http://flcompub.org/blog Tue, 08 May 2012 17:56:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/05/a-mothers-love/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-mothers-love http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/05/a-mothers-love/#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 17:56:02 +0000 Robert B. Clark http://flcompub.org/blog/?p=5477
"God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers."                                                             … Continue reading →]]>
"God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers."                                                                                  ----  Jewish Proverb. I like this proverb. Even though I believe that God actually IS everywhere, I think  mothers are the living proof. My own mother was a great example. She really did seem to be everywhere and she pretty much knew everything. We discovered early on that hiding anything from her was impossible. I remember when I had been misbehaving in grade school and I didn't think she knew. That night she sat down on my bed in tears, telling me how disappointed she was and how much she believed in me. After getting over the shock of her knowing about my behavior, I was in utter dismay at how I had made her feel.  Lesson learned. Mom knows everything and the worst feeling in the world is letting her down. She was a Christian Scientist, so that meant that we grew up thinking of God as representing both fathering and mothering qualities. When we needed discipline, it came from both mom and dad. Comfort and tenderness too. When I was a teenager, my father's  secretary one time pulled me aside and said, "Your father is the last of the true gentlemen." It was true. He was a real man and a very gentle one. My parents, together, were a pretty good example of what Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy, meant when she wrote, "Union of the masculine and feminine qualities constitutes completeness." Mothering includes firmness and strength. Fathering includes compassion and tenderness. In a single parent home, one parent can provide all the needed qualities since they are God-derived rather than gender-specific. I think we can celebrate Mother's Day by saluting mothers--and fathers--everywhere, who love their children with the same all-knowing, all-embracing love that best expresses God in our lives. As God, speaking to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, says: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."       

Retweet this post]]> http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/05/a-mothers-love/feed/ 0 http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/05/mental-health-month/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mental-health-month http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/05/mental-health-month/#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 15:34:20 +0000 Robert B. Clark http://flcompub.org/blog/?p=5464 Continue reading →]]> Mental Health Month”; and actually always has been since 1949.  I didn’t know that. It’s a little hard to keep track of which month is which these days since May is also Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, Better Sleep Month, Employee Health and Fitness Month, Healthy Vision Month/UV Safety, National Mental Health Month, National Physical Fitness and Sports Month. Anyway, Mental Health America, founded in 1909, is the country's oldest and largest nonprofit organization addressing all aspects of mental health and mental illness. Their website this month gives some startling statistics, and then some good news. The startling stats: “1 in 4 American adults live with a diagnosable, treatable mental health condition.” The good news: “they can go on to live full and productive lives.” Good news about a national health dilemma is always welcome, but the good news statement begs the question, How do the almost 80 million among us with mental health conditions go on to live full and productive lives? The answer is probably as varied as the individual mental health challenges themselves. The MHA website also offers an interesting resource called the “Do More for 1in4 Toolkit”. A quick scan of the toolkit shows that it breaks down mental health conditions into categories and then offers lots of practical advice. Being a proponent and beneficiary of spiritually based health solutions, I was hoping to find some ideas along those lines in the “toolkit” and was disappointed to come up empty. This is understandable since spirituality is so often thought to be the exclusive domain of religion. And publicly funded health resources tend to shy away from any kind of religious endorsement. Rightfully so. But do you have to sign up for a particular religion to tap into spiritual resources for better health? I don’t think so. In today’s world of readily available online health and spiritual resources, anyone, religious or not, can find spiritual resources for all kinds of health needs. One of my favorites is an award winning iPhone app called “Your Daily Lift” which offers two minutes of daily spiritual inspiration from experienced Christian healers. You don’t have to embrace any particular religion to listen and benefit. Another helpful health app is Healing Words Pro, which offers daily scriptures, testimonies, videos and prayer circles, all for $.99. We are a nation of open-minded seekers; and a lot of the seeking has a spiritual core. According to the Pew Research Center, over 58% of us pray daily, and 80% of internet users look online for health information. Many of those people are finding permanent solutions to mental darkness and disability without drugs or psychiatric treatment. So whatever health month it happens to be, there are always spiritual solutions available.  And although core religious beliefs are immensely helpful for some, myself included, they’re not a requirement. An open-minded and honest search for truth is all it takes to get started.    

Retweet this post]]> http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/05/mental-health-month/feed/ 1 http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/04/a-smarter-world/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-smarter-world http://flcompub.org/blog/2012/04/a-smarter-world/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:01:36 +0000 Robert B. Clark http://flcompub.org/blog/?p=5458 Continue reading →]]> "Can you make yourself smarter?". Great question. What if we could?  I guess we'd have a smarter world. The article goes into some detail about current research that challenges persistent and widely believed myths about human intelligence. For well over 40 years, human intelligence has been assumed to include two types: crystalized intelligence, which is stored up information that can always be increased and expanded, and fluid intelligence, which includes problem solving, reasoning, and learning ability. Fluid intelligence, which is measured by IQ tests, has long been thought to be static, unchanging. It is what it is. You either have it or you don't. Now, research, started in 2008 at the University of Maryland, is revealing that "fluid intelligence" actually is fluid. The human mind can expand and learn to reason better, solve more complex problems, and thus we can become "smarter". Like anything else, it just takes work, practice. This is great news for all of us. The Times article talks about Harold Hawkins, a cognitive psychologist at the Office of Naval Research who oversees most of the U.S. military's studies on human intelligence. He has dramatically shifted funding to further research in this area because he says, "It's potentially of extremely profound importance". When I was in graduate school, I struggled greatly with a required statistics course. I had always battled with mathematics. It was never easy for me and I had just assumed this was an innate disability that I was stuck with. But I had to pass this course to get my degree. I had been studying Christian Science and had come to see limitations as man-made, and freedom as God-given. This helped me spiritualize my self-concept. I dropped my mental limitations and began to think of myself as entirely capable. I re-doubled my efforts in the course. I had to play catch-up and study areas of math I had avoided in my undergraduate work. But I stretched myself mentally, passed the course and got my degree. One of the ideas that spurred me on came from Mary Baker Eddy. She wrote (almost 14o years ago) that, "...business men and cultured scholars have found that Christian Science enhances their endurance and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them acuteness and comprehensiveness and an ability to exceed their ordinary capacity. The human mind, imbued with this spiritual understanding, becomes more elastic, is capable of greater endurance, escapes somewhat from itself, and requires less repose. It raises the thinker into his native air of insight and perspicacity."  Toward the end of his article, Hurley asks an intriguing question: "Might children with A.D.H.D. receive working-memory training rather than stimulant drugs like Ritalin?" Good question! Imagine a world where IQ is elastic rather than static, and where those who struggle with currently short attention spans are not branded as "disabled" but encouraged, and shown how to grow out of that limitation. That would definitely be a smarter world.      

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Deepak Chopra has become a household name. Most people interested in spirituality and health have probably read one of his 65 books, 19 of them York Times best-sellers. Twenty-million copies in 35 languages are hard to miss.  His newest book, published … Continue reading →]]>
Deepak Chopra has become a household name. Most people interested in spirituality and health have probably read one of his 65 books, 19 of them York Times best-sellers. Twenty-million copies in 35 languages are hard to miss.  His newest book, published last month, is Spiritual Solutions: Answers to Life’s Greatest Challenges---compelling reading from a recognized leader in the rapidly merging fields of spirituality and health care. According to Chopra, our greatest challenges fall into four categories: Relationships; Health and Well-Being; Success; Personal Growth. Most of us have challenges in at least one of those categories, if not all of them.  Spiritual Solutions offers some practical answers which don’t require specialists or expensive therapies. And what exactly is a “spiritual solution”? Let’s take a look at the book’s “Health and Well-Being” section for an example. Here Chopra tells us, “Most people define health solely in physical terms, by how good they feel and what they see when they look in the mirror. Medicine relies on drugs and surgery, which reinforces our fixation on the physical.” This is a good example of what Chopra defines as “contracted awareness”. In this state of mind we are absorbed in our problems, stuck inside them and examining them only from that perspective. “Expanded awareness” is our ability to look beyond the problem, let go of its immediate confines, and see infinite possibilities. As an example, Chopra cites “people whose memory has improved with age, others who have gotten stronger by taking up exercise in their eighties or nineties, and still others with organs that function like someone ten, twenty, or even thirty years younger”. Finally Chopra explains “pure awareness” as the level of complete freedom, where “every challenge is a creative opportunity”.  He explains, “What makes this possible is that awareness can expand without limits”. In a previous bestseller from 2009, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, Chopra explains how to break through the limitations of "contracted awareness": • Instead of making do with the physical form you were given at birth, why not look for a breakthrough, a completely new way of approaching the body? • Breakthroughs occur when you start thinking about a problem in a fresh new way. The biggest breakthroughs occur when you start thinking in an unbounded way. Take your eyes away from what you see in the mirror. If allopathic medicine, with its deep dependence on expensive drug and surgery based treatment, were as successful as it should be after several centuries of continuous practice, there would perhaps not be such a growing interest in spiritual solutions to health challenges. But with upward spiraling health care costs, soaring obesity rates and out of control prescription drug use, it does seem like a good time for a change of perspective---solutions from a different source. And this is exactly what Spiritual Solutions: Answers to Life’s Greatest Challenges brings to the table.  I predict it will be Chopra’s New York Times best-seller #20.

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