Medicine for the Soul: Growing Stronger in Broken Places
Transformation can, among other things, be compared to a fire burning away what once was. These experiences of change are the ones that leave us with deeply etched memories.
When You Can't Seem to Reach Your Goal: Get Going — Or Let Go?!
It’s painful to find yourself seriously stuck. Despite doing all the right things, inexplicably you’re unable to reach a long-held goal, whether it’s in your career, your relationships, your finances, your creative life, your health, or your personal growth.
How To Step Back and Maintain a Larger Perspective
When we obsessively focus on something that is, or isn't, within our control, it can feel like we're carrying a giant boulder on our backs. Instead, we need to treat that one aspect of our lives as small rocks in our pocket so we can...
Blissful Innocence: Ignorance Is Bliss
We have heard that "ignorance is bliss," and we usually judge and criticize ignorant people. Yet there is a form of ignorance that serves us well, and that is ignorance of limiting beliefs. A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon declared, "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
Digital Hoarders: We've Identified Four Types – Which Are You?
How many emails are in your inbox? If the answer is thousands, or if you often struggle to find a file on your computer among its cluttered hard drive, then you might be classed as a digital hoarder.
Where A Tattoo Is Located Makes A Difference Energetically
Tattoos are something you are going to wear and stare at for a long time. Once you decide to get a tattoo, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the body’s energy zones and how they interlock together as one consciousness.
I Spoke to 99 Big Thinkers About What Our World After Coronavirus Might Look Like – This Is What I Learned
Back in March 2020, my colleagues at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University thought that it might be useful to begin thinking about “the day after coronavirus."
Begging or Choosing? The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Create It
We always have many choices before us. If we believe we must grovel, plead, or struggle to manifest our dreams, these choices can seem overwhelming, even frightening. But if we realize that every choice before us represents the universe inviting us to remember who we really are, and...
5 Ways To Manage Your Screen Time and Heavy Reliance on Technology
With numerous countries back under severe pandemic restrictions, many of us once again find ourselves questioning whether our heavy reliance on technology is impacting our wellbeing.
What Works For Me: What Do I Really Want More?
As the publisher/editor of InnerSelf, I read a lot of material dealing with personal empowerment. And some of the things I read really resonate with me, and I end up adopting them. It's sort of like creating a tapestry using threads coming from various sources.
Telehealth Care In Mental Health Has Been Boosted Due To Coronavirus
Australia’s health system has embraced telehealth during the coronavirus pandemic, with patients getting care online, by video or by phone. But what happens to this post-pandemic is uncertain.
Are You Running Your Life on "Shoulds" and Fear of Rejection?
The bummer about 'shoulds' is that when we are dominated by them, we are also dominated by the fear of being rejected or abandoned in some way, because that's the core emotional fear that activates many of them. These ongoing fears leave many of us drained and exhausted...
Slow Down, Stop Rushing, and Celebrate Life
People are in such a rush these days, living on the fast track. Talking fast, eating fast, moving fast. What a difference from sixty years ago. Did you know you'll probably do more in this year with appointments, people to meet, places to go than your grandparents did their entire lives?
How Does Your Brain Wake Up From Sleep?
When you’re asleep, you can seem completely dead to the world. But when you wake up, in an instant you can be up and at ‘em.
When We Become a Dreaming Society: The Stronger the Imagination, the Less Imaginary the Results
In a dreaming culture, dreams are valued and celebrated. The first business of the day, for most people, is to share dreams and seek to harvest their guidance. The community joins in manifesting the energy and insight of dreams in waking life.
Is What You Do in Alignment with Who You Really Are At Your Core?
Each event in our life builds off other events emotionally so that they create our core themes. Every perception, drama, trauma, relationship (both the good and bad ones), fear, belief, success, and failure are rooted in our core themes. They're all just waiting for ...
6 Ways To Reboot Your Brain After A Hard Year
There’s no doubt that 2020 was difficult for everyone and tragic for many. But now vaccines against COVID-19 are finally being administered – giving a much needed hope of a return to normality and a happy 2021.
Three Misleading Ideas about Past Lives and Life-Between-Lives
Over the years, I heard clients blame everyone and everything for the issues they were dealing with in their lives, but they seldom considered the possibility that this was what they put into motion in their life-between-lives session.
Three Ways to Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions by Building 'Goal Infrastructure'
Every year most of us make New Year’s resolutions. Eat healthier. Exercise regularly. Invest more in valued relationships. Learn a language. And so on. Often they are the same resolutions as last year. Why do our resolutions often so swiftly wither away?
The New Year Lays Gifts Upon The Altar Of Your Heart
The beginning of a new year offers a poignant opportunity to set the priorities that will carry us through the year. We succeed or fail based on what we hold dear. Choose meaningless priorities, and you become the heir to pain. Live from what you value, and your life becomes a celebration of purpose.
How To Outsmart Your Covid-19 Fears and Boost Your Mood In 2021
After a year of toxic stress ignited by so much fear and uncertainty, now is a good time to reset, pay attention to your mental health and develop some healthy ways to manage the pressures going forward.
9 Tips To Give Yourself The Best Shot At Sticking To New Year's Resolutions
For many cultures, the dawn of the new year is marked not only with celebration, but also the opportunity for personal reflection and growth.
Humans Learn From Mistakes — So Why Do We Hide Our Failures?
A few years ago I had the pleasure of listening to the highly-influential legal scholar Cass Sunstein speak in the flesh. Cass wrote the best-selling book Nudge, along with his long-time collaborator Richard Thaler.
The Intersection of Prosperity and Life Purpose is Your Financial "Sweet Spot"
We all have a desire for wealth and prosperity. But there’s a deeper meaning to this desire than simply accumulating material goods or fattening our bank accounts. When properly aligned with our purpose, passion, and high-value gifts, our desire for wealth and prosperity is like a compass pointing us toward our greater purpose in the world.
New Year’s Resolution Tips For 2021: Focus On Getting To The End Of Covid-19
Welcoming the new year may feel a bit different this year, given the challenges of 2020 and the inability to celebrate together.
How Can We Transform Our Perspective of Negative Conditions?
A negative condition is anything you perceive as lacking in joyful experience for yourself. Another person may perceive that experience to be joyful and a definitely positive condition. Conditions are relative, for in essence, there is no reality, but simply your perception of it. All is relative.
5 Strategies To Reduce Addiction-like Behaviours Over The Holidays
With the pressures of the holiday season, rising COVID-19 rates and the resulting social isolation from friends and family, people can easily fall into addictive or excessive behaviours.
The Why and How of Successful Affirmations: Manifesting the Ideal Through Practice
Affirmation is a skillful means for transforming energy, and it begins with the deletion of negative statements about self and others. A negative statement freezes one in time and space without room for harmonization. Affirmations need to be unambiguous, simple and clear statements of one's intentions.
"I Am An Introvert": The Myths of Introversion
It is natural to want to fit into a category that gives us an identity, especially if that identity provides a better understanding of ourselves and others, and explains the nature of our interactions. But be careful of typecasting yourself. Instead, try to ...
Where Have All The Hunter-Gatherers Gone?
New advances in anthropology and paleontology have answered one of the most vexing questions about the Hunter/Farmer theory: “Why is the leftover Hunter/ADHD gene only present in a minority of our population, and where have all the hunters gone?”
Hieroglyphics, The Word of Gods, Magic, and Power
Words are magic. Thoughts create actions that manifest forms. No matter what language you are using—English, Chinese, or the language of hieroglyphs—thoughts are things.
A Visual Illusion That May Help Explain Consciousness
How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it?
Sherlock Holmes and The Case of Toxic Masculinity: What Is Behind The Detective's Appeal?
Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective of all time. Since he was imagined into creation in 1892 by the young Scottish doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, there has been hardly a decade in which a play, television series, film or book about Sherlock Holmes has not been produced.
Should I Stay or Should I Go: How 'City Girls' Can Learn To Feel At Home In The Country
A move to the country is often presented in popular culture as an idyllic life, a place where you can escape the pressures of the city.
Hate Christmas? A Psychologist's Survival Guide For Grinches
A few years ago, I came into work on December 1 to find a bag on my desk labelled “Karen’s Christmas Intervention”. It contained many Christmas themed gifts and challenges...
Little Kids Prefer Fractal Patterns From Nature
By the time children are three years old, they already have an adult-like preference for the visual fractal patterns common in nature, report researchers.
Losing Our Appetite For Struggle and Reclaiming Our Divine Birthright
Since we originated in the essence of infinite and unconditional love of self, you may be wondering, then, "How did we end up stuck in this experience of life as a struggle?"
Always and Never: Two Extremely Powerful Words
'Always'. 'Never'. These are probably the two most powerful words in the English language. Even more powerful than yes and no, since saying yes (or no) applies to the moment or subject at hand, while saying 'always' or 'never' sets the tone for everything to come. The two words can...
Living Your Truth and Your Evolutionary Calling
When you live your truth, you know who you are, and you own it. The person you are inside and the person you are to the world are one and the same. You are no longer reluctant or afraid to stand for what you really are.
Why Living In The Future, Rather Than The Past, Is Key To Coping With Lockdowns
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a tough year for people across the globe, with billions facing at least one lockdown. And it’s not over – there may be further lockdowns needed in the new year.
Hypocrisy Is No Match For Partisanship: From The White House To Ancient Athens
Numerous studies show that people respond with outrage against public figures once their hypocrisy has been discovered.
Afraid of the Unknown: How Important Is Change In A Person's Life?
Naturally we are scared to move into the unknown because our personality relies a lot on the symbols, psychological structures, and associations we develop. We become comfortable in a society, and with a group of people -- work mates, family, and friends. However, embracing change is a matter of giving away or letting go of old traits.
A New Way of Belonging: Calling Forth the Best in Every Person
The level of hunger for “belonging” being expressed by a large number of white Americans today reflects a primary drive all people feel to belong to a family, a tribe, a social group, or a welcoming community system.
How Can We Foster Deeper Connection and Make Love-filled Memories during this Potentially Difficult Season?
We're headed into holidays in a year unlike any year we've ever known. We've got a mountain of challenges, with grief and disappointment making themselves at home in our hearts. Some of us feeling even more divided from our families than ever. Most of us longing to have loved ones gather. All of us navigating uncharted waters.
Something Wonderful Is Happening
News, by definition, is mostly bad. If we believed only what we read, heard, and watched on mainstream news and through social media, we’d become convinced that our world is in the worst shape it’s ever been and that human beings are a woeful species doomed to imminent demise.
Why Concussion Can Accelerate Ageing of the Brain
The serious harm caused by concussion in sport first became apparent among the “punch-drunk” boxers who suffered repetitive blows to the head over the course of their fighting careers.
A Philosophical Idea That Can Help Us Understand Why Time Seems To Be Moving Slowly
Many people feel that their experience of time has been a bit off this year. Even though the clocks are ticking as they should be, days stretch out and some months seems to go on forever.
Abuse: Working with Painful Memories and Transforming the Memory
Abuse is deeply shattering to the body, psyche, and spirit. The process of opening up and letting go, of becoming aware, can break up the painful memories that arise from abuse, whether they've been there for a long time or are just beginning to arise.
Living A Whole Life Is A Choice You Make and A Stand You Take
Choosing to live and create a whole life in this current overculture is a radical act, one that requires you to consciously, courageously, and consistently make choices that support the whole to thrive — including, at times, taking a fierce stand to longer accept anything less than a whole life.
We're Not As Grinchy As We Think: How Gift-giving Is Inspired by Beliefs-based Altruism
’Tis the season for gift-giving and for the scrooges among us to complain about the wastefulness of gift-giving. Why give gifts, they say, when people know what they want better than anyone else?
Going Out Into Nature and Finding Peace in the Rhythm of the Natural World
Over the years, I've informally polled thousands of people about the things they do to take care of themselves. Going out into nature is at the top of the list. Returning to the natural world is my favorite self-care activity as well, and has been since childhood.
Working in Harmony with Life-Force Energy
As humans, everything we do requires energy. We need energy each morning to open our eyes, get out of bed, and plan what we’ll do next. From our first month in the womb to our ending days, our bodies use this energy to keep life flowing. You can think of this energy like fuel and your body the vehicle.
Why Are We Here? How and Why We Use Social Media
Why are we here? Ha! I know it sounds like one of those belly button gazing type questions that gets us analyzing ourselves into a corner. But what I mean by "Why are we here?" specifically is looking at our use of social media.
The Silver Lining: Reflecting on 2020's Challenges and Opportunities
We all can't wait to be done with the year 2020. Looking back over all the challenges this year brought to people both in the U.S. and across the globe, we're not likely to feel much fondness for the previous 12 months. And yet, we may find some positive aspects...
3 Reasons For Information Exhaustion and What To Do About It
An endless flow of information is coming at us constantly: It might be an article a friend shared on Facebook with a sensational headline or wrong information about the spread of the coronavirus.
Hoarding, Stockpiling, Panic Buying: What's Normal Behavior In An Abnormal Time?
Symptoms of depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders have emerged or worsened for many during the pandemic.
Two Paths and Five Ways to Increase Joy
Whether you describe the way you feel as jubilant, happy, elated, ecstatic, or euphoric, the underlying emotion is JOY. Joy is an emotion. It's so lovely to feel this emotion and to tell the truth, it's been a while since I've...
Are You Holding Yourself Back From Expressing Your True Self?
We have repressed a lot of our emotions, whether they are considered 'good' or 'bad' ones. Sometimes we hold back on expressing our love for fear of being misunderstood, or perhaps thinking the timing is not 'right'. Most commonly, we have been taught to hold back on our 'negative' emotions — fear, anger, sorrow, pain, etc.
The Matrix Is Already Here: How Social Media Promised To Connect Us, But Left Us Isolated, Scared and Tribal
While the algorithms and my brain kept me scrolling on the endless feeds, I was reminded of what digital marketers like to say: “Money is in the list.”
Seeking and Seizing Opportunities To Do Good: Learning to Find the Sacred in the Ordinary
It is no accident that you are working in your present organization or that you are working with and for the people you do. All of this has been arranged by you -- by your Higher Self -- to give you as many opportunities as possible to learn and to grow spiritually.
The Law of Least Effort is the 4th Spiritual Law of Success
Least effort is expended when your actions are motivated by love, because nature is held together by the energy of love. When you seek power and control over other people, you waste energy. But when your actions are motivated by love, there is no waste of energy, your energy multiplies and accumulates.
3 Roots of Overwhelm, Burnout, and Self-Sacrifice
What follows are three of the root causes at the core of the burnout cycles, self-sacrificing choices, and unsustainable realities.
Take Yourself On and Do The Work
Whether unconscious or conscious, we are all hungry for more depth of connection and more purpose. People often choose therapy as a last resort to heal their discomfort. My group therapy practice is built on the concept of taking yourself on, or, as we call it in my group, “work”.
How Job Policies That Offer Generous Unemployment Benefits Create More Happiness
Losing one’s job undoubtedly makes someone less happy, a feeling tens of millions of people around the world are experiencing right now.
Much Like Dorian Gray's Portrait, Trump Is A Reflection Of America’s Soul
As many have noted, United States President Donald Trump embodies the very worst American traits. If one were to caricature America’s vices, from bombast to narcissism, heartless individualism and toxic machismo, one would come up with someone who looks very much like Trump.
The Power of Belief: Is It All in Your Head?
Just as true happiness is not simply the absence of problems but an internal life state that enables us to challenge any obstacles to happiness that come our way, health is not simply the absence of illness. The important issue is whether we defeat sickness when it comes or whether sickness defeats us...
Will I Or Won't I? Scientists Still Haven't Figured Out Free Will, But They're Having Fun Trying
In 1983, American physiologist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that became a landmark in the field of cognitive sciences.
Our Light-filled Ancestors: We Are The True Potential of Our Ancestors
Since the ancestors in our lineage have not been honored in our religion for many years and were often confronted with adversities in their era, we have forgotten where we come from, who we are, and what potential lies dormant within our lineage.
What The Day of The Dead Tells Us About The Aztec Philosophy of Happiness
Growing up in the United States, I remember on Halloween my mother used to sa y, “Honey, this is not just a day for costumes and candy. You must also remember your relatives.
The Power of Erasure: A Magic Word that Erases Unhappy Conditions
There is a magic word that can remove from existence any unhappy condition of mind, body, and affairs. This tiny word is power-packed and should be used instantly to negate any seeming evil thought, word, or appearance before it can establish a foothold in consciousness.
Why Sleep Experts Say It's Time To Ditch Daylight Saving Time
For most of the U.S., the clock goes back one hour on Sunday morning, Nov. 1, the “fall back” for daylight saving time. Many of us appreciate the extra hour of sleep.
5 Ways The Pandemic Could Be Affecting Your Mental Health
In addition to its staggering impact on physical well-being and mortality, COVID-19 is also taking an unprecedented toll on our mental health.
The Spiritual Heart and The Cosmic "I": Being of Service to the World
When kundalini awakens beyond the heart, our perception deepens and we open to psychic capacities. It is through the third eye that we recognize and move away from the noise and chaos of the world...
The Sixth Huna Principle: Mana -- All Power Comes From Within
The sixth Huna principle, Mana, states that there is nothing outside us that is more powerful than we are, and there is nothing that can’t be touched by our influence. Every dynamic action that we take contains an inner spark of universal power that spans the galaxies and beyond.
Breaking Down or Breaking Through? Choosing Our Attitude
For every setback, look for opportunity. That is a provocative statement, hard to accept when you feel betrayed or shamed or in the depths of grief or loss. When you have lost your job, or your partner has walked out on you, or you have made the worst mistake of your life, how can you accept the idea that by what you fall, you can rise?
Daylight Saving Time: Five Tips To Help You Better Adjust To The Clock Change
Daylight saving time was first implemented during the first world war to take advantage of longer daylight hours and save energy.
A Different Kind of Midlife: Facing Feelings and Letting Go of Illusions
By your mid-30s or 40s, you wake up every morning and you feel like the same person. Your environment, which you relied on so heavily to remove your pain or guilt or suffering, is no longer taking away those feelings. This is the midlife crisis that most people know about...
Why Solitude Can Be Helpful Even If You Didn't Choose It
Since March 2020, many of us have got closer to experiencing the kind of solitude long sought by monks, nuns, philosophers and misanthropes.
How Successful Golfers Stay Focused On Those Crucial Shots
Sporting history is littered with tales of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Famously, the US golfer Doug Sanders was a three-foot putt away from winning the 1970 Open Championship in St Andrews. He missed.
Are You Waiting for Someone or Something to Rescue You?
The pattern I have seen repeated both in myself and in others around me is what we could call the sleeping beauty/frog prince complex. It consists of waiting for something or someone to deliver us from whatever situation we have gotten ourselves into.
Thriving In The Face of Deep Instability
It is our challenge to find strength and meaning in the tragedies, fears and confusions that confront us. In discovering ways of dealing with those inevitable events, we have the possibility of alchemizing our experience, turning the base metal of our pain into the gold of wisdom, understanding, enrichment and purpose.
How To Shift Away from Overwhelm, Burnout, and Self-Sacrifice
The first step in changing what’s not working for you is awareness — becoming conscious of what you are currently blind to. You simply cannot change what you cannot see. But when you do see what was previously hidden, you gain the power to change it.
Can We Actually Learn To Live With Coronavirus?
As we move into the last quarter of 2020, the virus that has defined this troubled year is showing no signs of going away.
Get Rid of Stress by Discovering and Living Your Spiritual Purpose
Each soul incarnated into a specific form on earth for a unique purpose. Your journey is now and exists at this moment, whether you realize it or not. It will be more enjoyable if you consciously pursue your spiritual purpose to bring the world to Love. Consciously following your spiritual purpose brings you ultimate...
Connecting with Your Life Purpose, Personal Goals, and Free Will
I started asking the crowds who came to my workshops two questions: “Who believes they have a life purpose?” and “Who knows what their purpose is?” Without exception, everyone believed they had a purpose yet only a small fraction knew what it was.
Is The Coronavirus Cure Worse Than The Disease?
In the conquest of Mount Everest anything less than 100% success is failure, but in most communicable diseases we are not faced with the attainment of such absolute goals, but rather with trying to reduce the problem to tolerable levels, as quickly as possible, within the limits of available resources
Going From Incoherence, Competition, and Chaos to “Holotropism”
The coherence-building process in the universe is a real but subtle process. In the contemporary world it is often diverted and dominated by existential, more directly survival-oriented forces and impulses. These forces and impulses tend to be self-centered and competitive.
Young People's Mental Health Deteriorated The Most During The Pandemic, Study Finds
Public health responses to the pandemic have focused on preventing the spread of the virus, limiting the number of deaths and easing the burden on healthcare systems.
Changing...Instantly: It's A Lot Easier Than You Think
Mechanical behaviors are old ways of doing things that once worked, or appeared to have worked, in situations that were stressful or in situations that were actual or perceived as potentially endangering your survival.
How Can We Find Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives?
Our culture invariably supposes that action and accomplishment are better than rest, that doing something -- anything -- is better than doing nothing. Poisoned by this hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we can never truly rest.
Learning to Process Emotions Safely and Successfully
One of the biggest problems that people bring to therapy is not knowing what to do with a wide range of feelings, including sadness, anger, ecstasy, fear, and depression. Many visits to medical doctors are attempts to deal with feelings unable to be expressed or released. Such feeling problems are quite common.
During These Weird, Wild and Wonderful Times
How are you doing in this time? My experience is that it’s weird, and wild, and wonderful in certain ways, and really, really challenging in others. Grief, loss, uncertainty. Inspiration, creativity, a feeling of a “pause” that is ongoing. These are some of the things I’ve been feeling, and I’m hearing from many people who are experiencing similar energies and emotions.
Stepping Into Our 5D Frequency For Planetary Transformation
By nature, we are 5th dimensional humans. This has been encoded in our DNA. 5D humans live from their heart’s wisdom. They feel fully empowered and emit unconditional love and non-judgment for themselves and all others.
How to Break the Spell and Set Yourself Free
We need to examine the spells that hypnotize us and break them when they hinder us. Spells are words, deeds and judgements that go unquestioned, undigested and unchallenged. It could be a doctor informing you that you have three months to live, a friend saying your marriage won’t work, your mind telling you that...
Life Is Always Trying To Teach Us Exactly What We Need To Learn
If we accept that life is always trying to teach us exactly what we need to learn, we can view everything that happens to us as a gift. Even experiences that are uncomfortable or painful contain within them an important key to our healing, wholeness, and prosperity.
The Force Is With Us: Gateways to Soul Power
Nothing can happen without the power to make it happen, and if you and I are to work at living more abundantly and soulfully, we will need not only a lot of love, determination and psychological maturity, but also a lot of power. Indeed, having power is very important and it serves as a central gateway that can potentially...
One Way To Solve Society's Most Urgent Problems
Innovation is a critical part of tackling problems in areas as diverse as transportation, housing, public health and energy.
How 3 Prior Pandemics Triggered Massive Societal Shifts
Before March of 2020, few probably thought disease could be a significant driver of human history.
How Science Untangles The Elusive Power and Influence of Hope In Our Lives
On Erin Gruwell’s first day as a high school English teacher, she faced a classroom of 150 “at risk” freshmen. Most of these kids, statistically, were going to fail. They were tough, their young lives already defined by poverty, gangs, violence and low expectations.
Traditional dancers celebrate Hari Raya, the end of Ramadan. Photo by Aniq Danial for Unsplash, CC BY-ND
On Erin Gruwell’s first day as a high school English teacher, she faced a classroom of 150 “at risk” freshmen. Most of these kids, statistically, were going to fail. They were tough, their young lives already defined by poverty, gangs, violence and low expectations. These students, she wrote, knew nearly every “four-letter word” except one: hope.
Yet four years later, every one of her “at risk” students at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA, had graduated from high school. More than half went on to graduate from college. The stories written by Gruwell’s students were published as a book called “The Freedom Writers Diary”. It became a New York Times bestseller and in 2007 was made into a major motion picture called “Freedom Writers” starring Hilary Swank.
Graduation carries many messages of hope. Photo by Marleena Garris for Unsplash., CC BY-ND
Gruwell taught English but also taught them an elusive trait: hope. Science has, in the past 30 years, documented that hope can serve as a strategy for success.
Teaching hope
Although hope is a common theme in mythology, philosophy and theology, it wasn’t a subject of psychological research until University of Kansas psychologist Richard Snyder began his pioneering study in the 1990s. His work paved the way for science to measure, teach and distinguish hope from other psychological disciplines. His research recognized hope as a cognitive function, an emotional state accompanied by action.
Goals are basic to human behavior, Snyder noted, whether they are long- or short-term. They are the first step in imagining future achievement. Being successful, he writes, requires a way to pursue a goal and the will not give up – will power and way power. Snyder and social scientist Shane Lopez confirmed that hope can be taught and learned and that it provides benefits in the public sphere.
What kids need to excel
I am a professor of practice and clinical director for Arizona State University’s Center for the Advanced Study and Practice of Hope. The center’s team is made up of researchers, practitioners and graduate students who are advancing the understanding, strategy and practice of hope.
Other academic institutions including the University of Oklahoma’s Hope Research Center are committing resources to better understand the dynamics of hope. In 2014, the John Templeton Foundation funded The Hope and Optimism initiative, a $4.5 million, four-year grant at Notre Dame and Cornell. The project explored hope from various lenses including religion, medicine, sociology and psychology.
Kids thrive with an adult in their court. Photos by Kevin Laminto for Unsplash., CC BY-ND
There is a new generation of hope scientists emerging on university campuses around the globe dedicated to further unraveling hope’s potential. These research topics include coping skills, depression, aging, social justice and creating communities of hope.
It is my long-standing belief that society often defines children and their future by disproportionately identifying and focusing on risk and trauma but ignoring hope.
Applying hope to life
To better understand how hope theory could be translated into practice, in 1993 I enlisted a group of seven researchers, practitioners and graduate students to participate in a seven-year literature review. In 2000, our team shared its conclusions, launching a new initiative called Kids at Hope. The Kids at Hope strategy, at its core, promotes the practices and belief that all kids are capable of success – no exceptions.
These findings informed the design of a framework that teaches hope as a cognitive skill. Teaching hopefulness begins by believing in all kids, connecting with young people in meaningful ways and teaching children how to imagine their goals, a process called mental time travel, that encourages the brain to plan for future opportunities and challenges.
The ability to mentally time travel is the process of remembering the past to draw from those memories and construct a future. Recalling past events is a great advantage in determining who and what to trust, and what works and what doesn’t. Through past experiences, people are able to picture where they would like to be and how to get there.
A central part of this work focuses on teaching the science of hope so that it can flourish in communities — whether that is the juvenile justice system, education, child welfare, behavioral health or youth development systems. The science is clear. Hopeful people are happier, healthier and achieve more of their goals than those who lack hope.
If it “takes a village to raise and educate a child,” I believe hope theory should be part of that strategy. As Gruwell and her students discovered, hope is a gift that can positively change lives.>
About the Author
Richard Miller, Professor of Practice, T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamic, Arizona State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How Introverts and Extroverts Working Together Create Balance and Innovation
In the rapid-fire of the modern day workplace, teams with diverse perspectives can produce unique solutions to problems while generating fresh and creative ideas. This powerful perspective is often evident when introverts and extroverts work together in harmony appreciating the rich difference in style and energy.