Keeping secrets is bad for your spiritual health

The fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism is to covenant to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This search for truth and meaning begins in our own hearts where we keep secrets because of our fears which blocks communication with others and hampers our experience of our authentic selves.

Robert said, "I am tired of the secrets. I have kept them my whole life. I am scared of what will happen if they find out. I'd rather die than deal with the consequences. What should I do?"

Secret keeping blocks our communication with existence. Our spirit is made to hide in the corners and under the rocks. Our secrets diminish us and who we really are. Secret keeping is a sign of disrespect for others and most of all for our real self.

A sign of spiritual development is the release of secrets and a growing transparency. We become purer with nothing to hide.

I said to Robert. "You can tell me. I will keep your confidence and when you tell me your secrets we can talk about what, if anything, can be done."

Robert told me his secret and we both laughed about how silly it was. His secret was a lie he had told his grandfather and his uncle 40 years ago. His grandfather was now dead, but his uncle was still alive. I encouraged Robert to tell his uncle his secret just as an experiment to see what his uncle's reaction would be. Two weeks later, Robert and I met again and Robert was a new man. He was relaxed and happy with a grin on his face. Robert told me that when he told his uncle his secret of the lie he had told 40 years ago, his uncle laughed and said he had known all along that Robert had told a lie and his grandfather did as well. Robert said that his uncle hadn't wanted to confront him with his lie because his uncle wanted him to come to the realization that telling the truth would not change the love that grandfather and he felt for him, but this disclosure could happen when Robert became brave enough to overcome his fears of shame.

Robert laughed at his own folly of keeping his secret from those he loved for over 40 years for nothing but a life lesson about spiritual growth of monumental significance. Keeping secrets is a prison for our spirit of our own making. Purification and bringing darkness to light is what "enlightenment" is all about.

Deep down do you feel defective and inadequate or a perfect child of the Spirit Of Life?

The first principle of Unitarian Universalism is covenanting and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This principle gets marginalized and disparaged in our political society manipulated with wars on terror and attacks on "the other."

This not only a societal problem but starts in our own relationships and in our own homes and in our own hearts.

It is written in A Course In Miracles, "Every decision you make stems from what you think you are, and represents the value that you put upon yourself." T-15.III.3:3

A little further in the same chapter Jesus says, "I asked you earlier, 'Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God.'" T-15.III.5:1

One of the famous verses in the New Testament is the one in Matthew 16:15 where Jesus asks His disciples "Who do you say I am?"

Deep down we all feel defective and inadequate in some way. Our biggest fear is that we are little, small, unworthy. This generates, usually unconsciously, a feeling of shame. We are embarrassed and live with anxiety about being found out, judged, rejected, and abandoned.

It is this deep, innate, sense of inadequacy and defectiveness, which creates our human problems as we try to cover it up, hide it, and attack others before they attack us.

If this entity of defectiveness and inadequacy is who we are afraid we are, we diminish ourselves and don't understand that we are loved unconditionally by the source of our being. We have chosen our defectiveness and inadequacy by separating ourselves from our divine source thinking that we can do things on our own only to discover, as is taught in Alcoholics Anonymous in the first step, that our lives are unmanageable and that we have to turn our life over to our Higher Power and follow God's will not our own.

Patty told me several times over the course of our weekly meetings for six months that she didn't love her husband because he didn't love her but some other woman he had told her he would rather be with. Patty had left for a while with the kids, but finally went back home where her husband continued to pay the bills. He had gone to live with his mother but slowly over several weeks he moved back in after spending a few nights with Patty. He said he cared about the kids but couldn't make a commitment to her and this made Patty, she reported, angry, sad, and confused.

I teased her and said, "Why? What's not to love? You are a good person."

She smiled at me shyly as if she couldn't or wouldn't accept that she could be loved by her husband. She was competitive, jealous, and hateful of this other woman whom she believed her husband loved more than her even though his actions didn't seem to match completely her worse fears.

I said to Patty, "If you don't love yourself, it's hard to believe that he could love you and if you think he does, it is only a matter of time before he becomes disillusioned and disappointed and leaves you for someone else."

She looked at me with a perplexed look and said, "You think I am the one with the problem?"

I said, "No, it's a problem for the whole family because it affects everyone in the family and friends as well, but the only person you can ultimately control and take responsibility for is yourself and I don't think you have a good appreciation of who you really are."

Patty started to weep and I said, "What ever makes you cry, let's talk about in our next meeting."

A Course In Miracles says that we accept too little when we should only accept our magnitude. We are, after all, children of God, and bringing our will into conjunction with God's will for us, we become an unbeatable, unstoppable, glorious dynamic duo with our Creator.

Awareness of the interdependent web transcends the ego and leads us home

The seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism is the respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. The awareness, at a deep level, of this interdependent web requires a transcendence of our egos and an awareness of being one with the all and that things are exactly as they are. We become one with everything at the center and no longer move on the periphery. We have the peace of being at home and no longer marginalized or alien. We have the peace of being where we truly belong.

What does it mean when we say, "Time stood still?" or "Where did the time go? I lost track of time?" We become aware at such times that for an instant there was no past and there is no future. As the Buddhists say, "Be here now."

When time stands still we experience a taste of eternity. We experience nothing other than pure awareness of being. This experience is the epitome of a spiritual state of bliss.

In psychology, there is the concept of "flow". Flow is complete absorption in the activity one is engaged in to the extent that there is a loss of awareness of space and time.

If there is heaven, this experience of flow is the closest we might come to experiencing heaven on earth where there is no time, no past, no future, only the eternal now.

Jennifer told me that there were moments when she forgot her past, didn't worry about her future, just experienced peace. I asked her when these moments occurred. She said that these moments occurred sometimes when she was listening to music, hiking along a wooded trail, and caught up in the exhilaration of  a run. I knew what she was talking about because I have the same experiences when I am writing, riding my motorcycle, and engaging in psychotherapy sessions with my clients.

In A Course In Miracles, these experiences of time standing still are called Holy Instants. Becoming aware of Holy Instants and allowing them to occur is a sign of spiritual development. May you have many of them and enjoy the peace they bring.

At a spiritual level we don't know what anything means

Unitarian Universalism promotes seven principles, the fourth of which is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning and the seventh of which is respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. In some ways these principles are contradictory and paradoxical. The third principle encourages us to gain greater control of ourselves and our world through increased knowledge and understanding, and the seventh principle acknowledges the mystery of belonging to something much larger than ourselves which we will never understand. In grasping for knowledge and meaning we create anxiety because at a spiritual level we become aware that we don't really know what anything means.

So many of my clients come to therapy complaining of anxiety. Their physicians have prescribed various medications and they don't seem to bring the relief desired. And so the question psychotherapists get asked is "can you help me?"

The common response to this question is to recommend a course of CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or some other form of psychotherapy which are myriad. At a spiritual level these psychological approaches miss the point and may actually do more harm than good. Adding more knowledge and techniques for managing symptoms of anxiety can be somewhat ameliorating but don't really get to the root of the problem. At a spiritual level, the client needs less knowledge not more. The client needs to rise above their worries not find better ways of managing them which paradoxically makes their worries even more prominent as a focus of attention.

The spiritual strategy for dealing with anxiety is to "turn it over to their Higher Power". As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, "Let go and let God." AA teaches the Serenity prayer, "Dear God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Heather complained of her anxiety especially when she was trying to fall asleep at night and during the day when she was in groups of people. In exploring the factors that seemed to contribute to these feelings of anxiety and her attempts to deal with these factors we made a little progress but Heather still not have the peace and confidence she was seeking and both she and I were frustrated with her situation. Finally, I turned my frustration over to the Holy Spirit seeking guidance and I was inspired to ask Heather,"What is your interior spiritual life like?" Heather paused, seemed to look inward in a pensive way, and said, "What an interesting question." We went on to talk about her prayer life, her attempts at meditation (mindfulness), and she began to noticeably relax.

It seemed that Heather did have an interior spiritual life which had not been recognized and acknowledged before. In reflecting on her engagement with her interior spiritual life, her pervasive anxiety began to subside and she reported longer periods of peace.

It seemed to me that her recognition and acknowledgement and further engagement with her interior spiritual life allowed Heather to let go of her anxieties and trust her intuition of her inner Higher Power.

At the end of the day, when we die, we all have to learn to let go unless, as Bruce Cockburn sings in his great song, Last Night Of The World, "we all have to be pried loose." What ultimately are we afraid of? We unconsciously sense that we have cut ourselves off from our Creator and this separation creates anxiety and deep yearning we often can't clearly identify to go back home. Peace comes from remembering what we really are and in that re-membering we become one with the all which brings a peace beyond understanding.

The Source of our Unitarian Universalist faith

The third principle of Unitarian Universalism is to covenant to affirm and promote the acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations (and around the world.) What does this acceptance and encouragement consist of? Becoming aware of the unconditional Love of the Spirit of Life and extending it through ourselves to others. This is the "miracle" of which A Course In Miracles speaks.

The Beatles got it right in their song, Love Is All You Need. In the last analysis, after all the drama, Love is all there is. We forget this and get caught up in judgment and strife. But underneath the insanity we create, we sense there is Love. It is true that Love is all you need, but more importantly is the awareness that Love is all there is. And so why do we fret and stew and suffer?

The Buddha taught us that suffering comes from attachment. A Course In Miracles teaches us that suffering comes from separation of ourselves from God and from one another. We forget our Source and in our willfulness even reject and resent our Source. In the drama that occurs with the creations of our egos we smother the awareness of our Loving Source.

In therapy when clients are describing their problems with me I will ask "What do you make of all that?" and they will retreat somewhat and say, "I don't know." and I will say, "Yes, you do." and they will look inward and come up with an answer or if they still resist, I will say, "Guess" and they always come up with something.

We do know deep down that our source is Unconditional Love which we have forgotten. Sometimes this awareness is so repressed that we have lost contact with it, but if we ask the Holy Spirit for help we become aware of the timeless wonder of the Love that is all there is.

The truth of the fourth principle is "keeping it real."

The fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We live now in a media and digital age where "Fake news" is the accusation of the day when we become aware of anything we don't agree with. What is the truth becomes even more questionable. And so, the question "What is the truth?" becomes even more important.

 A Course In Miracles teaches that Truth is the existence of God's unconditional love which goes beyond definition. It says in the Course's introduction, "The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is our natural inheritance." Can we give up our egos and get out of our own way? The drama of our egos are blocks to our awareness of love's presence and the truth.

In dissolving our egos or rising above them, we become mirrors of God's Holiness. God's love reflects off our beings as off a mirror. As Stephen Gaskin said one time, "In the last analysis all we have to offer others is our own state of being." What condition is your condition in? Is your condition authentic, genuine, sincere?

Lying, now called "spin," has become so acceptable that we have come to expect it from politicians, advertisers, proselytizers of all stripes, and even from friends and loved ones. Back in the 60s we would ask whether a person had his/her "shit together," whether in communicating with him/her we got "good or bad vibes."

My granddaughter said to her mother upon meeting the mother of her school friend in the mall, "Mama that woman is off. Isn't something wrong with her?" Indeed, the woman was very histrionic and full of hyperbole and my 8 year old granddaughter had picked up on it. At a young age, people know the truth.

And so, we might say that "truth" is very close to authenticity. People in California talk about "keeping it real." How authentic, how real are you keeping things in your life?

Today, when someone greets you and asks, "Hi. How are you doing?" You might try responding, "I'm great. I'm keeping it real." Being authentic, genuine, sincere, is mirroring the manifestation of God's love and creating heaven on earth.

Unitarian Universalism and the good life and good death

Nothing can provide a spur to one's spiritual life like a brush with death. Facing one's mortality square in the face brings existential concerns front and center. Considering one's imminent death leads one to reflect on what one has done with one's life and what is left to do - the so called "bucket list."

For me consideration of the end of my life left me feeling full of gratitude and thinking of all the people I was grateful to and wanted to say good bye to. It dawned on me that getting to the end of one's life and being full of gratitude is the sign and largest criterion for what we call "the good life."

The "good life" is one, the philosopher's tell us, comprised of virtue. Has one lived a life based on honesty, kindness, compassion, effort, good work, appreciation of beauty, recognition of evil, and awareness of one's Higher Power?

A life of reverence is better than a life of cynicism although cynicism has its place. "Don't mistake my being kind for being a fool," is an important principle. However, love and forgiveness trumps everything else.

Facing one's imminent death focuses one's attention and priority setting becomes much more desired. What is really important? "Will this make a difference after I am dead for the world left behind" becomes the navigational North Star by which one can make decisions.

People have said that they never started living until they were faced with their imminent death. Nothing focuses one's attention as well on what is really important.

What does Unitarian Universalism have to teach us about how to die well? Having lived a life based on the seven principles and using the six sources is a blessing. Perhaps Unitarian Universalism could flourish more if it promoted its principles as a way of life that leads to a good death full of satisfaction and fulfillment because of a life well lived.