TruthBook Religious News Blog

RACHEL ZOLL
September 10, 2009

NEW YORK (AP) — There is the dread of leaving the house that morning. People might stare, or worse, yell insults.

Prayers are more intense, visits with family longer. Mosques become a refuge.

Eight years after 9/11, many U.S. Muslims still struggle through the anniversary of the attacks. Yes, the sting has lessened. For the younger generation of Muslims, the tragedy can even seem like a distant memory. "Time marches on," said Souha Azmeh Al-Samkari, a 22-year-old student at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

Yet, many American Muslims say Sept. 11 will never be routine, no matter how many anniversaries have passed.

"I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every year," said Nancy Rokayak of Charlotte, N.C., who covers her hair in public. "I feel on 9/11 others look at me and blame me for the events that took place."

Rokayak, a U.S.-born convert, has four children with her husband, who is from Egypt, and works as an ultrasound technologist. She makes sure she is wearing a red, white and blue flag pin every Sept. 11 and feels safer staying close to home.

Sarah Sayeed, who lives in the Bronx, said that for a long time, she hesitated before going out on the anniversary. The morning the World Trade Center crumbled, she rushed to her son's Islamic day school so they could both return home. The other women there warned that she should take off her headscarf, or hijab, for her own safety. She now attends an interfaith prayer event each Sept. 11, keeping her hair covered as always.

"There's still a sense of 'Should I go anywhere? Should I say anything?' There's kind of that anxiety," said Sayeed, who was born in India and came to the U.S. at age 8. "I force myself to go out."

The anniversary brings a mix of emotions: sorrow over the huge loss of life, anguish over the wars that followed, but also resentment over how the hijackings so completely transformed the place of Muslims in the U.S. and beyond.

A poll released this week by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 38 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence. That is down from 45 percent two years earlier.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: 9/11, emotion, fear, interfaith, Islam, Muslims, Pew forum on Religion, Rachel Zoll

Permalink | Link to External Source Article

Friday, August 14, 2009

Grudge not lest you be grudged

August 9
Francine Adams

It is far easier to hold a grudge than to let go of something seemingly unforgiving, especially when one feels they are expressing righteous anger. It appears, however, that the grudger may, in the long run, wind up paying a much higher price than the grudgee. Dr. Piderman of the Mayo Clinic elaborates on this with quite interesting remarks on forgiveness. If one finds they are among those who are still hanging onto a grudge against someone long after the matter has been put to rest, consider the following:

"But when you don't practice forgiveness, you may be the one who pays most dearly. By embracing forgiveness, you embrace peace, hope, gratitude and joy. Here, Katherine M. Piderman, Ph.D., staff chaplain at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., discusses forgiveness and how it can lead you down the path of physical, emotional and spiritual well-being."

Are your grudges giving you headaches, backaches and sleepless nights. It is now common knowledge in modern medicine that there is a mind/body connection which means our emotions can affect our health. Stress and negative emotions have been associated with heart health. The American Academy of Family Physicians provides an extensive lists of disorders that can be signs one's emotional health is out of balance:

Please click on "external source" for the list, and the complete article.

Labels: emotion, Francine Adams. forgiveness, health, mind-body connection, well-being

Permalink | Link to External Source Article

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Music designed to boost physical, spiritual health

July 07, 2009
By Abbie Stancato

Research has shown that music has a profound effect on your body and psyche. In fact, there’s a growing field of health care known as music therapy, which uses music to heal. Music therapy can help with pain management, ward off depression, promote movement, calm patients and ease muscle tension.

Music is thought to link all of the emotional, spiritual, and physical elements of the universe. Music can be used to change a person’s mood, and has been found to cause like physical responses in many people simultaneously.

In the 1973 classic, The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird devote a whole chapter on how music affects plants, called “The Harmonic Life of Plants.“

However, do different styles of music have negative effects on the mind, body and soul?

To find out the answer, please click on "external source," at the bottom of this entry.

Labels: Abbie Stancato, emotion, health, music, music therapy, pain management

Permalink | Link to External Source Article

Friday, June 05, 2009

TEXAS FAITH: What's the role of emotion in shaping religious faith?

Jun 02, 2009
William McKenzie/Editorial Columnist

President Barack Obama has made it clear that he wanted a Supreme Court justice with a sense of empathy. Since then, a debate has ballooned up about what empathy means.

Some see it as a code word for judicial activism. Some see it as a trait needed to understand a litigant. The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote last week that:

"People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row....But because we're emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it's prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist."

I'm not looking for your views on whether Sonia Sotomayor would make a good justice, but I am interested in your thoughts about the role -- and limits -- of emotion in guiding individuals.

People of faith clearly have been known to be passionate about their beliefs. The joy they have in their faith often is seen as a positive, even by skeptics. But here's the question of the week:

How much can anyone rely upon emotion in shaping their religious experience and the way they act in the world?

Our panelists respond:

Please click on "external source" for a good collection of responses from various religious disciplines to this important question regarding faith and emotion.

Labels: emotion, empathy, faith, William McKenzie

Permalink | Link to External Source Article

Thursday, June 12, 2008

"Spiritual Evolution" by George Vaillant - Book Review

June 10, 2008 at 06:40:18
by Senia Maymin

Here is what will happen to you when you read George Vaillant’s book Spiritual Evolution:

* * During the chapter “Joy,” you may cry as you feel Joy. During the chapter “Love,” you will want to call home to say Hi.
* * You will be pulled in by personal stories from the Study of Adult Development, and how these men have come around to positive emotions and spirituality.

In Spiritual Evolution, Vaillant makes the case that “positive emotions are not just nice to have; they are essential to the survival of Homo sapiens as a species.” For thirty-five years, George Vaillant ran the seven-decade-old Study of Adult Development at Harvard. He writes in this book, “by studying lifetimes, I have learned to pay attention to how people behave, not to what they say.” Here, too, in this book, Vaillant describes emotions by how the emotions behave, not by what they say. Vaillant describes an emotion by what a poet may have written about it, where it resides in the brain, which world leader may have used it, and how a Study participant over time came to display it. As a reader, you may feel that in reading about Joy, you’re inside a story with many paths, and then, in stepping away from the book, you start to see: “Aha!”

Spiritual Evolution

The table of contents may remind you of a hymn: Faith, Love, Hope, Forgiveness, Awe, etc. The first part of the book is about the three evolutions Vaillant references in the title: genetic (”walnut-brained… cold-blooded reptiles slowly evolved into warm-blooded, child-nurturing [mammals] trusting their parents to care for them rather than do them for lunch”), cultural (”Homo sapiens began to decorate caves in ways that still induce a unifying gasp of spiritual awe”), and individual (over the human lifespan as “adolescent caterpillars evolve into great-grandfather butterflies”). The second part includes individual chapters about each of seven positive emotions, and the last part is about the difference between religion and spirituality (”Love, like the other positive emotions, is religion without the side effects.”)

A crux of the book is that Vaillant backs up his stories with data about the mind and the brain:

* In addressing “what good are positive emotions?” Vaillant cites a study by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in which there was a large rise in heart strengths after the September 11, 2001 terrorism attacks: gratitude, hope, kindness, love, spirituality, and teamwork all increased while head strengths did not much change. Similarly, Barbara Fredrickson at the University of Michigan at the same time learned that awareness of positive emotions appeared to buffer the students against depression after the attacks.
* There are many details about how the limbic system (one of the three main areas of the brain) contributes to health and healing through positive emotions: Vaillant’s brain-based examples include oxytocin for Love, endorphins for Compassion, the parasympathetic nervous system for lowered cardiac risk for Forgiveness, and others.

A Bonus
Plus, in addition to information, stories, and connections, Vaillant brings us his language. Here are some George-isms:

“You can pull a puppy’s tail, but not a rattlesnake’s.”
“She did not have faith. She did faith. Basic trust, like God, is not a noun: it is an experience.”
“If poets are blind to love, psychologists are struck dumb.”
In describing how Sigmund Freud could not experience joy, “What an irony it is that in German freude means joy.”
“…bonobo chimps and Homo sapiens are are the only two species to make eye contact during sexual intercourse.”

Senia Maymin, MBA, MAPP, is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of www.PositivePsychologyNews.com, a 30+ author daily news site about the latest research and applications of positive psychology, offered in English and Chinese. Senia has taught positive psychology at the Masters level at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Chicago Graduate School of Business, and has taught business communication skills at the Masters level at NYU.Furthermore, Senia works with individuals and companies to bring positive psychology tools to businesses (www.Senia.com). Senia has a background in entrepreneurship (past President of two high-tech start-ups) and finance (Morgan Stanley, hedge fund). Senia is a member of the Forum Committee for the Springboard Enterprises ALLTHINGSMEDIA venture forum for women entrepreneurs. Senia completed her AB in Mathematics and Economics at Harvard University, her MBA at Stanford University, and her Master in Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Senia speaks Russian, French, and Japanese.

Labels: behavior, emotion, evolution, George Vaillant, Senia Maymin, spirituality

Permalink | Link to External Source Article

Monday, February 04, 2008

Heart Health

By Sam Manger
Epoch Times Australia Staff Jan 29, 2008

Emotions play an important role in our health.

"Heartbroken" and "heart-warming" have long been considered simple expressions with no significant medical meaning. However, research from the National Heart Foundation of Australia has clearly shown that depression, social isolation, and lack of quality social support are three significant risk factors for the development of coronary heart disease. [1]

Heart disease takes one Australian life every ten minutes, and is the leading cause of death in Australia. In 1993–1994 alone, the health system costs for coronary heart disease were around AU$900 million.

Had a patient asked a doctor twenty years ago whether they believed there was any association between the heart and love, they might have received a chuckle and a pat on the head. However, recent research indicates that joy and interaction are necessities to a healthy heart and body.

Many spiritual and alternative health philosophies have been oriented around the idea that disease is a physical manifestation of a corresponding damaged emotional or psychological condition. It has long been thought that parts of the body represent certain emotions or conditions. For example, the heart represents love; the back represents support, and so on. These ideas have generally received limited support from mainstream medicine, but are they really so far-fetched? Recent research would suggest not.

According to the World Health Organisation, by the year 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent health condition in the world. It is reported that the rate of childhood depression in the United States is increasing at a rate of 23 percent per year. This reflects the situation in Australia—rates of depression are highest in younger age groups, especially females. About half of those affected do not seek medical attention.

In 2001, Australian GPs reported that depression was the fourth most common illness in their practices. GPs have increased their number of prescriptions of antidepressants. The Age Online states that 250,000 antidepressant prescriptions were issued to children and adolescents alone in 2003—an increase of 30,000 from 2002. The statistics call for government and health professionals to take a different approach.

Antidepressants have various adverse effects, including violent and suicidal behavior. Most importantly, pills alone do not address the underlying cause of depression.

Faced with this, health professionals in the future may have to change their traditional approach and begin to incorporate apparently alternative paradigms. We may soon welcome a new age in wholistic medicine.

Labels: emotion, health, heart disease, Heart Foundation of Australia, love, Sam Manger, spirituality