systems at minimal cost and at no real risk.” – James E. Stahl, lead author of the study

The study was published last Tuesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

So, how did the research team analyze the impact of mind-body interventions on modern day medical techniques? They gathered data on people who have been participating in the BHI Relaxation Response Resiliency Program for the past eight years. After analyzing more than four thousands participants, and comparing it with a control group of almost fourteen thousand (while also taking other factors into consideration — read the study for more), the participants engaging in the relationship program displayed an average reduction of 43 percent when it came to using their regular health care services over the year after their participation in the project.

“I think of it this way: There are many gates to wellness, but not everyone is ready to walk through a particular gate at a given time. From a public health perspective, it is better to be prepared to offer these tools to people in their customary settings than to wait for them to seek out these interventions. For that reason, we feel that mind-body interventions — which are both low-cost and essentially risk-free — should perhaps be incorporated into regular preventive care.” – Herbert Benson, founder and director emeritus of the BHI and co-author of this current study

Meditation/Yoga Prayer Techniques

Personally, I believe a common misconception about meditation is that it must be done in a special way, or you must sit in a certain position. All you have to do is place yourself in a position that is most comfortable for you and focus on your breath, in and out. It’s not about trying to empty your mind, it’s about more so about developing a “non-judgemental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind” (source). Let your thoughts and feelings come and go, then return your focus to your breathe. Telling yourself not to think will only produce the opposite effect, but you can work on choosing how to feel and respond to those thoughts. Meditation can be similar to state of mind, in that some might have the ability to produce the same brainwave frequencies that are commonly seen in meditators without actually meditating. On the other hand, there are many devout students of meditation who spend hours of their time each day devoted to this ancient practice.

If you are someone who doesn’t have much experience with meditation and would like to try it, you can check out some of our articles on the topic that offer some advice/tips on meditation, as well as find some guided meditations here.

As far as yoga goes, here is a 20 minute yoga class for complete beginners, and here is a list of articles we’ve written that provide more instruction and information about yoga.

MIRACLES OCCUR NATURALLY AS EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE

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A Great Message from…

Marianne Williamson 11/15/2015

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. Their effects are maximal. They work within a quantum realm beyond the normal confines of time and space. They affect situations the rational mind cannot comprehend, affecting situations we will never know about. They represent a divine intercession from a thought system beyond our own, carrying with them the power to dissolve and dismantle that which is not love.

As I watched news of the events in Paris, I began to cry. I realized that while in the state of my despair, completely powerless before my tears, my heart felt softened and expanded somehow. I remembered the line “that every problem comes bearing its own solution.” Our global cry fest is leading us somewhere. It’s opening us up to who we need to be now.

How many of us have been fortunate enough to fall in love in Paris, and now it’s inviting us to fall in love again. It took the hit that would pierce all our hearts, so all of us would remember that love is all there is. In that remembrance lies our power to work miracles, and those miracles will save the world.

Read more from Marianne Williamson