Richard Beck - The Joy of Moving Beyond Yourself (N348)

[Music] Welcome back to Nomad Podcast. I'm Tim National, very pleased to say this is Anna Robinson. Good morning, Tim. Hello, everyone. So, Anna, what have you been up to since we last spoke, which I think was the Dan McClellan episode a couple of months ago now? Ooh, something fun that I did was take part in the uncontrolling love of God Conference with Tom Ord and Simon Cross from the Progressive Christian Network. That was really, really engaging, really fun to be part of that. I got to meet some really interesting people, some great discussions and grappling with open and relational theology. It was really good. I really enjoyed that. What did you do? You lead in some groups or something? The conference was kind of, people were invited to have conversations and then it was opened up to the floor for people to kind of join in and take part, which I really liked. So, I was doing a conversation across difference, talking about how we have conversations when we were in different places and different positions, which was, yeah, it was really good. We enjoyed it and I led a couple of short reflections as well, trying to help bring the head knowledge down into the heart, body, that kind of thing. So, yeah, it was fun, really lovely to venture out of Cornwall and go and meet people, talk about face shifting and face and emerging theologies and all sorts of things. Yeah, it was great. How about you? What have you been up to? Yeah, you'll like this one. I've been forest bathing a couple of times. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I came across a group that goes to a local wood near here and everybody kind of takes a mat and some chairs and then you just kind of meditate while listening to nature. It's amazing. Absolutely loved it. We did one on the Summer Solstice as well. It's slightly different. We were kind of encouraged to kind of look up through the tree canopy and kind of reflect on the interplay of light and dark. It was quite profound, actually. I can easily walk through a wood and miss the orchestra of sounds that's going on and it really does sound like an orchestra when you tune into it. The wind and the leaves, branches knocking together, all the various bird songs and stuff. It's amazing. I can really struggle just with silent meditation, but 20 minutes listening intently to nature, it just went in a heartbeat. It was amazing. How was that doing it with lots of other people? I can imagine doing that on my own. Yeah, it is interesting because if I were to meditate, it would always be on my own. The only time I've ever done silent meditation in a group was on a silent retreat that I went on and I found it really difficult. I found the silence on my own relatively easy once I'd got into the flow of it. I found it incredibly difficult with a group. But with this, I just forgot that anyone else was there. I think I was so tuned in on all the kind of nature sounds that I just felt like I was in my own little world. I didn't have much awareness that anyone else was there, really. Beautiful. That sounds incredible. Just listening to birds. Birds are awesome, aren't they? I'm really starting to appreciate birds. That's another exciting development, actually, for the Nash's. We've had hardly any wildlife in our neighbourhood since we've lived here. I think because there's so many cats. There's about four or five cats that are just constantly in and out of our garden and I think they've just kind of cleared out all the wildlife. But for some reason, there's been a dramatic drop in the cat population. I think a few have died. A couple of people moved away. For some reason, my neighbour who has got two cats to start to keep them indoors and just loads of birds have turned up. We've got wrens, chiff chaff, sparrows, robins, blutits, song thrushes. It's amazing. We've put a bird feeder up and a bird bar. For now, we have breakfast outside in the morning. Just listening to the birds and watching the birds feed in and bathe in. That is amazing. It is the bird season, isn't it? Well, spring and all the babies are all fledged. Yeah, we've got little nest of sparrows and all the babies have come out now. We've got like five just hopping around our garden and yes, awesome. I love it. Nice. So Tim, who is it you've interviewed for this particular episode and tell me why? Why have you chosen this person to interview? Yeah, welcoming Richard Beck back onto the podcast. He's professor of psychology at Abilene University. You might know him from such nomad episodes as Hope in a World on Fire, the Gospel according to Johnny Cash, why we don't love like Jesus and the devil for doubters and disenchanted. You might also know him from his very popular substack, experimental theology. I invited him back on the show because I've been interested for a while in the relationship between spirituality and science and particularly spirituality and mental health. So some years ago, now I read Andrew Newberg's How God Changes Your Brain and Fan Out Rear Interest in and then I read Lisa Miller's The Awakened Brain and then subsequently interviewed her for nomad. They focus on brain scans to look at the way spiritual practices positively affect the brain and can lead to better mental health. So when I saw Richard's new book come out, The Shape of Joy and realised that it that covered similar kind of territory, I read it and really enjoyed it. And his basic kind of thesis is that many of us feel anxious and depleted and spiritually adrift because the modern self is curved inwards as he puts it so we can kind of get trapped in cycles of self focus and performance and he contrasts that with the more ancient posture of being curved outward, kind of orientated towards love and transcendence. So he's saying that rather kind of digging deeper into ourselves for healing, he suggests that we need to turn outward towards awe and connection and sacred. And I thought that sounds very interesting. I'm interested in that kind of thing, Anna. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I recorded a conversation with him and very interesting it was too. But before Richard unpacks all of that for us here, beloved listener, there's all your essential blurb. We've had a few new people sign up as supporters for Nomad this month, which we are very thankful Patreon reckons anywhere between one and five percent of an audience offering their support means you're doing very well and we're at about three percent. So we're doing very well and we're very thankful for that. If you'd like to join the three percent as you can go to patreon.com/nomadpodcast. One of the benefits of signing up is gaining access to Anna's wonderful monthly contemplations. One of the things that I really like about your contemplations is that they often take the kind of heady ideas of a Nomad episode and kind of ground them in a more embodied way. I think you're very good at creating a space to allow those ideas to really kind of sink in and settle down. So I'm wondering how that kind of took shape. Was that a very intentional thing? Did you think, oh, you know, there's a lot of ideas, a lot of heady stuff here. It'd be nice to have a space to let that kind of sink in. Or is that just the way it organically kind of played out? I think that over the years, as I have sort of got more into, I suppose, interested in long lasting change and wanting to kind of grow as a human being in all areas, including spiritually, I noticed that you can have a lot of information and a lot of cerebral understanding, but for ideas and concepts to kind of actually become embedded in your behaviour and how you actually move around in the world, it takes more for me than just reading a book or hearing ideas. So the idea of taking longer on reading things more slowly, taking a particular concept that has landed with me either in one of the interviews that we've done here on nomad or just, you know, bringing attention to nature or something in the season and just spending more time with it. I'm a big fan of the less is more the artist's subtraction and just really allowing space and time to contemplate and take things from the head down into the heart, more into the kind of become more aware of our unconscious, I guess, and raise our awareness, raise my awareness. I suppose that's the sort of reason why I love the opportunity to write the contemplations because it helps certainly me to get more from there's so much information that we get bombarded with, but actually sometimes, you know, line of poetry or, like you say, listening to bird song, actually coming back to simplicity and really delving into that and chewing on it and turning it over and allowing the full flavour of that to sort of sit with us and see if in any way it speaks to us more deeply. I just love creating space for that for myself and for other people. So I guess it's just been part of my spiritual practice and that actually happened in the contemplations over all these years. Yeah, your life is rich with nurturing life, giving spiritual practice as anna, but when you can't be bothered of all of that and you're feeling a bit blue, what do you do for a quick kick, a quick pick me up? Oh, I don't know, might binge watch a series on Netflix. Jump in the sea. All right, yeah. Go swimming in the cold water. It's better in the winter for me. I the shock of it is good. I've said before I'm listening to lots of audiobooks at the moment, bit of escapism in that world. Tell me you've been watching the BBC show Pilgrimage. I have watched. Is there one at the moment? Yeah, one's just finished. The fourth one's just finished. Actually, full enough. Are the people who been mentioning this? And I didn't realise I was actually one at the moment. I'll definitely watch that. I love the other three. I thought they were fascinating. That's absolutely amazing, aren't they? I think it's one of the best things on TV. It's definitely the most spiritual show I've seen on TV in years. They just take a group of people. So, you know, there might be a Christian in there, often kind of a lapsed Christian, maybe a Muslim, a Jew, an agnostic, an atheist, a real kind of mix of people. And then they just set them off walking and ancient Pilgrimage to Iona or something like that. And all of them seem to have really kind of gentle but profound spiritual experiences. It's just the most beautiful thing to watch. Just slowly kind of play out as they just walk and walk and walk and talk. And then, you know, come across like a little chapel or a little shrine. And just have a really profound experience. It's a beautiful TV show. I love it. It is. And I love the diversity of the people that walk together, you know, different religions or none. It's a really healthy watch, really. With all the bad press that religion gets, it's just easy news headlines, isn't it? But to produce a show like that that shows a really kind of healthy, grounded life-giving spirituality, it's a rare thing, I think. And just walking together, just the act of walking from A to B. Just think it's really good. Have you got any events coming up or any kind of new facetift groups about to start or anything like that? Yeah, well, I've got a few spaces on the next facetift group starting in September. So if you want to come along and join, we have six sessions. We talk about topics that the group want to talk about around, you know, facetifting, deconstruction. They're fantastic spaces and I absolutely love them and I love the people that I've got to journey in those spaces. So yeah, getting touched. I have a retreat at Hillfield Friary, which I've been to a few times before, which is a Franciscan Friary, beautiful community there in Dorset and gathering embers. And actually recently met the wonderful Dave Tomlinson of the Holy Shed, how to be a bad Christian. And he's going to come along. I've been really enjoying his book of prayers, Bad Christians Book of Prayer. He's really, really incredible with words and he really plays with language in an accessible way. And so we're going to play around in that space with the idea of of curiosity, poetry and prayer a little bit. So yeah, I'm really excited about that in September. That's for night retreat. So do get in touch if you'd like to come to that because that's going to be absolutely brilliant. And then I've got another retreat in person for night in October, here in Cornwall with the wonderful Isabelle, which is creative flow in the wilderness. So it's kind of off the back of table in the wilderness, which is a gathering of face shifters, space to grief, process, reimagine. But creative flow adds an extra element of artist workshops to help us kind of creatively process our journeys and where we find ourselves and perhaps where we want to go as well. So yeah, two really beautiful retreats. Great places to find a sort of connection on the journey and belonging. Yeah, do come along if you're interested because, yeah, they're fantastic. Both of those. Very excited about that. Yeah. So presumably people can find out more about that and book or contact you through your website. Yeah, if you get to go on my website, which is livelight12deep.org. And always the best way to stay connected to my work is get on my mailing list. That's the main way that I send out kind of invitations and all that kind of thing first through there. And I'm also twinging Tim with doing some pop-ups over the summer as well. Maybe some pop-up, face shift, discussion groups, twing with the idea of maybe doing an online retreat over a weekend just a bit longer. Because I do the online retreats throughout the year, which are two hours long throughout the sort of season, Celtic season and also the Christian season as well. But I quite like the idea of offering an extended one online over the weekend. I'm just looking and playing around with some ideas around that because obviously not everyone can physically get to a retreat center. It's just another opportunity for connection and some reflection and contemplation. So yeah, I've got lots of ideas bubbling around which feels exciting at the moment. So yeah. Yeah, brilliant. Remember to check out Nomad's book club that's on the $15 tier at Patreon. They're just about to start Richard's Raw's new books and now be a good time to jump on board with that. And remember if you need some support on your face shift journey, check out the therapy network. It's a list of qualified experienced registered therapists, all of whom through their own personal experience and through client work get the whole faith shift thing. So if you need someone to talk to about your journey, check out the therapy network. And that, blah blah blah, listen, is all your essential blurb. So I'm going to say a few nice things about my chat with Richard to lead us into the interview. Yeah, so this is a really good interview to think about your own kind of joy and flourishing and what that looks like. Reflect on kind of what stabilizes us in difficult times and kind of digging into that link between spirituality and well-being and mental health. Yeah, and there's some cool concepts that I quite like that you mentioned as well, which I'm sure we'll talk about more afterwards, but I like the idea of cosmic mattering. Yeah, that's great fun. Yeah, so it's just good, it's a good opportunity, always a good opportunity to think about our well-being and mental health and how our evolving shifting faith spirituality can support that. Yeah. So here is me and Richard Beck. So Richard, welcome back to No More Podcast. Oh, it's going to be with you Tim. Long time. Glad to be back. You open your book, The Shape of Joy, by describing a growing mental health crisis, which you suggest is partly caused by the modern self being curved inward, you know, stuck in our own thoughts in our anxieties. Could you unpack that a bit? You know, what does that actually look like and why is it so damaging? Yeah, I think a lot of this goes back to Sigmund Freud over 100 years ago, argued that the source and the secret of mental health was to turn inward and to plumb the depths of the unconscious. But I think over the last 100 years, we've seen a variety of, it's a evidence to suggest that excessive introspection, what I call the collapse of the self is actually hurting us and fragileizing our mental health. We're increasingly describing our inner life as having a wandering mind. Our default state is being inside of ourselves, not connected to external reality. And we're also seeing evidence suggesting that excessive introspection, especially rumoured introspection, exacerbates mental health problems. You write that both truth and joy have gone missing. What do you mean by that? Well, the joy part is what I just described, the mental health crisis, at least in the West, in America, especially in my contact, you're seeing increasing rates of depression, anxiety, suicideality, increasing deaths of despair, deaths due to suicide, drug overdose, liver disease, due to chronic alcoholism. So that's the joy part. Something's gone wrong with our mental health pursuits. The truth part is turning away from Freud and looking at philosophers like Renee De Cart, who proposed that that maybe a radical skepticism turning inward to begin with like the cognito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am in beginning the truth claim with subjective reality, rather than the object reality. I think you could trace the beginnings of that to our current post-truth culture, where people's factual grip on reality has become increasingly tenuous, and instead we live with kind of self-asserted truth and in our own realities. So I think we've seen that crisis of truth as well. And I argued that both of those, the mental health crisis and the post-truth crisis are both due to this inward turn in a reliance upon the ego or this self as the source of mental health but also the source of truth. So before this shift occurred, you argue that the self was curved outward. What did that look like in kind of ancient or pre-modern understandings of personhood? Yeah, I think before the enlightenment truth and also well-being was pursued by seeking an alignment or an attunement to a sacred reality that was greater than and other than your own. So there was a kind of objectivity or an externality that we were pursuing for truth, obviously, in alignment with the objective world, but also from a mental health perspective, navigating our lives in relation to what Plato called the transident values, the true and the beautiful and the good. And these were values that were not subjectively chosen but objectively real and thus could be discovered and one could then live in conformity with those values. You suggest that in our current culture we perform the self. Well, after that inward turn, the question is that what becomes the foundation of the ego, what becomes the grounding of the self. And without an external reality to attune to, then the self has to be self-generated, self-created. It has to become a performance in that sense. And so we typically perform through what I call the superhero complex, borrowed from an interesting podcast, but rooted in the psychological work of Ernest Becker, who argued that our search for meaning and significance is a hero project. So it is a game of value or significance that we attempt. It's all different. We all have different hero projects, but we all play in that sandbox for metrics of success and value and worth. And it's something that's constantly needs to be engaged with over time. It's in thus a performance that we are involved with. And we see a lot of that increasingly co-opted by social media performance, the way we perform ourselves for the consumption of others. We kind of become a character in our own game. And if you look at a lot of the psychological research on like young people and social media, we see how that performative aspect that the self is something being consumed by the gaze of other people has fragilized the mental health of young people. - So what is the cost of this performance? Could you say a bit more about that? - As an example, I give my car tire was flat one morning and I didn't have one of those electric pumps to inflate it. And as I ponder that, I realized that my bike pump, the valve would fit my car tire. So I tell this silly story of going to get my bike pump from my shed and trying to inflate my car tire with this bike pump. And it's a silly story, but it illustrates the point because you can totally do that. Like you can inflate a car tire with a bike pump, but it's exhausting, especially here in the West Texas heat. I was out there, I don't know how long I was working with that bike pump. And I just use that as a whimsical metaphor about this performative identity that we are exhausting ourselves by performing this self. We are exhausting ourselves by constantly trying to rehabilitate or re-inflate our self esteem and our self perception. And I'm put my finger on that is one of the sources of our mental health crisis. What some scholars have described, the weariness of the self, this Matthew Crawford calls it, this vague and unending project to become in your fullest self, right, the vague and unending project to become in your fullest self, that a lot of us are experiencing this self fatigue because of that performative nature. Much of your critique, this idea that we're kind of curving inward seems to challenge dominant therapeutic assumptions that healing comes through self focus or boosting the self esteem. Could you unpack that a bit for us? - Yeah, and I've got some really helpful critical feedback from therapists who have read the book because the book is pretty hard on introspection and they want me to clarify about there are healthier and unhealthy forms of introspection and I agree with all of that. But we're also seeing the rise of what some have called bad therapy where some sorts of therapy do exacerbate or prolong mental health issues by keeping us stuck in ourselves. And so you're seeing even in the mental health world, the rise of therapies from cognitive behavioral therapy to acceptance and commitment based therapy that are preaching distancing from the self, that the need to at least get a little bit of distance between yourself and yourself talk, the internal chatter that we have. But you're also seeing the rise of things like in the field of positive psychology the mental health benefits of things like mindfulness and gratitude and now interestingly now awe, experiences of awe and what you notice, especially with mindfulness, that they cease introspection. That's the whole point of mindfulness is to stop the inner talk or the inner chatter and to become grounded in the moment. And so I think your listeners will be aware of mindfulness and practice of gratitude and awe 'cause they're hot topics right now. But I just want to kind of underline the theme of all of those is how we're seeing the mental health benefits in stopping the inner dialogue within ourselves. So you're seeing even in the therapeutic community this recognition that maybe I do need at least for times in the day in life to get out of my own head. - I'd always assumed that that kind of inner chatter was just part of what it meant to be human. Are you suggesting that that's been exacerbated or maybe even created by the culture that we live in? - Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think because of the rise of consumer culture and the rise of increased amounts of leisure time, we are not spending as much time engaged in work. We don't work with our hands as much. We are not out in the natural world as much. And so we are increasingly left with ourselves and then with the rise of technology, TV and the now social media and the internet, more and more, our lives have become less in contact with the natural world or with relationships. And it is increasingly just mediated via screens and algorithms and that the modern experience to self has become increasingly self referential and Freud diagnosed that as increasingly neurotic. And so I do think the self referential and neurotic experience of the self is a modern phenomenon as the human mind has been given more time. It's been left more with itself and that's struggled a bit. And I already in the book, you saw it especially with COVID. When COVID took us out of the world even more than normal, we saw an exacerbation of a mental health crisis that the mind left alone with itself is not a healthy mind. - You argue that self esteem is a trap and that it sets us up for exhaustion and shame. Is that also relating to what you're just saying? - Yeah, it goes to the self referentiality I was talking about. It's been a truce and I think for a couple generations the secret to mental health is self esteem to have a positive or healthy self appraisal of oneself. But I think we have seen the negative impacts of self esteem culture on us that constantly gazing in the mirror trying to convince yourself that you like yourself is again an exhausting project and mostly I argue to trap for a couple of different reasons. One of them just goes to the definition of self esteem. If you look at the psychological definitions of self esteem like the very first definition of self esteem by the psychologist William James back in the early 1900s, he describes self esteem as this mathematical equation, this psychological algebra that is the ratio of your successes to your goals. So self esteem is literally just keeping track about how successful you are in life. And if your life's going well, that means your self esteem is great. You're getting that positive feedback loop. You're getting that dopamine reinforcement. But a lot of us when we're experiencing failures or dissatisfactions with our job, our relationships, our life in general, that self esteem plummets. And it's that variable nature of self esteem, the fact that it is not set and steady but it is rather reactive and is going up and down, contingent upon the successes of our lives, makes it a very unstable thing to put our mental health on. And so that's just one way to trap. But the other thing I point to is just the way that there are things that happen our life with abuse or trauma or life experiences that can really damage our self perceptions and in pretty durable ways that even years of therapy or medication don't completely eradicate. And thus we find ourselves with that wearing and exhausting project back to the image of the bite pump of trying to constantly rehabilitate our self assessments. And so I want to suggest the science of psychology is pointing us to like a better way forward to find joy. What about relationships or belonging? Is that a solid stable basis for personhood? Yeah, so one of the other definitions of self esteem beyond William James is one by Roy Balmeister, social psychologist called the sociometer. And this is more of a relational definition of self esteem that in our minds we have this metric of the degree to which we feel loved or included or desired by other people. So it's not a thermometer. It's a sociometer measuring the quality of our social relationships. And as obviously social creatures, we're like we need that. We need some feedback mechanism in our head to tell us how well we're doing socially. That's why loneliness is painful for us. It's like a hunger and it drives us toward connection. But again, the quality of our relationships can vary. And the argument I make in the book is that when social life is going well, when we have thick and rich family connections or thick and rich friendships, then obviously life is going well. But in America at least, our surgery general just published a big alert arguing that we're in an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness, especially among young people. And so what does the sociometer tell you in the midst of thin relationships or even absent relationships and your self-worth is going to plummet? So again, even though relationships are critical, I think most of us can look at relationships and see places where we wish they would be better. Let alone situations that are not as well we experience infidelity, abuse or rejection. So where are we going to ground our joy or our mental health when we're experiencing relational trauma or lack? So I kind of come back to that idea of what stabilizes us as I describe it in the book on the worst day of your life. And for many of us, the worst day of our lives is going to have some relational component, some sort of loss or trauma or rejection. We'll define the worst day of our lives. The ground's our value and our worth on that day. So it's not to deny the vital role of relationships. It's more just an honest admission that relationships can be the very location of a pain in our lives. Just coming back to therapy again. I mean therapy clearly has helped many people. So I'm assuming you're not dismissing it entirely. You're trying to hold it in tension maybe. Yeah. Let me go back. One of the things I mentioned earlier was the way therapy itself is trying to incorporate some of these lessons about mindfulness and gratitude and getting a more objective take upon your inner dialogue. So it's not to suggest that therapy isn't helpful or even life-saving. It is suggesting that even therapy itself is beginning to incorporate these lessons that we need some outward turn away from our inner ruminations in neurosis. And that some kinds of therapy itself might keep people somewhat stuck in that. So it's a conversation that is not against therapy, but is happening within therapy itself as we're beginning to learn more and more about what joy, influishing, like really looks like. So I want to be clear about that. I don't think that's the message on what people take away that therapy isn't like vitally important. It's just that if you go to your therapist and they teach you about mindfulness, just drawing your attention to the way they're asking you to adopt a technique that ceases introspection and reground you in the external world. Or if your therapist asks you to keep a gratitude journal, how they are causing you to look at the external world and live and seeing it and receiving it as a gift that is being given to you as another way of ceasing internal introspection. So it's more charting where therapeutic science is taking us when we think about psychological health and resiliency. So you write that numerous studies show a strong link between faith, spirituality and well-being. Are we talking here about widely accepted peer-reviewed research? Yeah, a variety of meta-analyses, and that's just a technical word for studies of studies, of point to faith and spirituality being positively correlated with meaning in life, satisfaction with life, and better mental health. And so those of studies have been going on for decades. And I kind of argue that it's one of the best kept secrets in the mental health literature, but it's been consistently demonstrated that faith and spirituality are part of it. And that should be obvious, I think to us. I think if you are a person in faith or you define yourself as a spiritual person, that there are certain capacities for narrating your life and grounding your story in something bigger than yourself if you're a spiritual person. If you live with a completely like nihilistic worldview that nothing matters and nothing really makes a difference, there's going to be some mental health consequences there. But faith traditions, wisdom traditions, spiritual traditions have always pointed us to transcendent goods and values, especially as I argue, our own worth and our own value, and the inherent meaningfulness of our lives that our lives do have existential weight in mattering. And I think that's an important message, especially as we're experiencing what psychologists describe as like a crisis of meaning in our culture, where as we kind of move into a more post-religious or post-Christian era, at least in the Western world at least, that there is kind of an existential vacuum that we're feeling the consequences of the purpose in life, the direction in life. Why am I here? Does anything matter? And obviously faith and spirituality are going to fill that void. This isn't an argument for God's existence. It's not an argument trying to get people to believe in God for mental health reasons. It's just noticing a correlation between having a spiritual worldview and the quest for meaning, if it well together. Some critics might say that spirituality just correlates with other factors like community or a healthy routine, but isn't necessarily the active ingredient. How would you respond to that? Go back to look at the new atheist movement. There was a season there where we thought that atheism finally was going to turn a corner and become mainstream. It also corresponded to the rise of the deconstruction, conversation, and religion, and Christianity, as well. There was a sense where we're going to all kind of go into a journey of deconstruction as well. And I don't think things ended up going in that direction. We haven't seen people during that new atheism conversation or even during the deconstruction, just kind of opt for complete nihilism or moral relativism. In many ways, many people stepped away from the faith of their childhood for very moral reasons. Christianity itself was being judged from a moral framework and that people were opting for things that they felt were truer or more beautiful or good in relation to the faith they were raised in. And I point there is is that even though you're seeing people step away from "religion," you're still seeing that rejection or that drift taking place in relation to a transcendent framework. People are still living with a very thick, rich, value system, moral code. In fact, like I said, many people were rejecting Christianity for very, very moral reasons. And they still are navigating in their relationships and in their worldview as people with a strong moral sensibility. It might be very different moral sensibility than the one they were raised in, perhaps as a conservative Christian, but they are still living with a thick, rich, moral commitment. That's the only claim I really want to argue for there is that that person's mental health and the way they are gaining existential navigation is still through an appeal to the transcendent. It might not be the traditionally transcendent, but they typically have it opted for like a wholesale nihilism. In fact, you're kind of seeing a lot of the new atheists kind of realizing that the vacuum that they created was not satisfactory enough to give us the spiritual, existential, and moral resources we need till the fully flourishing and happy human life. And could it be that it's not faith itself that supports mental wellbeing, but simply the comfort of wishful thinking? Like is it the content of the belief that matters or just believing something hopeful? You could argue that. I think there are, like I said, with those new atheists who made a really hard claim back then that all of this, the moral realism, the values, the transcendent values of the true, the beautiful and good, that all of this was just a form of wishful thinking. You would have to then make the case that human flourishing, joy, and happiness and mental health are all based upon a fiction. And there are people that engage in kind of a performative nihilism out there that basically say, "I don't believe in any sort of transcendent good or any sort of moral realism." And they kind of perform their nihilism in a sense of a heroic display of, "I don't need to live with all of these fictions. I don't need to believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus." You other people do. And I would argue that from the very beginning, the humans have lived with a transcendent framework. And the sacred has always been a part of the human experience. And I guess the empirical science points to the way joy, mental health comes from an atonement with some horizon of the true and the beautiful and the good. Like set aside specific creed or doctrinal claims for a minute. I mean, there's a reason why people, when they stepped away from religion, grabbed the hold of spiritual because that's just the way the human mind operates. And maybe there's a very few people out there who can say, "It's all just wishful thinking." But I would argue they are in the minority. and I would also argue that the mental health literature doesn't support that contention that that's the path to to joy or happiness. So so you you can believe that love and beauty and goodness of the human life is all rooted on a fantasy or you can believe that there might be some deep logic here that is pointing towards some horizon of sacred transcendence. And again, I want to be very generous with what that looks like. I don't try in the book to argue anybody back into a church, but that's definitely where I've found my conversation with transcendence, but but I'm not insisting upon that here. I'm just arguing that from just the psychological science, we need existential resources to fill life with meaning. And you can either believe that those are just projections or you could entertain the suspicion that there might be something more than just a factual description of the universe. Could you say a little bit more about the type of spirituality we're talking about here because the spirituality that many of us inherited, which was passed on to us in good faith, led to feelings of shame and guilt and poor mental health ultimately. Yeah. So let me try to make this more specific because I think the last couple of minutes has been pretty abstract. But like one of the things that pauses psychology is pointed towards and to kind of go back to that conversation about self-esteem culture and the weariness of trying to constantly re-inflate and rehabilitate your self-esteem has been the role of what psychologists have called existential significance or cosmic mattering. And what they mean by existential significance or cosmic mattering, someone just called mattering, is just this durable conviction that your life has value significance. I think in modern self-help culture, it's just the the claim that you are worthy, right, is just a truth, an intrinsic existential cosmic truth. So that's what the word existential and cosmic are pointing towards. Some objective value that you just possess by mere existence. And that people who have that sense of cosmic mattering or existential significance, farewell from a mental health perspective. When we've looked at what secures meaning in life, this is the most reliable anchor of that, is this mattering. And so when I talk about transcendence or I talk about value, this is what I'm pointing to. I'm not necessarily pointing to an angry guy with a beard in the sky who's going to send you to hell. I'm pointing to your cosmic significance, your existential mattering, this belief or conviction or faith or just given this about your values human being. Now to go back to the critic who you raised earlier, right, is that value, your cosmic mattering, your existential significance, is that a fiction? Is that akin to Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Or is it the truth? And we can have a conversation about that. But I'm just pointing out that the empirical science shows that people who have that sense of significance fare better from a mental health perspective. Because they're living in relation to a transcendent value, independent of their own failure or their shame. They don't have to constantly rehabilitate their self-assessment because of this mattering, this existential significance. So that's what I mean by the outward turn or we're living in relation to transcendence or a sacred spirituality. Now in my Christian tradition, I ground that mattering in the Hebrew claim from the early chapters of Genesis that everybody is made in the image of God. I matter because, quote, unquote, "I'm made in the image of God." Now if you lack a spiritual foundation, then the claim of your mattering or your value might lack of a cause. You matter, your life is valuable, your life is meaningful because why or what. And I think that's one of the reasons why faith and spirituality has mental health benefits because the value of your mattering has a reason, it has a because, it has a story. Again, a critic might think that story is a fiction, but at least there is a because there. I'm betting myself in a larger narrative that undergirds my worth or my value there. Anyway, I just want to put mattering on your radar screen. I want to talk about spirituality and talking about things like that, like your cosmic value, not necessarily the belief and the deity that is judging you or causing you to feel shame or guilt. In fact, mattering is the very thing that kind of keeps your shame or guilt from spiraling into some dark places. But many people simply are unable to believe in that kind of transcendence. They're not able to believe in God even if they found the idea of that attractive. Are they able to access these kind of experiences and their accompanying health benefits? Well, one of the things I talk about in my book is the literature on awe. So we're discovering that awe experiences of wonder have all of these mental health benefits. So what is awe? So awe is encountering a reality that is greater and other than your own. So most obviously a lot of us are good at experience awe like in nature. So I encounter the natural world and the cosmos. And that awe triggers what psychologists describe as a small self. And by small self they mean not small in the sense of insignificant, small as a part of a greater whole. I prefer to describe it as a relational self. I find myself in relationship with a larger reality. And so people are going to experience that relational self, that small self as a part of a greater whole as a place where they're going to ground those values. I matter because I'm a part of this greater whole and my life has existential weight as significance because because I'm a part of a greater whole. I have duties and obligations. Life is asking something of me and that therefore creates the drama of my life. How do I respond to this call? But it's not just nature, even more than nature, psychologists have discovered that moral beauty is a greater trigger for wonder at all. And by moral beauty looking at moral heroes and exemplars. And we all have these people in our lives that we think represent the best of us and they inspire us to action. So like I have heroes from the American Civil Rights Movement like Martin Luther King Jr., other moral heroes of mine are like St. Francis or Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day. And I think we all have these moral heroes. I think it's one of the reasons why we are attracted to Jesus. Even if you don't believe in the transcendent claims about his identity, we are struck by his moral beauty. And when we see that moral beauty or like we see in the aftermath of a tragedy or a natural disaster, the way humans, like suddenly this family connection emerges and we see these stories of people sacrificing and giving to take care of each other or rescue somebody. And so those experiences of moral beauty pull us into that relational self. Like that's the kind of world I want to live in and that's the kind of a person I want to be. So I would argue that these experiences of awe are again pulling us out of ourselves into a relationship with a reality bigger than my own. And one that is also filled with value like moral beauty like goodness self is calling me out of myself and into an engagement in a relationship with the world. And again, I don't think these experiences are just a purview of the religious. These are human experiences that go back to the dawn of time and prehistory that we've always lived in a relationship to this calling of the good and the true and the beautiful. And so if people are getting hung up on the religiosity or whether or not think this whole conversation is like a Trojan horse to get people to go back to church, I think you're missing out on the humanism of what I'm describing. I'm just talking about the human experience because another part of this conversation about always art and music and beauty and how those pull us into these transcendent experiences. So I would just kind of put awe on everybody's radar screen for the non-religious or the skeptical. And if you broaden out what you mean by transcendence, you start realizing that everybody is bumping into the sacred in some degree or fashion. So what practices can help us access these experiences? Well, we've already talked about a couple of these, right? To talk about seizing the self-referential neurotic loop in our heads, we've already talked about practices of mindfulness. I don't think that's new to anybody. We're realizing that practice is a gratitude, expressing thankfulness. And this is where again, I would come back to this conversation about awe. So I call it just talk about what might be described as cosmic gratitude. There's definitely interpersonal gratitude where I'm thankful for, like I'm thankful for you Tim, for letting me be a part of your podcast, right? So I experienced gratitude for that, but gratitude for the sunrise, gratitude for bird song, gratitude for life itself, gratitude for, you know, this next heartbeat or next breath, right? So that cosmic gratitude throws me outside of myself into a relationship with a greater reality. So mindfulness and gratitude experiences of awe we've talked about, taking time to take a walk in nature, to spend time with moral heroes. Like I asked my college students, we were told about this conversation about moral beauty and I said, do you have moral heroes? Like do you have anybody in your life that you can point to that inspires you? And if you don't, like find those people that pull you out of yourself and make you want to be a better person. And then the other thing I would argue is joy isn't just a positive emotion. I think we get caught up in that sense that, you know, my dog gives me joy and a good cup of coffee in the morning gives me joy and a night out with friends gives me joy. No, that's true. But I'm interested in like a transcendent joy, like a joy that can be found when you're struggling with social isolation, a joy when you experience heartache or failure. Like where do you get a durable joy? And psychology has appointed us to joy is less an emotion, but more way of perceiving the world or seeing the world through what you care about, your deep values and commitments. And what that would mean by way of practice is it gives you two levers to pull one by the way you see the world. We can practice construing the world or seeing the world in a certain kind of way. And that's where therapy can be really helpful for us because we can see the world differently with the aid of another person. But the other thing is it's signal through what we care about and where our values. And we have control over that. Like we have the power to set our lives down in a certain commitments or concerns. And if you locate those concerns in transcendent locations in the true and the beautiful and the good, then you're going to give yourself an anchor. You're going to put some ballast in there that when the storms of life blow, you're going to have a stability that you've conferred upon yourself because your joy therefore is it then contingent upon the circumstances of life? And it gives you this capacity for transcendence rather than being triggered by events. That's not a life hack. That is like a deep narrative practice of telling a bigger story about your life. But I think that's the ultimate secret to the shape of joy is telling a big enough story that it can save you on the worst day of your life. Do you think Jesus offers us an image of someone who lived this way? I mean the gospels don't seem particularly concerned with his inner life at all. So how can we know? Yeah, and I would argue that's exactly the point. It's not concerned about his inner life because the center of his joy was located outside of himself. He constantly redirects towards his origin and source being in the Father. So I would argue that in Jesus you are actually saying a very non-narotic individual because he's not engaged in a game of self-esteem. He's not in a performative posture. He's not living or searching for his identity in the gaze of others because he's secure and his identity. And I argue the secret to that, just being quickly speaking, is his baptism. I've described this as his baptismal identity or his eccentric identity and identity located outside of himself. That he writing to start receives his identity from the ground of his being. He hears the voice of his Father saying, "You are my beloved child." He doesn't perform for that. He doesn't earn it. It's not a resume. It's just a truth. And so going back to the psychological science, that's the source of his mattering. That's the source of his cosmic significance. And he operates out of that cosmic significance. And that gives him a capacity for this radical other orientedness because he's not in his head and he's not establishing his identity in a rivalry of comparison over against others. He is completely free to be available to others. So I would argue the lack of psychological interest in Jesus' inner life is sort of the point that he's not a head case in the way we tend to be. You say that healing involves telling a better story about yourself. You've already said that you're a Christian. Has the Christian story helped you with that? Like again, to go back to the science, when psychologists look at meaning in life, there's three ingredients. The most important ingredient we've already talked about, which is existential significance, cosmic mattering. The conviction that your life, your story has value. No matter what. So that means you have value on your best day and on your worst day. But the other two parts of that are coherence. Meaning in life involves being able to make sense of your life. This is the idea of telling a story about your life. And the third ingredient is purpose. That your life has a direction or a goal or an aim. So the way I describe it, my students is meaning life is comprised of three ingredients. Story, purpose, and worth. And so yes, this is going back to your conversation about spiritual faith. I do think spiritual people do have greater capacity to tell transcendent stories and to have transcendent purposes and also a transcendent source of their worth. That if you lack a spiritual framework, you're going to have to cradle that on your own. And the trouble with that from a mental health perspective is that if that story is wholly dependent upon your performance or your hero game as I describe it, then that story will be contingent. It'll be fluctuating and variable depending on how while you're doing. And that's the very thing that is going to fragileize your mental health because our lives are not always up and to the right. You don't always go from success to success. We're going to have really, really dark days. And so where do we tell a story big enough or maybe the better word would be deep enough or wide enough that can carry you through moments of isolation or sat back? For some of us, the message that it's not about you is about God was used to ignore our needs or to keep us small. So how do we differentiate healthy self-forgetfulness from harmful self-necollects? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. I think the beginning of that conversation has to be with, to be the drum here, the sense of cosmic mattering and significance. Because the religious framework can become its own kind of quest for significance. And religion becomes a performative game where I'm going to try to compete for my worth or my value before God. And you can kind of argue that's what the Pharisees are doing in the Gospels. That they have turned their religion into a performative game of winning or losing. And since they were winning that religious game, they were filled with pride. But like your point out, many of us kind of have lost that game or felt we couldn't win that game in experiencing the negative consequences of shame or guilt or social rejection because of that. So I would just go back and argue that the deep confession of Jesus' life is that sense of He is secure in the Father. His life is been grounded in that reality that He doesn't have to perform for the Father's love and He can't lose it either. And so I would argue that that would be one of the critical distinctions what you need to assess in a religious experience is whether or not that affection with God is contingent or unconditional. I really think that those are two forks in the road. And if it becomes contingent or conditional, then we're going to see all the abuse of the facts because all of those contingencies and conditionalities are going to be used against us or they will be used to control us by our families or by our faith communities so they become instruments of control. But I won't point out here what's the instrument of control is the contingency of God's affection, the fact that it can evaporate. I think there's another path of faith and spirituality where that worth or value isn't contingent and is unconditional. And that is the path I'm trying to describe here with the kind of cosmic significance or mattering where that this is an invariable truth about God's affection for us. So that I think is just a diagnostic question on the front end. Am I getting from this faith community a sense that God's affection for me is conditional and contingent or unconditional. And I think one path leads to health and one path leads to like you described a a lot of guilt and shame in a religious control. - So for those of us who are still feeling disorientated and spiritually homeless, what first step might help us move towards the kind of things that you're talking about? - You know, I have a kind of a belief that everybody lives in relation to some transcendent horizon of the true and the beautiful and the good. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest it. Everybody, wherever they're sitting and listening to right now, can see something better, something more beautiful, something more gracious, something more loving. Like, I think we can all see a better version of ourselves. I think we can all see a better version of the world that is always kind of blazing out in front of us. And I would just ask people to just pursue that horizon that I think we get tangled up in the linguistic game of God. And I think if we just kind of set that word aside for a minute and just pursue the beautiful and the true and the good, then that word might come along with us. We might be able to rehabilitate that a little bit. So that's what I would just call people to. And that's what I try to do in the book. Like obviously I'm coming from a Christian perspective, but I try to use the true and the beautiful and the good has kind of a more generous way talking about transcendence that doesn't get embroiled in these kind of religious controversies and it allows people to see a horizon beyond what might be called bad religion. Because I think in many ways, if you think about people who have deconstructed the reason why they've deconstructed is because they were seeing something better beyond where the word God was. They have pursued things that were more beautiful and more good and more true and thus they deconstructed to chase that horizon. And so rather than debate the word God, I would just point people to the better horizon for their lives and for the world and come alongside them and that pursuit. Because when you have that conversation, I think you find a lot of commonality. I think we all start coming into more alignment rather than into disagreement. And finally, Richard, in a time of climate emergency and political instability and economic uncertainty, can a more outward facing posture offer us hope, do you think? Hope is kind of a transcendent good. I do think it's hard to pursue the good without a little bit of hope, which is why I've kind of stayed connected to a faith tradition because I think being good without hope is a recipe for a lot of burnout and despair. So hope is an active faith. But I do think that we all can see that things aren't working. But my hope is that what's happening is our definitions of the true and the beautiful and good have become again very self-referential. Like good for me, good for my nation, good for my tribe, good for my ethnic group, good for my socioeconomic status. And the call to transcendence is to suggest that there is a reality and a goodness bigger than those insular and kind of self-referential definitions. So my hope is that we will not just be profits who are critical of that insularity, but are poets and artists who can portray that bigger, more beautiful thing to create a longing and desire to step out of the tribal loops that we are in and also bring obviously the natural world into that view as well. And I think there are people doing good work in that. And so yes, I do think transcendence, I have the capacity to pull us out of tribalism. Sometimes my hope ebbs and flows on that, but I have hoped that it can. Brilliant. Thank you so much. She's time to tell you Richard has been a fascinating conversation. Thanks, Tim. Appreciate it. I always like to ask about the experience of recording. How was that with Richard? What was the situation there? Yeah, it's really good. It's really relaxed. So I think David interviewed in the last couple of times he was on nomads. So it's probably been six or more years since I last recorded with him. But he remembered me, which I think says a lot about a person, because I imagine he's done quite a few interviews during that time. So yeah, it's really nice. And he was very complimentary of my interview style, which is always nice. Oh, really? Obviously kind of having a public role like this one does tend to get a lot of criticism. It's hard to believe, Anna, I know, but not everybody likes me or my interview style. So it's nice for the guests as they appreciate what you're doing. So yeah, very positive experience. I felt very pleased with the way it went. So Anna, Richard obviously was talking a lot about how in his view we tend to turn inward. So I'm wondering whether that's your experience. Do you tend to turn inward? Can you kind of relate to what he, I think, described as the wandering mind or excessive rumination? And do you kind of get a sense that that's just a personality thing? Or are you aware of cultural influences as well? Yeah, that's interesting. When I think about cultural influences, for me growing up, and I think a lot of the way my understanding, certainly my experience, I think a lot of the way that I operate now obviously is formed in childhood. My childhood is so important. But culturally, I've received a lot of messages going up that were the opposite to going inward. I was told not to, don't be too sensitive, toughen up, sort of sense of move on, being a daydream was a bad thing. And I had some difficult experiences. And as we all have growing up, and I've had some traumatic events. And I think for me culturally, there was no healthy way to process difficult emotions. It was kind of shut it down, move on, type things. So those are the messages I got, which actually were quite not that helpful. So I think in order to keep safe and to try and resolve things that I had no capacity to resolve on my own, it led to excessive remanation for me and impact my mental health. And I think the excessive remanation was because I was trying in order to keep safe and try and make sense of things that had happened. I was just hyper vigilant and therefore we just remanate as an effort to keep me safe. Yeah, in terms of personality, you know, those no mad listeners who love the anyogram, I'm an anyogram for. So I have, you know, a rich emotional life. And I feel a great deal. And so I have a natural tendency for quite a rich in a life, I'd say. And so yeah, I think I do have a tendency to sort of draw within, definitely. And the wondering mind, well, yeah, definitely, especially when I started to learn to meditate, it became really clear that the mind, you know, just sort of drifts and moves around all over the place in Buddhist teaching, you know, talk about the monkey mind and the idea that I think Buddha talks about how we're shaped by our thoughts and, you know, we become what we think, all that kind of idea. And sort of allowing the mind to become more of a friend than an enemy type of thing. So yeah, definitely. And I still live in after having practiced meditation for a long time. And I'm very aware that my mind drifts off. Yeah, how about you? Yeah, very similar. Actually, I can remember as a kid, times in the family that were very confusing or very painful. And we weren't encouraged to talk about that stuff. I think my parents, it was that kind of post-war stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on sort of vibe, you know. So I just went into myself, you know, I just went into my head and ruminated and light you said became hyper vigilant, trying to find sort of safety within myself in the midst of that environment. And I don't think I've ever been able to kind of fully come back out. I think my mind is always, always active and I can at times still excessively ruminate if I'm not careful. I went on a five day silent retreat some years ago. And I was just stunned how the volume of that kind of inner chatter, that inner rumination just went up. I guess it's because there weren't any distractions there. There's no work, no TV, no phone. You're just on your own. And I was really surprised how loud the inner chatter got. Like over the course of the retreat, it quietened right, right down, almost to kind of nothing by the end of the retreat. But that was a real kind of wake up call at like, wow, this is, there's a lot going on in your head all the time. So yeah, definitely a tendency towards a wandering mind and excessive rumination. And I can see Richard's point about those kind of deep cultural influences like Descartes and Freud. And the educational system that I experienced, it prioritized the mind, it prioritized thinking. So that kind of encouraged me to stay in my head. And yeah, in kind of contemporary culture, curating our best selves on social media and kind of, you know, I guess consumer spirituality or therapeutic religion, I'm definitely kind of susceptible to those. I mean, it's funny in it because, you know, Richard's talking about a spirituality that curves us outwards, but I can kind of, I'm not careful, I can take what he's saying and almost turning him into kind of life hacks and tricks and tips to kind of shape a spirituality that makes me feel good, do you know what I mean? Rather than one that kind of curves me outwards and connects me to the kind of wider world. So yeah, I definitely have that kind of tendency. So is that kind of in any way related to your mental health? Are you sort of aware of that connection between going into yourself and how that shapes your mental health? Yeah, I guess you got me thinking a bit about that because obviously excessive rumination is bad, but I also think, I mix, I think rumination in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think about like us, we're ruminating on this interview aren't I? I've been really pondering his words, but also trying to apply it to myself. So that is kind of reflection, introspection and rumination in a way that's quite life giving and positive. So yeah, I was confusing to me because I was talking about, I was thinking about Anne with an e, you know, Anne of Green Gables, who I'm convinced is a fool on the any gram, but I might be wrong if people might have different views. But just having a very rich internal kind of voice and life has been a source of strength for me. And I think even in my spirituality, I have tended to kind of draw within and then within connect to the divine and then that kind of union, that wanting that then gives me a connect with something way beyond myself. So that's kind of the root with which I have kind of discovered God. It was kind of through through being in nature, reconnecting to myself, knowing myself, if befriending myself in a way and then a kind of deep connection somewhere within the depth of my being and soul, there was a kind of beautiful meeting place of me in the divine and God. And so I suppose that's a very positive experience for me. And that's the root way kind of the being before doing kind of I equally, I know and as a fool, I had there's a shadow side to my my internal dwelling because sometimes within that rich internal life, if things are difficult or perhaps my hormones are out of balance or it can become a negative experience, you know, I can go on a different train of thought. But all of this is happening for me internally, you know, can be both a very positive experience or it can be a negative experience depending on what's going on and yeah, my mental health, I guess. So at the same time, I know as a fool, it's really helpful for me if I am dropping into a more negative, more difficult kind of space mentally, then kind of doing things that ground me and get me out of my head and into my body, into my hands, gardening or walking in the woods or playing with my beautiful dog, mabel, singing, playing the piano, anything that kind of gets me back into my body is super helpful and really good for me. So yeah, so listening to which it was like I was so much I agreed with at the same time, I was like, it's interesting because the way that I'm wired, perhaps my neurodiversity, I'm a highly sensitive person. For me, inward is good, but it's just the balance of what's going on inward in order to draw outward. Yeah, I'd agree with that because I'm really glad that I kind of have a rich internal life. And even though I know that can be out of balance, I'm still glad that I'm a reflective kind of analytical person. I don't think I'd have ended up doing no mad if I hadn't have been, but I'm aware that that can get out of balance. So if I'm in a stressful situation like a, you know, formal social gathering, I find those quite stressful when my kind of social anxiety is kind of peaking. I can feel myself going inwards and kind of rumination kicks in and I become hyper vigilant. And I know where that comes from, you know, it comes from kind of childhood crap around performance, especially kind of religious performance. And I can find it hard to manage that. Actually, I remember one occasion, I was waiting to preach the message at a wedding and, you know, as someone I obviously knew well and there was a lot of people I knew, there's a lot of people there. And I could feel the anxiety kind of rising as it was getting closer to me speaking. And I remember looking up and seeing the clock on the wall just to check, you know, what the time was. And I realized that as I was looking at that clock, that anxiety and stress and that kind of feeling that I was going into myself just kind of disappeared. And then from then onwards, whenever I was in those situations, I would try and kind of anchor myself to something external, something outside of myself, whether it is having a conversation with someone or just looking out the window, just going for a short walk, or whatever it was. And I kind of realized that, wow, like I can like Richard sort of described it, take a break from myself. You know what I mean? By kind of focusing on something outside of myself. Yeah. Because I think the evangelicalism I inherited played a big part in my kind of inner kind of rumination because it was a very kind of belief centric religion. So it was what was going on in my head that mattered. I had to get my beliefs right to be right. We've got, you know, we talked about it being about faith, but it wasn't really. It was about just believing the right things. So I spent a lot of time as a kid kind of anxiously ruminating on whether or not I was saved. And if I was saved, would I be saved this time tomorrow? You know, if I had lustful thoughts or whatever it was, you know, was I doing enough to please God? Was I praying enough? Was I reading my Bible enough? Was I witnessing to friends enough? You know, so I think the faith I inherited really kind of played into that as well. And so as I started to kind of deconstruct that and sort of find a spirituality that was more kind of outward focus, that definitely helped find balance, I think as well. So you've obviously spent a fair amount of time looking at the ancient mystics and contemplatives. Like Richard, did you get the sense that they were kind of turned less inward and more outward to kind of an external, sacred reality? Yeah, well, yes. And I guess the beauty of the mystics, like just the beauty of people is that they'll articulate that and practice that in different ways. That's why I find them so interesting, you know, when you read about different ones and how they found that and what they did. I think of Thomas Merton walking in his little cabin in the woods and spending a lot of time in nature. Like you were talking about the forest bathing, you know. And then you've got Julianne of Norwich who bricks herself up into a cell next to a church, you know. I mean, she's a good example because she's a good example of inward and outward. She's got that window out into the street where people would come and talk to her and get counsel and spiritual direction and I guess. And she would see, you know, people coming back from their night out and all the rest of it. But equally, she was sort of in prayer and I mean, it must have been hard for her not to have been in her own head, not given the given environment that she put herself in. I mean, obviously, that mind-standing of a mystic anyway is the idea of someone that just deeply drawn, has this deep longing for this divine connection, this oneing with the divine. So it's this kind of longing for this connection, this relationship. And obviously, that's a longing towards and stretching and reaching. At the same time, can I get the sense that the mystics have just a deep sense of self-acceptance and peace or at least that's what they're perhaps a result of their reaching towards God. I feel like there's an internal drawing, a bit like I was saying before, a kind of deep, you know, knowing of the self and a sort of self-awareness and self-acceptance and this idea of moving away from kind of a sin-based, you know, fear-driven connection to God and more of a kind of deep falling into a sense of, I am loved, I'm accepted, I am, I think, Richard reference is this the idea of mattering regardless. So yeah, and of course, if you read the mystics, it totally draws me inward, but then outward. Yeah, so is it like breathing in and out? Yeah. What are your thoughts to the mystics in terms of this outward curve idea? Yeah, I mean, I've only read bits and pieces, not nearly as much as you had. You know, I've read Brother Lawrence and Julian and Francis, and we've done a few nomad episodes on kind of the mystics and different contemplatives and stuff. And yeah, I definitely got the sense that their identity was rooted in loving presence. It's interesting in it because we sort of describe mystics like Julian and Lawrence and Francis as contemplative as if they're kind of turned inward as if they're immersed in an inner journey. But I wonder whether that's our kind of modern interpretation because when I read them, it seemed like they were kind of less self-focused than we often are. It seems like they kind of entered solitude and silence not to explore the self, but to make space to encounter the divine. That seems to be their overriding priority in my reading. So I suppose Brother Lawrence's practice in the presence of God is a good example. Like his gaze is constantly turned towards God. Like he's not checking in with his feelings. He's fixing his attention on God's presence. And to be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with checking in with your feelings. I'm just saying that I don't think that was their main focus. I think in a work for them was about becoming more tuned to this loving presence. And also, I think what's interesting, and I really got this sense strongly with Julian, that they weren't bypassing, suffering. We recently did that episode on spiritual bypassing. I think what they were trying to do was kind of locate their suffering within a larger sacred story. So it seemed like they were kind of sustained by a very kind of deeply relational spirituality. So they were kind of aware of existing in this bigger story. It wasn't a story of you are what you accomplish. It wasn't the kind of modern story of you are what you buy. It wasn't the story that I inherited that you're a sinner in need of being fixed. Their story was you're not at the centre but you are deeply loved that your value is gifted to you. It's not earned that joy is found in connection that your life is not shaped by your achievements but it's shaped by your orientation that you're oriented towards others towards God towards the world. That seemed to be the story that they would sort of try and locate themselves within. Definitely, I agree with that. I also think that I don't know if you've read any David Banner. He's written various books, the gift of being yourself, the sacred call to self-discovery, that kind of thing. I think he's a psychotherapist, a psychologist, one of those. But he talks about to love yourself, you need to know yourself. The idea of self-acceptance always proceeds genuinely in self-surrender and self-transformation. So I think in terms of knowing how we're feeling, I think having like a deep connection to yourself and having a kind of real connection and sense of love towards yourself, there has to be a level of introspection and there has to be a level of consciousness or self-awareness to be able to bring a real and honest self to God. I think sometimes we can spiritually, possibly, is it spiritually bypassing when, you know, if we don't want to deal with any of that, we can just go straight to, oh, I'm just surrendered to God. I'm just giving myself all to God. So, you know, I've always had a very, I've always talked about having quite a raw, samic relationship with God, a kind of, nothing about David and his kind of, honestly, who read the Psalms, they're really raw. They're really, there's emotion in there. And I think bringing, having integrity and bringing my authentic self to any relationship is really key in terms of feeling a depths of connection and that it can be something real and beautiful. And that's the same with my connection to the divine. So if I don't bring my honest, messy, jealous, angry, whatever, whatever emotions are delving around to me, if I don't bring that to that space in an honest and raw and real way in a kind of, this is where I'm at. And then accepting that, finding self-compassion in that and bringing that into the mix, that honesty and that connection and then the practices and that things can then, you can kind of move through that, but it's not a denial of self, it's not a denial of emotion, it's not a denial of things that you're finding difficult. It's a kind of having the trust to bring that to the spiritual space. And of course, we don't really know, we do know a bit in Thomas Merton, because if you read his journals and, you know, he kept a journal and diaries and things, because we only get the written often with the mistakes, we get either someone else's words about their work or their own kind of written things, but we don't necessarily get there in a journey, they're in a grapple and their struggles in the same way that we might hear people now, because there's more ways of being able to communicate that, I guess. In light of that, it's interesting that Richard said about the gospels, he were talking about the gospels and how it didn't really depict Jesus, Jesus is in a life. And I thought, that's interesting, given the episode on with Dan McClellan about contextual biblical contexts and stuff, because I'm conscious that the gospels, they're not written by Jesus and they're not an autobiographical depiction of his life, and it made me think that we don't really know what his inner life was like in terms of the gospels, that's not what they're portraying. And in fact, they don't really portray that in any, the Bible doesn't really go there at all. So I was a bit like, I'm not sure about that as evidence that Jesus I think Jesus would have had a very rich and beautiful internal life, because he was fully human. So he would have had some of the same struggles that we did if that's true, who just perhaps would have been better at dealing with them, perhaps, and having this union with God in such a beautiful way that enabled him to navigate being human in a different way to perhaps we do. Yeah, I guess we can only say that the gospel writers weren't interested in his inner life. They certainly didn't focus on that. There's one or two, there's the incident in Gessemony, where you get a sense of internal struggle, but the gospel writers weren't interested in that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Jesus didn't have a rich internal life. And I don't think Richard was saying that Jesus wouldn't have had a rich internal life. I think he was just saying that he wouldn't have been an inward curved person, that his sense of kind of mattering, his kind of sense of who he was and what he was about was curved outwards towards God, towards other people. Yeah, it was more connected to something beyond ourselves. That's what he's referring to. So Tim, what about you? What does inner work look like for you? And do you relate to this, how do you relate to this sort of idea of the inward and the outward curve? Yeah, I think it's a challenge. I'm not in long-term therapy. I've had three kind of lots of about 12 weeks of therapy and obviously a lot of kind of focused inner work there. I did that when things kind of bubbled up that I felt like I needed to explore with someone else. So like after lockdown, my usual kind of low-level social anxiety started to spike. And so I went to a therapist and spoke about that and that was really helpful, so that's been part of it. Probably the main thing I do is once a month I have spiritual direction. As I understand it, that's kind of about discerning and attending to the movement of God, the divine, the sacred in your life. And I find having that kind of focused hour to reflect on that really helpful. And just sort of being honest, I guess, with friends and family about where I'm at and how I'm feeling about stuff, that's the kind of regular ongoing way I suppose that inner work expresses itself for me. But yeah, sort of keeping that kind of outward focus, I think, is a challenge. Like I can kind of feel like the idea is to kind of perfect myself to sort of self-actualise all that kind of stuff as if the goal is for me to be a better me without necessarily kind of expressing that in an outward way. I had someone recently described sort of inner work as being not like a mirror where you're kind of fixated on yourself, but it's more like cleaning a window, kind of cleaning away distortions so that you can see and engage with the world more clearly. I found that quite helpful. I suppose to kind of use more Christian language, you could talk about the fruits of the spirit that curving outwards is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, their kind of relational qualities. So if the fruit isn't there, then you might think, well, perhaps the tree is wounded or stunted or diseased in some way. So perhaps the roots need tending, perhaps the branches need prune and perhaps pests need removing or whatever. So I kind of have to remind myself of that me being a better person isn't the end goal. It's about the kind of connections that that can lead me to deepen and to kind of grow, you know, connections with the people around me, with friends, with the wider world, with the divine. So that's the area where I think it kind of challenges me. Because like I said, I can kind of easily slip into the idea that the goal is to kind of just optimize my life rather than it being kind of about deepening relational connections. Yeah. What about you? I guess, as I've said, self-acceptance for me comes over self-improvement. I think I've learned through my kind of spiritual journey. Presence is so key, presence over performance. And I guess kind of change in transformation comes through presence and sort of self-acceptance and kind of rather than astriving. I think that's probably where my spirituality has led me. Like you, I've had therapy in the past, which has been extremely helpful because just because you don't process something doesn't mean it doesn't go away. And you know, it can live in in your mind, it can live in your body. So for me, having had the times of therapy to be able to kind of have more self-awareness to understand with deep compassion what my mind and my body have sort of been trying to do to keep me safe, but that actually are really not helpful for me. Like having people that can walk me through that in order to unlock unhelpful patterns of behaviors really, really helpful. And so that's something that's been transformative in terms of integrating parts of myself that have been quite exiled and isolated. And so I'm deeply thankful for the therapy. It's interesting he was talking about therapy and he was saying that some therapy can keep you stuck. And I would have perhaps liked him to expand a little bit more about that. Like what were the types of therapies referring to? Or is it the practitioner? He just said that, you know, obviously therapy is a good thing. But I'm just aware that because if there's anyone listening, it's really frightening going for therapy. I've had therapy, I've had different therapies over the years. And every time I've had to go back to the therapist, I've felt terrified. And you know, when I've talked to people about do you think therapy, there's just a lot of fear, hopefully less stigma these days. It's more. talked about, but yeah, it any barriers to getting good therapy is not good. So, you know, I suppose it's worth getting a recommendation or we're obviously we've got the wonderful therapy list here on the Nomad website, which is fantastic. Yeah, I also have spiritual accompaniment once a month, which is just a great time to have an hour to reflect on my life and spirituality and like, well, really it's just a reflect on my humanity, I think. Yeah, I do wonder that kind of self-improvement being my best self is maybe connected to the way that we've been pushed to be, I think, less naturally human. I think we're meant to be much more connected, interconnected and communal in the way that we live life. I'm sure, yeah. What about spiritual practices? You asked him about it, Tim, but what ones do you have that sort of you find, turn you outward? Yeah, this has been a big part of the kind of recent leg of my faith-shifting journey. As I've sort of already mentioned, that unhealthy inward curve, that kind of inner chatter, the rumination has been a big issue for me over the years. And like I said, the faith-hine hered, I think, exacerbated that really. And I don't think my sort of deconstruction necessarily helped to begin with because that was also a very belief-centric journey. They were just different beliefs. But yeah, I've always had that kind of sense that spiritual practices were a healthy way of expressing that, not that I have an issue with beliefs, but there was definitely a kind of an imbalance, I think, in my life. But particularly over the last kind of eight or nine months since I started this other podcast, Homegrown Faith with Hannah and Elliot, where every month we focus on a different practice, and then at the end of the month we record a conversation about it. So we've done like a month of gratitude, a month of hospitality, activism, church. That's become like a real focus now for our family life. So spiritual practices aren't something that I just kind of dip in and dip out of anymore. It's become the kind of focus of how we organize family life. And I've really noticed how that has impacted me. Like I feel a lot more peaceful over the last kind of eight or nine months, and that inner chatter has died down significantly. I think as I've become more kind of outward focused with a practice-based faith, the more kind of inner peace I've seen to experience. So we've just finished a month of activism, and now we've moved on to a month of nature connection. Very different. You know, one, there's a lot of movement, a lot of noise. The other, very still, very quiet, but both have had a similar effect of kind of pulling me out of myself. And yeah, I've felt a lot of peace. And I'm just talking about simple practices. So the kind of nature connection, one, every morning now, we have breakfast outside, and then we just spend two minutes in silence while we just listen to the birds for two minutes. It's just profound. I just feel so peaceful. As a result of starting the day, like that, you know, it really kind of pulls me out of myself. So like I said, I'm glad that I am a kind of a cerebral person, you know, I sort of accept myself for who I am. And like I said, I probably wouldn't be doing no mad if I wasn't wired that way. But I definitely feel more kind of balanced, I think, than I have before, by kind of shifting my faith more towards practice, unless focused on belief. Belief is really, really important. And I love the debates. You know, I love the kind of heady no mad episodes where we really drill into stuff. But I was just aware that it was just out of balance. So yeah, it's been a big shift for me over the last sort of, well, a few years, but particularly the last kind of eight and nine months. What about you? Yeah, well, I can relate to making that choice to kind of draw towards practices, life-giving practices. I sort of anything that brings a liveliness or life or draws me closer to love for many, many, many years now. My faith, the construction has been mainly about that. I would say, and drawing and drawing towards that. I love thinking and I love grappling and I love learning. I love all of that. But my faith and spirituality has, without doubt, been driven by more of embodied practice and practices in this way. Hence, I'm very fascinated by the mystics all these years. It's been interesting because I had a few years, he talks about what stabilizes us on the worst day of our lives. And I had a few years quite recently that were very, very difficult for various reasons. It was health scarce, but it was quite, yeah, I won't go into that why. But needless to say, it was one of the hardest times of my life and it was happening during COVID. And I just moved to Cornwall. So, you know, I didn't have long-term friends around me. We were locked in most of the time. It was really, really tough. And it just got me thinking when he said that and what stabilizes you on the worst day of your life. And obviously being someone that tried lots of different practices and spirituality in my faith, it was interesting when you go through something like that, what do you draw on and what helps. And interestingly, if you go into your mind, and I have a tendency again, you know, as a kind of habit from having trauma in the past of catastrophizing, which of course is part of rumination, I guess. And sort of thinking about worst-case scenarios to, in order to keep safe. Of course, if you're faced with some really difficult things, that's really not very helpful. It's not actually, it becomes very obviously unhelpful. So, one of the things that I drew towards actually a lot was at Cortolle's work, the power of now. And essentially, he's talking about being in the present moment, which is obviously links a lot to the words of Jesus and the mystics as well. And just learning to be in the present moment. And that, of course, is learning to not control the monkey mind or the wandering mind, but kind of befriending it in a way. And just being more aware of where the mind is going and recognising, I'm reflecting on the past. Oh, I'm in the future. I'm now attached to the future and jumping on getting overly attached to those and trying the only place I could find peace was in the present moment. Because the present moment, I was alive, the present moment, we were here, the present moment. And it's really interesting because thankfully, for me, I'm in a different place now. And I remember my spiritual accompliour was saying to me, don't lose some of the lessons that you learn through that, you know. In order to survive in that time, I just really nature, being, you know, sometimes it's coming outside and looking up at the birds or looking at the moon or smelling a flower or nature immediately brings me into the present moment and into the here and now. So anything that does that for me is helpful. And often when I'm in difficulty, you know, grand plans of like sitting for hours, meditating and doing centering prayer, which I absolutely love and have found extremely helpful, you kind of go out the window. I find improvising on the piano became profound. And then a course, gratitude or a wonder, which he talks about absolutely music and the arts, you know, moral beauty, seeing people, just ordinary everyday people doing kind things for each other or these things definitely are all part of my kind of spiritual practice of dropping me back into to gratitude and the present moment. And lastly, coming back, I didn't, we've not referenced the cosmic mattering or he talked about existential significance. I do really think that's key. It doesn't surprise me that people that have that perhaps, he talks about have a deeper sense of meaning or better mental health satisfaction because I didn't have that once upon a time and was trying to make sense of the world. And I remember, you know, how it felt when it just felt there wasn't really any reason to it all and that felt very tough, but reading about Jesus, about mattering, you know, that idea that I matter regardless of whether I'm achieving in the eyes of other people or failing in the eyes of other people, whether I mess up, whether, you know, regardless of my performance in the world or how other people perceive me, I have intrinsic value and I matter and I am loved and I am welcomed into something beautiful. And that utterly altered my whole way of me moving in the world completely and that was my first experience of the divine. And is it a step, that is the bedrock of my experience because it was so deeply profound this idea that I mattered no matter, no matter what. I first of all, I had to understand that I mattered that I was lovable and acceptable. I was welcomed into this. And once I can accept that more deeply, I'm more able to then accept that in other people. So again, that's another thing about going inward in that deep work of integration itself acceptance and enables me to be more accepting of other people, more compassionate when people struggling or finding things difficult or don't behave in the way that I think they should, you know, the more I can receive that kind of loving gaze and that deep sense of cosmic, I like the idea of cosmic mattering. I thought that's I like the wording on that. So yeah, I do, I did really resonate with him on that. Yeah, yeah, great. That's brilliant. Excellent. Thanks for the conversation today, Anna. Really enjoyed it. Thanks Tim. It's lovely. This is part of the spiritual practice as well as grappling on this stuff, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I already feel that way. And think about it and integrating it and celebrating it and learning from other people. I'm definitely going to next time I go into the woods, I might take my yoga mat and lie on the ground and listen to the bird song, having heard your experiences that's really really beautiful. Great stuff. I can't say with absolute certainty who's up next, but there is a episode that I've wanted to do for some years, but have kind of shied away from and also sort of just struggled to find the right person to talk to and that's an episode on abortion. Oh, wow. And as that's back in the news again because legislation in the UK has recently changed on that, I'll start to think again, maybe that's an issue I want to look at because it occurred to me that we're really good at talking about gender and sexuality and feminism and embodiment, but we've never on nomad discussed abortion. And it also seems like a topic that a lot of progressive voices sort of shy away from. So I want to sort of look at that, I think. So yeah, I thought in the next couple of weeks I'd try and set up a conversation around that. So tune in in two weeks time to see if I've made that happen, but if not, I'll be here talking about something else. So until then, beloved listener, goodbye. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]