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Anthony Quintiliani, Ph.D, LADC

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January 30, 2020 By Admin

A Tribute to Ram Dass (Richard Alpert)

A Tribute to Ram Dass (Richard Alpert)

Recently Ram Dass died at his home in Maui. He was 88 years old.  He was born into a well-off Boston family, and enjoyed materialism in his early professional years.  When completing a Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford University he was still into material things. His spiritual awakening did not exist.  He was once known for his psychedelic drug experimentation while teaching at Harvard University. This experimentation occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1963 he was fired from Harvard for related reasons. In 1967 he went to India to study under Hindu Sadhu Neem, Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji. Before his teacher died, Alpert was named Ram Dass (Servant of God). He practiced bhakti yoga – pure love on the spiritual path. In 1974 Ram Dass returned to the United States, where he developed his own style of meditation, a style that radically integrated various forms of spiritual traditions.  In 1971 he published his first book, Be Here Now;  this book helped open up higher consciousness to others without the use of drug and expounded a life role of service to others. In 2004 Ram Dass relocated to Maui, where he remained for the rest of his life.  In 1997 he wrote Still Here. In some ways this book helped to clarify his deeper understanding of himself; the depth was the result of a serious stroke he suffered. His cerebral hemorrhage forced him to go deeper into self-understanding. In 2004 he survived a near-fatal infection. From his stroke on Ram Dass  was mainly homebound. His last book (with Mirabai Bush) was Walking Each Other Home:Conversations on Living and Dying. 

To the end he faced his death with great human grace, and he never gave up his view that to live must involve to love and serve others. Ram Dass, sometimes with the help of others, also established various organizations to provide teachings and service to others. Here is a short list: Hanuman Foundations (the teachings of Neen Karoli Baba); Love Serve Remember Foundation; Prison Ashram Project; Co-creating Living Dying Project and Doorway to Light; Seva Foundation (healthcare for underserved areas); and, Social Venture Network (for businesses). Yes, Ram Dass lived his talk – he walked the walk!

With the passing of Ram Dass, we have lost a great spiritual and meditation teacher. There are few and far between equivalent replacements. May he rest in great inner peace as he travels the bardo.

For more information refer to Duncan Oliver, J. (January, 2020). Ram Dass, beloved spiritual teacher, has died. In Tricycle. See tricycle.org/trikedaily/ram-dass-dies/.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC  

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton SanghaChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon

Filed Under: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Featured, People, Ram Dass, Spiritual Energy, Spiritual Experience, Spiriuality Tagged With: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI.MINDFUL HAPPPINESS, RAM DASS, SPIRITUALITY

December 24, 2019 By Admin

Journaling and Grief Process

Journaling and Grief Process

Regular brief journaling may be helpful in your grief and horror regarding significant personal losses of self and/or others. Here are the various ways it may be helpful to you.

  1. Writing and reading about your personal loss experience may help you to make sense of the process, and at the same time guide you gently on that path.
  2. Journaling may open up past and present realities – both positive and negative – about your loss experience.
  3. At times anger, resentments, and regrets will come up. These realities open you up to the depth of the grief experience. Do not linger too long there!
  4. S. Kierkegard reminded us that our lived experiences are processed forwardly, but better understood if observed backwards. Journaling helps to focus us on the present but never lets go fully of the past.
  5. It may be important to you to make your personal journal more balanced with both negative and positive experiences. For example, it may be helpful to list all simple pleasures you experienced in any given day. It may also be a good idea not to linger emotionally too long when such experiences trigger negative states.
  6. I have always found it helpful to list my personal gratitudes, even in the midst of painful loss and suffering. It is not uncommon for the most valued experiences to be linked with the lost love-object and your shared life.
  7. If fear and trepidation occur as you move through the grief process, I suggest that you break down the scary moments into smaller, more manageable periods of time, space, and emotions.
  8. Pay attention to and write about both helpful and unhelpful thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and sensations related to your grief process. Be aware keenly of small improvements in all.
  9. You may notice that as you slowly heal you spend less time journaling. This is natural.
  10. You may wish to do “grave worship” practices, or simply write many good things about the lost person.
  11. V. Frankl noted that when we cannot change the reality of a situation, we may have to change ourself.
  12. When you find yourself crying over your loss, that is a very good time to contemplate and do journaling.
  13. Reading related poetry or writing your own may help you.
  14. If and when you experience the emptiness of the void inside, do your best to find words for the experience. And, work to fill that void by re-engaging with your life as it is now.
  15. It is always a good idea to develop and practice personal rituals about your healing. Write about this in your journal.
  16. S. Becket reminded us that we must go on! As painful as it may be, we cannot stop the process.
  17. As P. Chodron noted, we must allow it all to fall apart before we can find the resilience to face what comes next. In most situations, what comes next is slow improvement in your emotional condition.
  18. Rest in peace with your breath, and do more meditation or yoga if that suits you well.
  19. You may wish to visit optionb.org or other sites that support grief work.

Refer to Sandberg, S. and Grant, A. (2017). Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. New York: A. A. Knopf, pp. 58-76.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC  

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton SanghaChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon

Filed Under: Activities, ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Calming, Coping, Crisis Resilience Skills, Emotions, Featured, Gratitude Meditation, Grief, Holiday Coping, Inner Peace, Journal Writing, Learning, Letting Go, Meditation, MIndfulness, MIndfulness Activities, Mourning, Natural Healing, Self Care, Spiriuality, Stress Reduction Tagged With: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, GRATITUDES, GRIEF PROCESS, JOURNALING, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, RESILIENCE

December 18, 2019 By Admin

How to Offer Personal Tribute to Those Who Have Died

How to Offer Personal Tribute to Those Who Have Died

The Four Noble Truths tell us sobering news. There is suffering, and impermanence of all things including us and our loved ones. Below I have listed several thing you can do to HONOR a person you have lost.  Here is the list.

  1. Recall a special time before or at the time of death, and consider it a sacred place in space and time. Honor it and the person with the complete softness of your loving heart.  Do this now if you wish to.
  2. Pray for the person you have lost – and the goodness in that lost relationship.  You can do this if you are agnostic, even atheist. The prayer is to honor the loved person not to one of many gods.
  3. Go to your soft, suffering heart and fill it with joyous remembrances of your time with the person. Yes, the person has moved beyond; however, your internal and emotional memories are quite vibrant. They have made a special place for them self in your soul.
  4. You can carry this to a deeper level by seeing and touching special objects that belonged to the deceased.  Or, you can set up a small shrine in your home to pay respect and honor whenever you wish to do so.
  5. Know that the deceased person would want you to recall your joy, so light up your senses and recall in mild meditative state the pleasant and happy experiences you both shared.  If something happened with them that made you laugh, go there! This is what they wish for you.
  6. Listen to the music the lost person enjoyed, or read something inspirational.
  7. Think carefully of all the ways you could say goodbye again. Do it now if you wish to.
  8. Recall the smile on their face, and smile back. You may be surprised at how powerful this experience may be.
  9. Dedicate meritorious behavior to them. If you wish, set up some special program or fund to champion causes they cared about. The financial level is far less important than the emotional level of actually doing something.
  10. Write a special tribute about them in a journal. Write often, and read what your have written again and again.
  11. Lastly, work carefully to discover some ways to celebrate that person’s life and your relationship. Celebrate often and be calm within the warmth of your love.

For more information refer to Reoch, R. (1997). To Die Well: A Holistic Approach for the Dying and Their Caregivers. New York: Harper. See also Holecek, A. (2013). Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition. Boston: Snow Lion, pp. 312-314.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC  

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton SanghaChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon

Filed Under: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Compassion, Coping, Death, Deep Mindfulness, Featured, Gratitude Meditation, Grief, Letting Go, Meditation, Mourning, Rituals, Self Care, Spiriuality, Tributes Tagged With: HONOR, LOVING, OFFERINGS, PRAYER, TRIBUTES

October 30, 2018 By Admin

Setting Emotional Boundaries from Work to Life

Setting Emotional Boundaries from Work to Life

Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC

Sometimes setting emotional boundaries from the psychotherapy room to your life outside of work can be a difficult thing to do. Shifting from “experience near empathy” (Kohut), “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers), “hovering attention” (Freud), “the holding environment” in “intersubjective space” (Winnicott),  and compassionate awareness to emotional distancing, separation, and dispassion is no easy task. In more in-depth clinical interactions, the process of projective identification between therapist and client may drain your emotional resources; sometimes being “as if” you were the experiencer of your client’s pain and suffering can take a serious toll on your own emotional resources. At time the therapist’s own emotional life lacks the quality of connection experienced in the therapy session. Success in setting emotional boundaries is a very important self-care skill. It may determine your success, failure, joy, or misery in the clinical work you do. It will definitely prevent most case of “burn out.”

Therapists may wish to complete a brief self-care assessment at the end of each emotionally demanding day. Some things to check are as follows:

  1. Are you taking care of your own physical, psychological, spiritual, and emotional needs?
  2. Are you using mindfulness, self-compassion, clinical supervision, or journaling to get to know how you are doing?
  3. Are you valuing yourself enough regarding self-rewards, positive self-talk, cognitive and behavioral restructuring?
  4. Are you giving yourself time to experience some form of creativity?
  5. What about your spiritual self?
  6. Do you spend quality time in nature, among the awe of it all?
  7. Are you involved in the type of quality relationship you desire?
  8. Be sure to act on your own behalf if you find problems in the above areas.

Another very powerful process is to develop improving self-compassion for yourself, often blurring the inner boundaries of your own emotional life experience and the clinical work you do. Therapists are, in the end, only people with a set of specific helping skills. We suffer just like other people do. Hopefully, our training and experience have given us a bit of a positive edge here. Here are some things you may wish to consider to improve your own level of self-compassion.

  1. Using mindful awareness, observe the level and intensity of your self-criticism.
  2. Let go of personal resistance to being real, being your true self.
  3. Get out of your head! Get out of the past!
  4. Do loving kindness meditation often.
  5. Recognize your own difficult emotions (shame, anger, revenge, trying to control others, etc.), and simply be with them as a sacred part of who you are and be real about it. Use emotion regulation to improve things.
  6. Practice much more self-appreciation.
  7. Do not dwell on the pain and suffering of your past. All that stuff probably made you a stronger person.
  8. Welcome and LOVE all of you, with special attention to the sacred quality of your own life suffering.
  9. When you experience or re-experience anxiety, depression, addictive behaviors, or trauma – hold an open, soft heart for it.  Then make changes to improve your life experience.
  10. Always get help when you need it, and do your best not to dwell on what you have little control over.
  11. Be certain too make changes to improve self-compassion regarding any problem areas above.

Fo more information refer to Norcross, J. C. and VandenBos, G. R. (2018). Leaving it at the Office: A Guide to Psychotherapist Self-Care. New York: Guilford.  Neff, K. and Germer, C. (2018). The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive. New York: Guilford.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton SanghaChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

 

Filed Under: Boundries, Featured, Leadership, MBSR, Mindful Awareness, MIndfulness, Self -Kindness, Self Care, Self Compassion, Self Esteem, Spiriuality, Stress Reduction, Therapist, Therapy, Well Being Tagged With: EMOTIONAL BOUNDRIES, MBSR, SELF CARE, THERAPY.

January 16, 2017 By Admin

Significance of Beads in Spiritual & Religious Practices

Beads: Significance in Spiritual and Religious Practices

The significance of religious and spiritual practices in the world is enormous.  Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist practitioners make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. The  CIA estimates are that Christians (33%), Muslims (23%), Hindus (14%) and Buddhist (7%) make up the majority of religious followers. Atheists and non-religious believers make up only 12% of the world’s population.   About 11% of the world’s population practices other spiritual and religious traditions.  ALL of the major spiritual and religious traditions have used beads in their practices.  Below I have listed some details about the nature of spiritual/religious beads used by major groups. As you will see the use of beads in spiritual and religious practices is very common.

  1. Roman Catholics use rosary beads (from rose petal “beads” in the rose garden or rosarium) – usually 54 + 5 beads. When beads are used to recite 150 psalms, they are 150 beads long and called patermasters.
  2. Muslims use their misbaha/masbaha, tasbih, subha  beads – usually 99 or 33 beads.
  3. Hindus (from 500 BCE) use mala beads – usually 108 (the cosmos) or 27 beads.
  4. Buddhists (mala) for 108 worldly desires, and Sikhs have generally maintained the Hindu “counts.”
  5. Baha’i uses beads – usually 19 or 99 + 5 beads.
  6. Orthodox Jews, use tassels tallit or tzitzits (Moses – to remember the commandments of god).
  7. Ortodox Greek and Russian Christians use knots as beads – Greek prayer ropes are called kombologian, and Russian prayer ropes are called chotki – Greek knots are 33, 50 and 100 while Russian knots are 33, 100, and 500.
  8. African Masai, Native American, and Greek and Russian Orthodoxy also use beads.

So why use beads in spiritual and religious prayer practices?  There are many, many reasons why beads are used in these spiritual traditions.  However, I will note just a few. Here are some reasons.  Beads are used:

  1. To maintain your counting in prayers practices – in praising the object of your beliefs;
  2. To confirm your level of dedicated practice by repetitions;
  3. To deepen your personal belief by mantra-like or out loud speaking;
  4. To enhance your level of faith by deeper and deeper contemplations about your beliefs; and,
  5. To deepen practice by repeated, deeper contemplations (called lectio divina ) in Catholicism.

Here are some other reasons why beads are used. These reasons deal more with contemporary neuroscience research than with ancient and current religious practices.  These are:

  1. Enhanced learning in frontal and prefrontal areas by verbal/cognitive repetitions;
  2. Temporal area strengthening by hearing the words you are saying either to yourself or out loud;
  3. Multi-sensory applications to bead mantra work – using fingertips (huge representation in the brain) to touch beads as you repeat verbal statements over and over again;
  4. Multi-sensory applications open up pathways for brain plasticity, so your brain changes over time to make your religious practices and beliefs stronger and stronger over time;
  5. Possible multi-sensory brain coherence – lighting up neurons across various brain regions in your practices, which allows even more powerful plasticity to occur about your practices and beliefs; and,
  6. Ritualize the spiritual or religious practices, thus making the objects of practice more sacred.

So, now you have some information about why beads are so, so common in spiritual and religious practices. This same information is the basis for use of beads in contemporary spiritual practices without religious connections.

For more information refer to Dorff, V. (2014). The Little Book About Big Things: World Religion. New York, NY: Fall River Press. See also www.dharmabeads.net for more information. Retrieved May 2, 2016.

 Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness  

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New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Filed Under: Activities, Benefits of Meditation, Children & Youth, Contemplative Practices, Featured, Meditation, Meditation Activities, MIndfulness, MIndfulness Activities, Practices, Religion, Rituals, Self Care, Spiritual Energy, Spiritual Experience, Spiriuality Tagged With: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, BEADS, MEDIATION, PRACTICES, PRAYER, RITUALS, SPIRITUAL

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