Introduction
I subscribe to the newsletter from the Global Leadership Foundation. It has a very simple objective – to raise “the emotional health levels of people on the planet.” It seeks to do so by inspiring and supporting “leaders to better understand themselves and their impact on others.”
The last newsletter discussed the awful word ‘permacrisis’ and I was instantly reminded of remarks made by an astrologer about this time last year when asked for advice for his audience concerning 2025 and the next 5-6 years. He said, “Don’t hold onto anything too tight.”
But are things really that bad? You really have to go back in human history a long time before you come across a time when the world was crisis free. Our sense of permacrisis and drama is really a ‘first world’ disruption of comfort zones and aspirations. Yes. Change momentum is intensifying and there is no let up on the horizon.
Our emotional wellbeing is something we must take charge of. But what’s this got to do with spirituality? A lot.
Can I link emotional health and spirituality?
One of the things that has fascinated me is the way religion has been divided into a discipline of self-awareness and a body of self-serving beliefs, the latter dominating our conception. Rather than knowledge, faith and belief are championed. Paths of self-awareness aren’t fostered in Christianity, or in the civilization it has engendered.
Contemporary psychology and paths of spiritual self-awareness converge on multiple points. The human spirit has long been understood to be our drive for life in obedience to our better natures. We can debate our conceptions of the ‘science’ underpinning this – but can we agree that emotional wellbeing and self-awareness are companion states of awareness.
The teachings of the Buddha and Jesus are about self-awareness in that deep sense of knowing who you ‘really are’. It is interesting that in so many traditional cultures self-knowledge is understood as necessary to become an effective member of one’s community.
We are more about social status these days – our sense of identity and standing. This seems like a legacy of a culture shaped by the religious, political and economic energies of social control.
Self-awareness pops up periodically – often driven by inspiration from random sources – but never in any systematic manner. I have been fascinated by the way that self-awareness has been growing as a theme in organisational leadership – but as an option rather than a requirement. We still hire and promote psychopathic individuals, and we still celebrate narcissists.
In short, the legacy of our religion is that we esteem gaudy priests over ‘good people’. That tension has been around at least since the emergence of Buddhism. That legacy has severed the connection between being self-aware and emotionally health and being ‘good’ in the social sense – obedient and conforming rather than virtuous.
Its time to heal that disconnection.
Restoring our understanding of who we are
Another legacy of our religious culture has been a distortion of our sense of identity. Between Christianity and materialism – two dark twins – our sense of who and what we are has been devastated. Now, between evolving sound science and the restoration of our sense of our spiritual nature, we are allowing our sense of who we are to reform.
But this is an evolving business driven by intuition as well as rational inquiry and experience. It is a collaborative rather than competitive endeavour motivated by goodwill rather than pride.
For the last close on 15 years there have been voices raised in concern over our collective emotional health. There certainly seems to be a problem that has arisen as a consequence of how we are living – about which too few people feel they have any effective control.
It is unlikely that restoring a sense of who we really are will readily arise amidst our various crises of identity, meaning and purpose. We must be prepared to take personal responsibility for our own emotional wellbeing. We can see this present situation as a ‘permacrisis’ only if we remain uncertain about what our vital needs are and our right to meet them.
Conclusion
The Global Leadership Foundation is only one of many bodies intent on doing real good. Its method is uncomplicated. It says nothing about spirituality at all. I am making the point that it is a spiritual enterprise precisely because it seeks to restore and maintain good spirits in individuals and groups or organisations.
Spirituality isn’t about metaphysics or theology but about how we live regardless of who believes what. It is about what we experience in every aspect of our lives. We can discover who we really are when we are free from influences that try to make us servants of other people’s religious, political and economic ambitions.
Some will say that spirituality cannot be ‘secular’. They will say secular means “Worldly rather than spiritual”. To me ‘secular’ should better mean, ‘not disconnected from the reality that we are in the world’. We have a spirit that must be free to interpret what being in this world means to us.
Secular spirituality is really the only kind we can freely have. This means that being self-aware and emotionally healthy should be of great value to us.
If we are moving toward greater self-determination, it will not be without confusion as we struggle to make sense of what is going, and resistance from those who see self-determination as an impediment to their ambitions.