Spiritual Profiling: the Gift of Love

Lorna Smith Benjamin has been working with suicidal clients in Salt Lake City for something like 25 years. Last I heard, after decades of working with some of the most unhappy people on earth, she only had one client commit suicide. Those results are astounding.

She has a very unique way of looking at unhappiness. Her basic idea is that people are unhappy when they are not allowed to give the gift of their love. They make attempts to share what they feel is best in themselves with others, and those others refuse it. The closer we want those people to be, the more it hurts when they refuse. That's the gist. Unrequited love.

So far I've piled up a few problems, especially: toxic situations, lack of education concerning attentional abilities, lack of training, and unrequited love. Notice none of these problems look like they cannot be addressed. But, just as we have little common knowledge concerning training our attention, we have little awareness of all the ways in which our unhappiness can be seen as coming down to unrequited love. (Check Smith Benjamin's books or website for more of an explanation of how that works.)

I've already said or hinted that we can all get better by improving our concentration, noticing certain tricks that our minds play, developing or maintaining some degree of equanimity with one another, presenting problems in ways that suggest solutions, and improving awareness concerning feelings. I've mentioned the first- and third-person approaches to, or perspectives on, spirituality. And the second-person type of spirituality fits really well with this idea of love.

The second-person approach to spirituality is dealing with "you" as spiritual. It's about how we deal with other people, beings, and our planet as spiritual. And like Rumi, we can seem to speak directly to God (You) whether we see God in everything, in nothingness, or as somewhat separate, beyond, or above. One of the happy eventualities of my focus on first- and third-person types of spirituality is that my system does not prescribe HOW you SHOULD feel divinity as personally existent. I see that as only my business if you want to make it our business, if you include me in the "you"s you address concerning spirituality. This is part of my respect for equals. I assume that you are enough of a human person to have an individual-yet-connected relationship with God if such things exist, and you are enough of an individual-yet-connected person to have a feeling of direct connection with spirituality if those other things don't exist. In other words, your religion is yours and your spirituality is pretty much yours if you don't want to include me. I respect that. I don't want anyone trying to force me into a burkha, and as far as I can tell, I still like pork.

But it is also part of my feeling that I want to be able to love anyone I come in contact with. This isn't something morally good about me. I think it's basic to who we are, like having eyes and skin. Part of why we need some degree of psychological and spiritual strength is that we've all been given strong emotional reasons for pulling back our love, for withholding. Freud made anal retention a commonly used concept. What do we call love-retention? We say, "That's life, c'est la vie." I disagree with that sentiment, though. I say that's death. It's emotional death to not love. And hatred is just love's crippled cousin. Hatred lives, but when it lives within us, we are maimed.

I say this to show what spiritual profiling is. It includes at least two directions. The first is the sense of personal growth through appreciation and inspiration and perhaps onto something like serenity and enlightenment. The second is the removal of obstacles to the occupation of putting all of our energy into that movement. In other words, many of us have to heal before we can fly. In doing so, we don't need some imperious person telling us why we're weak of what is wrong. We need healing. Some of us need to connect with others first. Some of us need time alone. I don't know what any other person needs completely, and I don't try to tell people how they should believe or feel towards others or towards divinity. I offer training.