Numerous studies have shown that people who believe in a God and practice a religion are happier healthier, and more resilient than those who don’t.
So what does this mean for those who don’t believe in God, or have a religion? Religion or even spirituality is a great gift for many people, but not accessible for everyone. Even people who believe in God and/or religion may not be getting everything they need out of it.
I believe we can extract the beneficial essentials of religion, and reproduce them in a form that is accessible to everyone. Doing this can offer more happiness to more people. But what are these essentials? For a full exploration, please refer to my book, Higher Power for Recovering Cynics, which describes “generic spirituality,” as I like to call the sum of those essential elements of religions. I advocate tapping into this source of happiness by finding your own personalized, ways to incorporate the benefits of religion into your life, without necessarily believing in any religion.
Here are ideas about some important parts of religion that can be practiced without any religious context. These are only very short summaries of complex ideas:
1. Gratitude: Generally, the more you can find on a daily basis to feel grateful for, the happier you are. No matter what your circumstances, daily focus on what you are grateful for can be very powerful. It is very hard to do when you are already depressed, but now there are actually studies that show that people who practice gratitude daily are happier than before they practiced gratitude. If you can bear it, and aren’t depressed now, do it as part of a prevention program. Look for every opportunity to acknowledge your gratitude in large and small ways—it can be your secret, but say it to yourself. See if you can find a hundred things in a day to feel grateful for—from your health, to pollinating bees, to people who love you, to having weekends off, to the sun, to…everything that is true for you—everything you have that you would miss if you didn’t have.
2. Feeling connected to all other beings on the earth: This has implications so profound and deep and far-reaching that I can’t do it justice here. Think about this for yourself though. There are theories in science suggesting that anything that happens anywhere can potentially affect everything else on the earth. To make it more immediate, though, have you ever found improbable connections between you and someone else? Like “Six Degrees of Separation,” a movie in which characters found everyone knows everyone else with no more than four people in the chain between them.
Imagine if you are rude to a clerk, and later find out he is the cousin of your boss’s wife. Or you give money to a homeless person, and 10 years later that person has recovered and started a successful business and employs your daughter. These seem farfetched in the abstract, but they happen all the time.
How would it change your life if you treated everyone as if they were your long lost brother? What if every being on earth is connected in ways we don’t understand. What if we all treated all other beings as if they were parts of our own bodies? I just wonder if this is an essential understanding we’ve strayed from, but that would make us all happier if we returned to it. It’s worth experimenting with it.
3. Compassion. Compassion is probably the most important resource we have after air, water and food. If we can feel compassion for ourselves and for others, we have no basis for war, violence, self-esteem issues, child abuse, and most of the relationship and emotional ills of our world. It is worth learning and practicing like a language. If everyone had this one resource, I'd joyfully be out of a job!
4. Valuing life’s lessons: Even painful ones. This gives life meaning, and hope. Practice looking for something to learn from each experience you have.
5. Living by our own values: Whenever we do something that opposes our own values, we take a toll in guilt and disappointment in ourselves. The more we are clear about what we value and live by our own values, the better we feel about ourselves. When we see ourselves acting as what we believe is a good person, we are less likely to be depressed. For most people, this will include actions like: generosity and kindness; helping and not hurting other people. We are happier when we like how we choose to behave.
6. Humility: Humility offers relief from expectations of us that are greater than what we can meet. It gives us perspective on ourselves as human beings. It helps us hold the reality that we will fail and make mistakes on a daily basis, just like every other human being who ever lived. It reminds us that in the context of all of time, and all of space, we are a microscopic flash of a dot, and so are the problems that plague us. It makes life simpler, and easier, because a realistic assessment of our power tells us to keep our expectations simple.
People often confuse humility with humiliation. They are related, but very, very different. Humiliation causes people to feel shame and exposed—it’s very painful, and probably has no value. Humiliation is something to avoid; humility is something to cultivate. Humiliation tells us we are bad and everyone knows it. Humility tells us we are wonderful, and also have limitations, and so is true for everyone else.
7. Meditation: I believe this is a concept that has to be very adaptable to our lives and personal needs. It doesn’t have to be somebody’s rigid idea that everyone has to conform to. It can be focusing on the rhythm of your breath, of your heart, or of your feet as you walk or jog. It can be saying the same word over and over.
When I was 12 years old, I had frequent panic attacks. I found that if I wrote the word “relax” on a paper and wrote over and over and over the word with my pen, while reading the word each time, it helped the panic attack pass. Repeating the same word or words over and over has been called a mantra, or a chant, and my discovery was not technically either, but many people have found this type of meditation to be helpful. My favorite meditation is picking cherries out of a bin. I focus only on picking the cherries that are dark and firm, one after another.
Anything that is a single, simple focus for your mind can be a meditation. You can be moving, chanting, or shopping—you don’t have to sit still for 45 minutes, something many of us can’t and/or don’t want to do. Of course if you can and want to sit still for 45 minutes, or all day, and that works for you, by all means use that as your meditation.
8. Relationship with Higher Power. I believe this also has to be a very flexible concept, so the non-religious can get the benefit from it. All of us have to admit there are powers great than us. Even the weather is more powerful than we are. If you put together any group of people, they are generally going to be more powerful than any one of us. There are even parts of us inside that are more powerful than we think we are—inner wisdom that guides us when we are otherwise at a loss for what to do, inner critics and compulsive behaviors we don't want but can't stop, and inner talents that allow us to do or create something even we look at later and wonder how we'd done it!
We do not need to believe in any form of God to see that the complex web of elements that create what happens to us is beyond our control. We may call it fate, or God’s will, or destiny, or synchronicity, or karma, or chance or whatever, and we may or may not ascribe any meaning to what happens to us, but the power of the collective occurrence of events is beyond our power. Whether events are random, the logical outcome of other events, or intelligently pre-determined in some way, we have to acknowledge this lack of control in our lives. Though we certainly affect what happens to us, we ultimately can’t control or predict much it. Even if we do everything we can to create the outcome we want, there may still be elements that will ultimately determine the outcome. So, even if the events that transpire are random, they collectively have power beyond ours, because we cannot master them.
Interestingly, what happens to us is almost always a mix of good things and bad. Good and bad fortune seems unjustly distributed, but we all have some of both. Good and bad fortune is a little like weather. When it's bad, it will inevitable at some point be good again. We don't know when, how much, or for how long, and we can't change it, but good fortune, and bad fortune are inevitable. If you let yourself, even momentarily, rest in the faith that some good is coming, and that good may come even of what at first seems bad, or be mixed in with the bad, then you will find more peace, and more well-being in your life.
There are many powers greater than each of us; find your own version, and use it for comfort, guidance, and peace.
9. Consciousness: When we take an active role in our lives, rather than be a victim of what we are unaware of inside ourselves, we have much more power in the choices we make. It is worthwhile to explore the deep recesses of our thoughts, feelings, needs, motivations, behavior. It allows us a freedom we can’t access if we’re not aware of much of our inner selves.
10. Hope/Faith: These are difficult concepts to describe, much less create. I think people who can have these are able to recognize that there is no rational reason to believe either that everything will be a disaster or that everything will be okay, so choose to believe everything will be okay. This doesn’t mean everything will happen the way we want, but that we will be able to handle, have gratitude for and learn from whatever happens.
11. Perspective: Everything is better with perspective. The pain we feel as human beings focuses us on ourselves in the moment, or our near future or near past, and leaves out awareness of the magnitude of time and space. When we remember that our whole lifetimes are microscopic points on an infinite timeline, and our physical presence is a microscopic speck in all of the universes and beyond that exist, our problems seem very small. Perspective can be cultivated in many ways, which I discuss in Higher Power for Recovering Cynics.
12. Letting Go: Not holding on emotionally or physically to something that is damaging or hurting us (whether it be an object, a person, a thought, or a feeling) is very important and very difficult for many of us to do. Letting go requires trust, faith and hope that we will be okay, even if we let go. It requires getting past the fear of losing something, of needing something that is unavailable, of the comfort of obsessing (repeating a thought over and over), and the comfort of compulsions (repeating a behavior over and over, often despite the destruction it causes). I have a favorite visualization exercise that I practice to re-connect me with my ability to let go. However you access this ability, it is enormously useful and life-giving.
13. Miracles: Define miracles to include events that are unexpected, delightful, and fairly uncommon. By this definition, you can be celebrating miracles often, giving you joy and hope and gratitude--three important aspects of happiness. Celebrate the miracle of getting a parking place right in front of your destination in a city. Celebrate the miracle of your children doing their chores without being reminded. You get the idea.
14. Believing: It appears to me that believing in something that feels comforting is a large part of the benefit of believing in God. I hypothesize that somehow the act of believing stimulates our brains in some positive way. If you believe in God and a religion, great. If you don’t believe in God or religion, or even anything spiritual, and you are vulnerable to depression, look for something else to believe in. I think it can be political ideals; it can be heroes; it can be a vision for the future; it can be the healing power of love, or the healing power of science; it can be a personal moral code; it can be many things. But if your point of view is purely cynical—that only fools believe in anything or anyone--then you will be more vulnerable to depression.
15. Daily practice: Having structure and/or grounding, comforting rituals incorporated into one’s life is very important for some people’s well-being. These can be anything, like stopping for 30 seconds at your favorite plant every day, and feeling the full quantity of pleasure it can give you. It can be kissing your child, or petting your cat, eating with your family and finding out about their days. It can be giving money to a homeless person, or anything that reinforces the generic spiritual aspects of your life. It can also have more traditional elements, like candles, alters, meditation, stories, dialogue with your inner wisdom, etc. Daily practice works best with all your senses open to the experience to let it in fully.
