No More FOMO It s Sunday. It s the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We get to share in one of our larger fellowship opportunities after service. We get to talk about Rest and Play and Gratitude and Joy today. By all accounts, this should be a pretty spectacular day. If I turn my attention in other directions, I find other issues. The world continues to struggle with the violence in Paris and the new threats against cities in the United States. The groups using violence as the weapon to dominate through fear take more lives in Nigeria, Mali and other spots. Tensions around race and injustice are bubbling up on campuses and in another police related shooting in Minneapolis. We are rationalizing our fear into policies against immigrants and the arguments fill the media. We live in a county with one of the highest rates of Syrian immigration historically in our country, and now it is a topic of discussion. Is it socially irresponsible to not focus on these issues of violence and intolerance? Is it a failure of faith to focus on gratitude and play when those ideals seem so removed from so many? I fretted and pondered and I arrived at that elusive idea of balance. Then I turned in our book, Daring Greatly, and found these bits of wisdom. All of our talk about vulnerability has been to allow us greater freedom in connecting with others. Brene Brown writes this: Living a connected life ultimately is about setting boundaries, spending less time and energy hustling and winning over people who don t matter, and seeing the value of working on cultivating connection with family and close friends. Brown quotes Martin Buber, a philosopher I enjoy, When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them. As we practice this art of connecting authentically, what if we had the courage to reach beyond our comfort zone? What if we tried connecting with those who spoke different, dressed different, looked different than we do? We cannot connect with everyone but if everyone connected with someone unlike themselves, could that ultimately free the energy of God to flow amongst us all? Could that be the healing we seek? Perhaps this work we are doing is one path out of the fear and violence confronting us all. Perhaps it is the path I am to speak to today because it is the path we have been guided upon for several weeks. I m going to begin with Rest and Play because it may be the most foreign to us and because I want to end with Gratitude and Joy. I love the self-disclosure 1
Brown reveals in this chapter in The Gifts of Imperfection. She was really puzzled in her conversations about play with people living Whole Heartedly. She needed to do more research. She didn t really understand play. Or she just didn t understand what they were talking about as play. They were just fooling around. Luckily, there was a play researcher to help her, Dr. Stuart Brown. Really, we can get pretty stuck in the intellect. I even found the National Play Institute online. All about the science of play. We humans take ourselves sooooo seriously! Here are some interesting things I discovered. If you look at Dr. Stuart Brown s 7 characteristics of play, you find a number of things we have considered play, like organized sports, competitive games and even educational play, don t really all qualify as play. Play is purposeless and voluntary. It has an inherent attraction value; creates a sense of freedom from time; a diminished consciousness of self; and a continuation desire. It also has an improvisational potential. Brene Brown groups play with rest because she noticed that the body s need for play was very similar to its need for rest. And what do we know about the body s response to sleep deprivation? Let me just say that sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique so we know it s not good. One quote I found on the National Play Institute site and in Brown s book was The opposite of play is not work, it is depression. Play stimulates creativity, a sense of emotional well-being, and skill competencies even while it is purposeless. To lose that sense of hope and well-being is depression. While we may be irritable, at risk for health concerns and less able to pay attention when we are sleep deprived, we are also much more likely to experience depression. All work and no play makes Jack and Jill depressed! Once again, we return to our sabotage question: If we understand the benefits of play and rest, why would we neglect them? Obviously, if the concept of play was difficult for Dr. Brene Brown to understand, many of us have clearly neglected play and often rest. Why? Because our value system is anti-play and rest. Exhaustion is a status symbol of how hard we work. Productivity is a measure of our worth. The less we rest and play, the more evidence there is we are successful. Ironically, we tell ourselves we work hard, try to earn more money and get up the ladder, because at some point in the future, we ll be able to sit back and relax and enjoy success. I hardly ever see that happen because the life style of productivity and exhaustion has been set in motion. Brown began to see the sabotage of that philosophy in her own family. She and her husband sat down and made of list of what contributed to a sense that life is good. They listed, sleep, exercise, healthy food, cooking, time off, time away, attending church, present to friends and family, sense of control 2
over money, meaningful work that doesn t exhaust, and time to just hang out. Then they looked at their goals: a new house, a bigger house, more salary, new degrees, career advancement, bigger work assignments. When life was good, they were living well in the present moment. Goals, however, tended to stretch them thin and even when achieved,never seemed to produce the same life is good effect they sought. Here is a thought; what if you could live a good life in the moment and still achieve some worthy goals? Wouldn t that be worth a try? You might have to give up judging yourself as a slacker. You might have to be willing to take a nap when you are tired. Play without winning. Find something purposeless to do. Have some fun. Sound daunting? Your One Solid Step to cultivating rest and play: find what conditions are present when life is good for you. Not, what does a life on vacation look like. When ordinary life feels like it is good, does it involve meaningful work, rest, play, connections, and more? Define it and then make that your priority! Give up the status symbols that are not really aligned with a good life for you. If goals are achieved while you live a good life, it seems all the sweeter. Many of us associate joy with playfulness. Brene Brown pairs Joy with Gratitude. In her interviews with people who were living Whole Heartedly she found the two entwined and that it was a spiritual practice. I love this work! Really hard to get off track of spirituality. This Daring Greatly work makes our lives richer and more meaningful and connects us to one another and to our concept of the Divine! See, in the beginning you didn t think this was going to be a spiritual series. Vulnerability and shame had you worried! Most of what preach, 99.9%, can be linked to just love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. The adventure is finding a new way to preach that every Sunday. Some days more adventure than others. This series has been fun. So here is what Brene Brown found out about Gratitude and Joy: Joyful people practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to gratitude practice. Second, they described both joy and gratitude as spiritual practices that were bound to belief in human interconnectedness and in a power greater than ourselves. Last, they distinguish between joy and happiness by saying happy is a human emotion that is dependent on outer circumstance and joy is a spiritual way of engaging with the world that s connected to practicing gratitude. OK, so how many times did I say practice? Four times in three sentences. I love this Brown quote but I ll have to explain why. Brown says, Gratitude without practice may be a little like faith without works it s not alive. To understand how powerful this is to me, you can go to our website. Click on About Us, click on Board and Staff 3
and you will find a description of me as minister. It begins with my personal mission statement. I use humor, compassion and insight to inspire others to claim their Divine power and to lead joyous lives of abundance and service. As I live the Truth I know, I teach, minister, counsel and celebrate with others creating a world of harmony. The passage about me ends with my credo verse, the verse from the New Testament that spoke to me in seminary about my whole life: James 2:18, Show me your faith apart from your works and I by my works will show you my faith. So it is safe to say, I am a big believer in the faith and work connection; in the faith and practice connection. Gratitude practices show up as gratitude journals, daily gratitude prayers and meditations, gratitude art, saying out loud I am grateful for. Or just Thank you so much! If you feel shy about saying I am grateful for you, I put the basket on the back table with our Gratitude sayings. Slips of paper to say Thank You! Keep some in your pocket and slip them to the cashier at the store, the wait staff, the airline staff, the staff at the vet or the doctor. Give gratitude generously! The basket is always downstairs by the office if you run out and need more slips. When we are giving and when we are grateful, it triggers that natural joyous connection with Spirit and with others. It feels like this really is our true nature when we are connected. And yet.how do we sabotage our joy and gratitude? How many of you wake up and your first thoughts are, I didn t get enough sleep? Or I can t possibly have enough time to get everything done today that needs to be done. Or There just isn t enough money to pay for everything we need. We condition ourselves to live in a world of not enough. In this world we fear scarcity and we fear the darkness. When the light is gone is the fear that keeps us on edge. It is the fear that begins to nibble away at our ability to enjoy the light. How many of us have watched our infant child sleeping and in a chilling moment thought, What if? The fear sucks the joy out of that moment and every moment we allow that thought to take over. It is the same fear that grips us holding the hand of a love and thinking, What if. It is the frustration of watching a sunset and trying to stop time and cling to that one moment of brilliant orange, pink, purple. Instead the colors continue to shift and the sky deepens into night. There it is, darkness. In her book, Brene Brown introduces a new kind of scarcity that is clearly Western influenced, The Fear Of Missing Out. Or FOMO. F O M O. 4
In our great consumption of everything all the time consciousness, we pile more and more onto our schedules and into our list of needs. We are constantly lacking because we just can t keep up with all that is around us. More stuff, more activities, more friends, more awards, more volunteering, more projects more and more and more creates the illusion we lack..so..much. What can we say no to? Work is important. Friends are important. Social activism is important. Church is important. School is important. What could we miss? We have too few priorities, too few boundaries, and too few conscious choices. Every time we say Yes to something, we say No to something else. Every time we say Yes to work, we say No to family. Every time we say Yes to volunteering, we are saying No to self-care. Every time we say Yes to a party, we are saying No to rest. It is not about Yes or No but the conscious choice. Fear Of Missing Out drives us to keep saying Yes and yet drives us to continue to believe we never say Yes enough. Because we are missing something somewhere! Lynn Twist, in her book The Soul of Money, explores the consciousness of scarcity we have developed, cultivated and honed. She says this, We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough and that we are enough. Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. One Solid Step to cultivating the practice of Gratitude is to look at what practice you have. If you discover you don t really have a practice, find what works for you. A daily journal entry, a round of gratitude at the dinner table, at least one Thank You out loud a day. Make Gratitude a spiritual practice for you. Joy and gratitude aren t responses to outer conditions. Joy and gratitude are places inside us we live from. They are well-springs of our true nature we tap into when we move into that consciousness. Fear, scarcity, lack are all states of consciousness we move into when we focus on the conditions around us and forget there are other choices. 5
We can live such rich lives when we turn our attention to the consciousness we live from. What thoughts and beliefs do we hold about ourselves, our world and all others? Do we notice the choices we make and do we make them consciously? Do we numb ourselves to the awareness of our true self, the masks we hold up for others to see and how keeping ourselves hidden keeps us from authentic connection, even with our own divinity? I want to end today and this series with a quote from Brown s book, Daring Greatly. It is there in the middle of the book. It is not in a place of prominence; not bolded or in italics. She says, I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits. I wondered if this was really the right approach with all that is going on around us. I watched a concert/commentary special Friday evening titled: Shine a light on race in America. Interviews in Charleston, Ferguson and Baltimore were interspersed with performances of meaningful music. The last lines were, Be your best self. It is where we must begin to heal our world. As we enter this season to celebrate gratitude and our divinity, I can say without reservation that I believe we are sacred. Each one of us. Every single one of us, whether or not we are in touch with our true self or not; whether we are expressing our divine nature or not; our essence is sacred. And the greatest work we can embark upon is the care and feeding of our spirits. I hope this Daring Greatly series is the foundation of work that will continue to unfold for you. And in case the holidays get you feeling grinchy, next week we begin our Advent Series, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 6