Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category
Choosing Life Leave a comment
For some of us it’s a big jump to conceptualize that changes we want to make don’t start “out there” but in our own thought. This is clear to me as I listen to my diverse range of friends, many of them of retiree age, over catch-up coffees and lunches.Prayer for the Neighbour’s Dogs Brings a Harmonious Solution Leave a comment
About three years ago a young mum moved into the house next door to us. She had a couple of children, a cat and a dog. Soon her friend moved in too and he brought with him a tiny pup. These were both outside dogs but they had provided no shelter for them. They lived largely without human interaction in the bare backyard and it was the middle of a fierce and wet Canberra winter. In the mornings this tiny short-haired puppy could be seen sleeping curled and shivering in the long frosty grass. During the blustery winter days he cried and cried. When it rained he tried to stand under the larger dog for shelter and together they looked soaked and miserable.
I found this very difficult to witness day after day and I became incensed with indignation.
I succumbed to the error of believing that evil existed – in the form of my neighbours and that there were places where Love – another name for God – did not exist. If I believed that the neighbours were cruel and unloving then I was believing that God wasn’t all. I had to choose which idea I believed.
But, I didn’t want to let go of that indignation – I found it very difficult. But Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, tells us in her textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:
Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good (p393).
It was Spirit, God, who gave me the strength to resist this faulty thinking. I knew that there was no place where God was not. The Bible tells us that man is made in the image and likeness of God … of Love. The real man could not be unloving. So I held to this truth about man and acknowledged God’s love for all His creation. This dissolved the indignation. Within a day of this turn around in thinking the dogs were being invited inside and for the rest of the winter they were given shelter and companionship.
I have learned never to underestimate the power of practical applied scientific prayer!
This post was submitted by Deborah Packer of Canberra, Australia.
Who Am I Really? Leave a comment
Who Am I Really – Readings from the Bible and the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.
Every Wednesday at 6.15 pm a Testimony Meeting is held at the Christian Science Church in Canberra. Each meeting begins with readings selected from the two books designated as the Pastor of Christian Science: The Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. A new topic for the readings is selected each week.
At the conclusion of the short readings the congregation is invited to share thoughts on this topic and relate how they have used the principles of Christian Science to solve life’s problems and bring physical healing.
If you are in Canberra on any Wednesday please join us. Everyone is welcome.
This recording represents the readings on the topic: Who Am I Really?
Make a Game-Changing New Year’s Resolution Leave a comment
While some of us are still dealing with the influx of visitors, festivities and sun-soaked holidays, in the back of our minds is the niggling thought that 2015 has already begun and now is the time to make our New Year’s resolutions, before it’s too late.
Some are choosing to eat healthier and exercise more. That certainly can make us feel better.
Two other resolutions that go hand-in-hand will not only increase your health but be game-changers in your life: always opt for the positive viewpoint over the negative and choose to be kinder to others.
A friend related how his acquaintance was in hospital recently, suffering from a life-threatening illness.
Things were looking pretty grim and it seemed that he was hanging on by a thread. Then his heart stopped and he ceased breathing.
At that moment, the medical staff on duty in that area of the hospital noticed that he was passing on and began to congregate around his bed …. not rushing to him with defibrillator or drip, but unexpectedly telling jokes, laughing and talking loudly and animatedly about everyday things.
They continued by his bedside including everyone in the ward in the jovial conversation until he began to regain consciousness. The man made a full recovery.
What happened? Did the nurses and doctors know that their confident and caring presence was more effective than apparatus or medication? Yes.
Something similar is at play when a teacher disregards the negative ‘label’ attached to the child and responds with love and recognition of that child’s higher nature and abilities, bringing a turnaround in attitude at school.
Or when a brick wall tumbles down between two people who haven’t spoken to each other for years as one reaches out with forgiveness.
The reasons for such changes for the better spring from (1) choosing a positive, solution-based approach, and (2) trusting our instinct to be warm and caring, despite a temptation to take an impersonal, defeatist or hard-line approach.
Lissa Rankin MD, sought-after TEDx presenter and one of the keynote speakers at the Byron Bay Uplift Festival a few weeks ago, urges us to strip back everything that isn’t really us that we’ve learned in the world of hard knocks, to find that inner pilot light or divine spark of love within.
Research results from studies on cancer recovery and remission support her claim to the beneficial effects of this practice.
Rankin also cites conclusive evidence that an essential part of any successful treatment is engaging a health practitioner who is reassuring, gentle and kind, and treats patients with compassion.
Did Jesus mean in his well-known parable, that the warmth and care that the Good Samaritan showed had as much to do with the traveller’s recovery (who was robbed and beaten by thieves) as the bandages, oil and wine provided?
Mary Baker Eddy believed so and based her scientific, healing method on this premise. An important researcher into how consciousness affects health, she discovered in her investigations and successful treatments through prayer that…
“Whatever holds human thought in line with unselfed love, receives directly the divine power” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures)
Forgetting ourselves and putting others first really FEELS divine and invariably makes us glow with happiness.
I hope your 2015 takes wings. Seems it’s sure to do so if you choose to take this two-pronged approach to a happier, healthier year ahead – adopting a positive, solution-based viewpoint, and actively and warmly caring for yourself and others.
This article by Kay Stroud was published on 32 APN news sites, including these dailies: Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, Sunshine Coast Daily, Bundaberg News Mail, Tweed Daily News, Toowoomba Chronicle, Mackay Daily Mercury, Fraser Coast Chronicle, Coffs Coast Advocate, Clarence Valley Examiner, Lismore Northern Star, Gladstone Observer, Gympie Times, Ipswich Queensland Times, Warwick Daily News.
Kay is a freelance writer focussing on the undeniable connection between our thinking and our health. She writes for metropolitan and regional news media throughout Australia and beyond, and is a regular contributor to Australia’s national forum, Online Opinion.
Fearless Living is Healthy Living 1 comment
Eliminating fear is good for your health say experts.
Mind-Body Interventions such as patient support groups, prayer, spiritual healing and a state of calmness produced through meditation, can all help reduce bodily stress.
Fear is like luggage you carry around with you. It comes in all shapes and sizes. Some fears you can put down and walk away from. Others seem to be firmly attached to you. You know the kind I’m talking about. It can be a fear of going to the dentist, speaking in public, personal safety, not being able to pay the bills, fear of getting sick, and yes, even a fear of dying.
You often know when you feel nervous or afraid, through certain bodily sensations. For example, you get butterflies in the stomach, sweaty palms, dry mouth, shortness of breath, or rapid heartbeats. On such occasions, fear itself seems to be quite tangible, even physically concrete.
While fear appears to be expressed in a bodily way, it actually starts in thought. This may appear obvious, but it’s a point that often gets overlooked when we’re caught up in an anxious moment, or feeling ill. Being aware of this mind-body connection, provides a starting point for working beyond fear. It leads to finding a pathway for resolving a fearful situation, and to achieving better health.
One way to achieve fearless living, is to practice calm thinking whenever those internal alarm bells are sounding. According to Herbert Benson, M.D. Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Mind Body Medical Institute, this can be accomplished by “prescribing meditation – not just medication”. As the author or co-author of more than 170 scientific publications and seven books, Benson encourages a state of calmness through meditation as a means of reducing the bodily stress which is often engendered by fear.
While there are various ways to meditate, one method that many people have found to be effective involves spiritual thinking, or prayer. Thoughts of divine protection, as I’ve discovered, can help dissolve fearful concerns about health and personal wellbeing. This can calm thought, prevent fear from governing the body, and correct health problems engendered by fear. And why not? Evidence of the effect of spiritual thinking on the body are not new. One pioneer and writer on health and spirituality, Mary Baker Eddy, documented them during the last century.
Today modern health campaigner Deepak Chopra, MD, is exploring paths beyond western medicine and surgery. Although a board-certified endocrinologist, he believes that “The experiences of joy, compassion, and meditative quiescence (calmness) could be powerful tools to restore homeostasis (a state of equilibrium) and strengthen our self-repair mechanisms.”
Chopra is not alone in his views. In August 2012, I attended the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association conference in Melbourne. Doctors, nurses and other health care professionals who were present, discussed ways an integrative medicine practice could help patients achieve “optimal health and healing.” This included making use of “all appropriate therapeutic approaches, health care professionals and disciplines”, as well as “Mind-Body Interventions such as patient support groups, meditation, prayer, spiritual healing, …”
Those in the medical fraternity who seek the healing of fear and of fear-related illness through complementary practices, are to be commended. As Chopra says, “The mystery of healing remains unsolved. If we combine wisdom and science, tradition and research, mind and body, there is every hope that the mystery will reveal its secrets more and more fully.” Such unbiased inquiry as he proposes, could lead us to understand how to live a fear-free, healthy life and to the role that spiritual thinking can play in the healing that follows.
This article, Fearless Living is Healthy Living, by Beverly Goldsmith was originally published on her blog site, Spirituality and Health Connect. Beverly is a Melbourne-based health writer who provides a diversity of health content on how spirituality and thought affect health.
Classes with Care Leave a comment
One Saturday morning I was standing in the foyer of a young peoples’ theatre. Students were gathering for their weekly drama lesson. A teacher who had been away the previous several lessons arrived. I watched as one by one children sidled over to her.
“I did my piano exam,” one told her.
“I’ve auditioned for an arts program.”
“I lost my tooth.”
Their teacher embraced each with a comment, or smile, or hug – an affirmation of value. Children know when teachers or coaches care for them and they shine under this attention. Apart from the instruction in drama, football, or swimming, this is also of real value.
As kids become adolescents they enjoy finding people that care for them enough to verbally spar with them, let them exercise their wit, reason and questioning of the world. They want teachers, coaches, friends and neighbours to care enough not to always agree with them as they develop their own unique identities. Finding a variety of situations where this can safely happen can be a challenge.
In the Christian Science Sunday School time is given for the fostering of caring respectful relationships. Grouped around similar ages up to 20, a teacher or facilitator typically stays for two to three years. Relevant ideas from unique thinkers in the Bible and the book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, prompt discussion.
Along with a pre-teen group, I was part of an exploration of an idea from this book: ‘The divine Mind maintains all identities, from a blade of grass to a star, as distinct and eternal.’ There were no right or wrong answers. It included a discovery of our spiritual identity, our pets and the local water-ways!
This group grew in confidence at school and in extra-curricular activities. They uncovered something about their spiritual identity. As part of the group I learned about soccer umpiring, teenage movies, pokemon and mine-craft. Our regular one-hour a week together was a cheerful win-win all round!
In Canberra the Christian Science Sunday School operates every Sunday 10.00 – 11.00 am. It is located at the corner of Macquarie and Bligh Street in Barton. Visitors and new pupils up to the age of 20 are warmly welcomed. Instruction in classes is based on the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer.
Why being young at heart works. Is there a science behind it? 1 comment
Thank you to Sarah Marinos of body+soul at the Courier-Mail, for writing an article recently on the health benefits of thinking and acting younger – “Why being young at heart works“. Amongst the myriad of ads by the pharmaceutical companies, this article was unexpectedly thought-provoking and brought to my attention the work of Dr Ellen Langer, Harvard University psychologist and scientific investigator who conducted a landmark experiment 30 years ago where she had seniors live in a secluded monastery as though it were 1959. The results were surprising. After a week of living as though they were younger men, the pensioners were more flexible, had better hearing and memory and felt stronger. And they also looked younger.
This experiment was the forerunner of the British ABC’s TV program, the Young Ones that I recommended in a previous blog post, “Could it be that we all have the power to think ourselves young again?”
Langer has studied the way our mind influences our body and appearance and is the person who coined the word ‘mindfulness’. “When people are taught to be mindful in a fashion very different from meditation, they become more creative, healthier, and happier”, she wrote.
In Langer’s book, counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, she reminds readers that many definitive-sounding medical diagnoses are in fact best guesses. In a sense, this is a book about the limits of empirical knowledge. But as Langer sees it, the ambiguity that inevitably accompanies medical research can be profoundly liberating. If we can’t be sure that a diagnosis — or a widely accepted truism such as “memory loss is inevitable with age” — is true, we’re less likely to apply a self-limiting label to ourselves.
So what does this mean for you and me? Are these experiments miracles or is there a law in place?
I put the question another way. What if society’s current standards and expectations were the aberration and health and eternal life the reality?
The consistent findings from these experiments point to a law or science in place. I understand it to be a divine Science. Towards the end of the 19th Century the author of the first and complete book about the laws of reality, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Because of human ignorance of the divine Principle, Love, the Father of all is represented as a corporeal creator; hence men recognize themselves as merely physical, and are ignorant of man as God’s image or reflection and of man’s eternal incorporeal existence.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures)
Christian Science makes it clear that mankind’s misunderstanding of the reality of being, of what God is and of what man really is, handicaps our life experience thus far.
This article by Kay Stroud was orginially published on her blog site. Kay is a health writer focussing on the leading edge of consciousness, spirituality and health. Contact her to learn more about it, including Christian Science, via www.health4thinkers.com.
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: A Textbook of Spiritual Healing Leave a comment
Mary Baker Eddy’s groundbreaking book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, was first published over 135 years ago. For more than a century, this book has met humanity’s increasing demand for a more spiritual understanding of health, a better basis for lasting relationships, and a greater sense of security and peace. Around the globe, people are finding answers in Science and Health, and their lives are being enriched, transformed, and healed by its message of practical spirituality. The value they place in this book is seen in the outpouring of love and gratitude that impels them to share Science and Health with others.
Science and Health is Mary Baker Eddy’s primary work and the definitive textbook on Christian Science. It explains the scientific laws behind the teachings and healings of Christ Jesus. From the first chapter, “Prayer,” to her exegeses of Genesis and Revelation, the author invites readers to deeply consider the allness of God, the perfection of man as God’s spiritual creation, and how an understanding of these facts brings healing—just as it did in biblical times. For over 135 years, readers have testified that reading and studying this book has given them a spiritual sense of the Bible and their permanent relationship to God, and has also resulted in physical healing and spiritual uplift.
Since the first publication of Science and Health in 1875, its readers have testified that reading and studying this book has not only given them a spiritual sense of the Bible and a clearer recognition of their permanent relationship to God, but has also resulted in physical, mental, and emotional healing. Letters from readers that testify to healing from simply reading the book can be found in the last chapter of Science and Health. Available in multiple editions and formats, as well as in 17 languages and English Braille, the book is dedicated to thinkers and “honest seekers for Truth” (Science and Health, p. xii).
Published testimonials in Christian Science publications illustrate the life-changing power of the book’s ideas. These include emotional, physical, and mental healings. Testimonies of healing can be found at christianscience.com and in magazines such as The Christian Science Journal and Christian Science Sentinel available at Christian Science Reading Rooms worldwide.
Science and Health is available on line from christianscience.com and in Canberra from the Christian Science Reading Room and Bookshop on the corner of Macquarie & Bligh Streets, Barton, and from local libraries.
Are we all now on the same mind, body, spirit page? Leave a comment
Recently, thousands of people attended the Mind Body Spirit Festival in Brisbane. I made my way there through the gloomy weather on Sunday, to find a really ‘happening’ event, a lot like the Health Harmony and Soul Expo held on the Gold Coast earlier in the year.
There were a surprising number of Millennials and Gen Ys amongst the Baby Boomers and Gen Xs in attendance, as ready to explore the ideas of philosophy and religion, as they were to try out the organic tea or get their ‘reading’.
I got the impression that there was general agreement between those on stands and within their vibrant audience that health is about very much more than treating a body.
Quite a few I spoke to had pondered the mental nature of health, had heard about the medical research into the effects of spiritual and religious sentiments such as forgiveness and gratitude.
Dozens were eager to add their contribution to the ‘gratitude tree’ by writing down what they were grateful for … and pinning it on the murraya bush in the Christian Science Reading Room stand.
Don’t get me wrong. The majority of these people harboured a healthy scepticism of anything nonsensical or obviously geared to a purely money-making concern.
The astounding thing is that these were your average Aussie ‘blokes’ and ‘sheilas’. Just like the lady I met today. While her job was in real estate, she confided when I mentioned that I was a health blogger, that she’d investigated kinesiology and other alternative therapies and knew how important her thoughts were to her wellbeing.
It’s not surprising to learn that two-thirds of Australians use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and many of these recognise the interconnectedness of our thoughts with our health.
Suddenly results from thought-based treatments such as placebos, epigenetics, psychotherapy and meditation are big news.
A medico who turned from Western medical treatments when they failed to help her, took matters into her own hands. Through her research, Dr Lissa Rankin discovered that traditional health care was missing a couple of crucial insights:
taking responsibility for your own wellbeing is essential; and that we need to care for the whole package – our mind, heart and soul.
Rankin’s book, Mind Over Medicine, advances understanding of the great conundrum of the past 150 years – how our mind, bodies and spirit interconnect.
She found that thoughts, feelings and beliefs can alter the body’s physiology, discerned that loneliness, pessimism, depression, fear and anxiety damage the body, while intimate relationships, gratitude, meditation and creativity turn on the body’s self-healing processes.
Theologian, author, and founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy wrote and taught about the mental nature of disease way back in the 19th century.
She proved that a Mind-based (or God-based) view of health and life leads to cures in both mind and body.
Eddy described some of the states of thought that might generate disease in her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which endorses what many people like Rankin recognise as harmful to health today.
She wrote, “Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers.”
For me, it’s imperative to recognise my spiritual identity, which Jesus exemplified and explained so well, and can be nurtured and discovered through daily prayer and meditation. I find that this also keeps the body healthy, as well as repairing and healing.
It looks like many are now ‘on the same page’, sharing the profound knowledge that happiness and health are dependent on a healthy mind, body and spirit.
This article by Kay Stroud, a health blogger who is interested in the mind-body connection, was originally published on her blog, Spotlight on Spirituality and Health. It was also published on these media websites: Toowoomba Chronicle, Wanganui Chronicle, The Aucklander, Grafton Daily Examiner, Coffs Coast Advocate, Bay of Plenty Times.
Christian Science Canberra 