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The COSA Newsletter
CONTENTS
UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
A Message from the President of Spiritual Awakening Spiritualist Center
Dear Members and Friends, The 1st of July sees us starting the second half of 2024. Where does the time go? Summer is well under way with the promise of even higher temperatures to come, especially for those of us living in Florida. In this month's newsletter we have some really interesting articles as well as our featured article from Rev. Al Potts from Bournemouth, U.K. There will be a 'Mediumship Development Workshop' on Saturday, July 13th from 10:30am to 12:30pm, and all are welcome! This month we celebrate Independence Day on July 4th. As Spiritualists there is no better time to stop for a moment and reevaluate our individual core and fundamental values. As we seek a happier and more meaningful existence, spiritual values are the solution. These fundamental beliefs guide our lives and facilitate our personal development. Our spiritual values are potent forces that can enrich our lives, clarify our decisions, and modify our viewpoints. Spiritual values provide individuals with a sense of meaning and purpose in life. They help us understand our place in the universe and guide our actions. They emphasize the importance of compassion and empathy towards others. They encourage us to treat everyone with kindness, understanding, and respect. Spiritual values teach us the power of forgiveness and acceptance. They remind us to let go of grudges, embrace forgiveness, and accept ourselves and others as imperfect beings. Spiritual values guide individuals toward finding inner peace and harmony amidst the chaos of daily life. They promote meditation, prayer, or mindfulness to achieve mental clarity. Spiritual values recognize the existence of something greater than ourselves beyond the material world. They inspire us to reach beyond our limitations, seek answers to existential questions, and experience transcendence. I wish you and your loved ones a blessed and enjoyable 4th of July. Looking forward to seeing you soon! Blessings, Love and Light. Michael thechurchofspiritualawakening@msn.com
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Happy Birthday Wishes to Members: William Bouch on the 9th. Harry Bouch on the 14th. A Very Happy July Birthday to you! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ If you feel that you would like to become a member of our Spiritual Awakening Family and have been a regular for a while. Please click on the Membership link below for more information. Thank You!
GUIDED MEDITATION Please click link below or picture to watch and hear Meditation:
LET GO of Anxiety, Fear & Worries: Harmony, Inner Peace & Emotional Healing Run Time 22:21 A guided meditation: LET GO of anxiety, fear, and worries, and open up to Harmony, Inner Peace, and Healing. Does worrying drain your energy and take away your ability to be present and truly enjoy life? Do you want to stop the fear, stress, or anxiety that can build up from negative thinking? Imagine letting go of 50% of your worries and fears? How good would you feel? Imagine letting go of 80% of them? What would you appreciate the most about that kind of freedom? Allow yourself to LET GO in a safe and natural way - Heal and Transform energy that does not serve you anymore. Like a tree in autumn lets go of the leaves naturally, effortlessly, and inevitably...
VOICES FROM THE PAST SPIRITUALISM: YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW
SPIRITUALISM AND SPIRITUALISTS - What we Believe: Featured Article Contributed by Rev. Al Potts. FINDING BLESSINGS FROM TRAGEDY
Rev. Al Potts.
THE TEACHINGS OF SILVER BIRCH
FOOD FOR THOUGHT  Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life By Arthur C. Brooks In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the onetime associate of Sigmund Freud who died more than 60 years ago. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Those are his coinages, too. Persona, archetype, synchronicity: Jung, Jung, Jung.
Carl Jung: Click Here or Picture Above To Watch Short Video When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.” Clearly, this observation should not discourage any serious student of happiness. On the contrary, Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions, which in fact arose to alert us to threats and keep us safe. Rather, the objective should be progress—or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, my co-author on our recent book, Build the Life You Want, “happierness.” If Jung was a happiness skeptic in some sense, however, he was by no means a denialist. In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goal of progress. Refined with the aid of modern social science, Jung’s precepts might be just what you’re looking for in your life Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars. 1. Good physical and mental health. Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supported by plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness—the Harvard Study of Adult Development—has shownthat four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being are not smoking excessively, drinking alcohol moderately if at all, maintaining a healthy body weight, and exercising. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Indeed, one study from 2013 showed that poor mental health among Britons, Germans, and Australians predicted nearly two to roughly six times as much misery as poor physical health did. This raises what might seem like a nitpick with Jung’s contention: Good health practices seem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchers have uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positive emotions appear to beseparable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels. I have found in my own work that this helps explain why people with naturally low levels of negative emotion tend to struggle with staying on a regular exercise regimen: They may feel less benefit to their well-being from going to the gym than people naturally higher in negative feelings do. 2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships. The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivating them will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best life investments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the others are in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work; more on these in a moment). And as for marriage, an institution that has taken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars that being wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be, as the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox has argued. This research seemed so conclusive to Wilcox that he titled his recent book, simply, Get Married. Jung himself was married to his wife, Emma, for 52 years, until her death at the age of 73. The Harvard Study of Adult Development comes to one conclusion more definitively than any other. In the words of my Harvard colleague Robert Waldinger, who has directed the project for nearly two decades, and his co-author, Marc Schulz, “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” Waldinger’s predecessor running the study, George Vaillant, was just as unequivocal about the evidence: “Happiness is love. Full stop.” 3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature. Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things and experiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated. Long before I focused my scholarly life on happiness, I was dedicated to art and beauty. My earliest memories are of painting with my artist mother; I learned to read music before written language; I made my living as a classical musician from ages 19 to 31. News flash: Artists are generally not the world’s most blissfully satisfied people. In a 1992 study from Britain, researchers found that performing artists reported depression at higher rates than the control group. At some point, I will write a book not on the art of happinessbut on the very troublesome happiness of art. Among nonartists, however, the issue is somewhat simpler and in line with Jung’s thinking. First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagement with nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, with aesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments haveshown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen to sad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder. 4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work. As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminating unhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown that unemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people, both men and women, are unemployed. This cannot be explained simply by the lack of material and social resources that typically accompanies joblessness; rather, work itself helps protect mental health. But if we can upgrade “satisfactory work” in Jung’s list to “meaningful work,” then positive gains in happiness do come into play. The two elements that make work meaningful for most people are earned success (a sense of accomplishing something valuable) and service to others. These can be achieved in almost any job. The relationship between money and happiness is a hotly contested topic; older studies show that well-being tops out at relatively low income levels, but more recent studies show that such contentment continues to rise for much higher incomes. My own assessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending money to acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with loved ones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhance happiness. 5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience. Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the tedious quotidian travails of life, and put events—including inevitable suffering—into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, as his own words published many years ago in The Atlantic make clear: “For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.” He did not insist that his spiritual path was the only one—“I do not imagine that in my reflections,” he wrote, “I have uttered a final truth”—and allowed that even a nonreligious, purely philosophical attitude could do. But everyone, he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose. Research clearly backs up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of finding meaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith and spiritual practice seem protective against depression. Secular philosophies can provide this benefit as well. Recent papers on Stoicism, for example, have demonstrated that this ancient way of thinking and acting can yield well-being benefits. Many books have been written on the subject, including the psychotherapist Donald Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary: 1. Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness. 2. Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physical and mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income. 3. If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness at work comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment and service to others. 4. Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember that happiness is love. 5. If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with family and friends. 6. Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art and music that nourish your spirit. 7. Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps you comprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence. Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have the evidence of its effectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which was to be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life, had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied that he had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds pretty good to me.
THE FUNNY CORNER
SIMPLY DELICIOUS
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Pineapple Upside-Down Cake | Betty Crocker Recipe AND FINALLY Thank you for reading the July 2024 COSA Newsletter, we hope you enjoyed it and found the articles and videos interesting. Further details of services and events listed in this newsletter, together with suggested love donation and Zoom log-in details, will be emailed directly to you prior to the event dates. Love and light Tanya and Michael |
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The
Wisdom of Silver Birch
