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How to Have a Living Hope (and Not Waste Your Journey)

The prayer chain email I received last Thursday rattled me. Not for the tremendous burden and need the requester noted—which was, indeed, grievous—but for the depth and spiritual maturity of its perspective.

The Christian sister requesting prayer said she had just been diagnosed with a rare and particularly aggressive ovarian cancer. Just being diagnosed with any kind of ovarian cancer is enough to strike terror in the sufferer because ovarian cancer is usually not diagnosed until Stage 4; and the 5-survival rate is around 17%. My own precious cousin, Jan, died of the dreaded disease (after a valiant, grace-filled battle) ten years ago this month while only in her forties.

She’s recovering from surgery to remove large tumors and begins chemotherapy in two and a half weeks. She sounded confident in the family she is blessed with and her “army of supporters.” (Oh, God, that we would all be so blessed when tragedy strikes us!) Because of this support, she says she can make the most of every day that God will grant her.

Then she listed her prayer requests.

First, she wants to remember that God, not she, is in control.

Second, [recognizing] that “God is most interested in what’s happening in the part of me that can’t be touched, scanned, or medicated.”

Last on the list was that she not waste the time she has [left] despairing or seeking comfort about her disease or the outcome. She was bold in her statement:

“I will only waste my journey with cancer if I seek comfort or despair about my odds, rather than look to know what God can do with me.”

She completed her email request by saying she claimed Jesus’ authority and denied Satan [working] in her life.

After reading her email—which I read three times—I sucked in my breath. Hard.

Certainly all of this is probably easier to say before chemotherapy flattens her and leaves her feeling as though she’s been run over by a semi-truck; when the only time she can drag herself out of bed is when she has to maintain a vigil in the bathroom, lying on the cold tile next to the toilet, in wait of having to relieve her stomach of its contents.

When she undergoes the process of being poisoned to death in order to eradicate mutated cells that are already killing her. Before she’s really knee deep into this battle.

I don’t personally know this sister—whether she is, by nature, as stoic and brave as this email sounds. But clearly she has sought the Lord, the Holy Spirit has spoken to her, and she is ready to confront her disease and this potential earthly death sentence with all the strength, faith, grace, and hope of a believer steeped (and believing) in the promises of Jesus Christ and her true, future hope.

She has put this—and life—in true perspective.

And I was awed.

For me, her prayers and requests are powerful enough to warrant writing down and carrying around with me, to pull out and re-read when metaphorical lightning strikes my life, or I am tempted to whine about inconveniences and aggravating hiccups that cause bumps in my road.

And it was a punctuation mark to my earlier reading about Bethel Music founder and pastor Brian Johnson’s battle with and recovery from depression. He described it as going through six months of “hell” and having to be taken to a hospital when he suffered a nervous breakdown.

When the ambulance arrived at his Redding, California, home, he said to his kids: “This is when God becomes real.”

Isn’t that the truth!

The experience prompted him to write the popular worship song “Living Hope.”

And after watching the YouTube video of Bethel Music singing this heart-churner, I thought about some options for inscriptions on my tombstone:

Jesus Christ, My Living Hope

Hallelujah!

The Grave Has No Claim on Me!

It sounds as though this dear sister is already claiming these truths as she faces the biggest battle of her earthly life.

Her hope is built on Jesus Christ and the power of His death and Resurrection.

May it be so for all of us.

I promise that you won’t be able to stay seated long during this song.

And if watching that isn’t enough to get your motor going, here’s a Bethel song bonus: “Raise a Hallelujah.”

(*The journal picture and entry is a photo found on unsplash.com.)

Until next week, no matter what you’re facing, raise your own hallelujah to the Lord!

Blessings,

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan is an award-winning inspirational writer, fitness pro and chaplain. She writes and works to help people live their best lives—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Tai Chi’s Active Ingredients for Well-Being

Harvard medical professionals have been studying the benefits of tai chi, and the results are worth noting and incorporating into your exercise regimen.

Peter Wayne—medical director of Harvard Medical School’s Introduction to Tai Chi—has discovered, along with his research team, that tai chi benefits participants in a variety of ways, like a “multi-drug combination.”

Wayne devised what he calls the “eight active ingredients” of tai chi, which he and his colleagues now use as a conceptual framework in evaluating tai chi’s benefits, a way to explore the underlying mechanisms that provide these effects, and for shaping the way tai chi is taught to both the clinical trail participants and teachers.

Each different tai chi style stresses different ingredients, but these therapeutic ingredients are interwoven and symbiotic—they work in combination and compliment one another. And complete one another, like two perfectly-timed and orchestrated ballroom dancers.

Critical tai chi components—

Rather than focus on one body part—like doing bicep curls to increase bicep strength and tone or squats to tighten your glutes —tai chi movements look at the body (and rightly so) as an interconnected system. Upper body to lower body connectedness; right side to left; and the limbs with the body’s core.

I can appreciate this whole-body interconnectedness.

As a gymnast, my entire body functioned as an interconnected unit—when I made foot or hand contact with the ground or when airborne. One false move, and the rest of the body follows suit, usually to a splat on the mat.

When I handed in my leotard for a teeny bikini and oil-slicked body for body building competition, I noticed big body coordination changes.

Yes, I was incredibly toned, strong and buffed up, but my ability to move gracefully, multi-directionally, and smoothly plummeted. It was clear that the one-directional (single plane) exercise structure of weight lifting wasn’t benefitting my body’s connectedness and fluidity. (See the grainy snapshot below of me in the Palm Springs Classic many moons ago.)

I decided to retire my signature royal blue bikini.

And for those of you old enough to remember, a popular NFL player started taking ballet classes to improve his dexterity, litheness and body control on the football field. People razzed him to no end about it, but today a number of 300-pounders take ballet lessons to improve their football form. And they say it’s the hardest activity they do! (Yes, ballet is much more difficult than football.)

Tai chi focuses—

Alignment and posture are critical components. Tai chi teaches you to move in safe, unstrained alignments. And this integration promotes graceful movements that extend beyond the tai chi session to your daily life.

The result?

Less stress and load on your joints, and improved balance. A win-win situation all around, especially for aging seniors who spend too much time sitting in recliners watching television and losing their balance and strength.

Added bonus from doing tai chi—

If being able to move without pain weren’t enough, tai chi boasts another bonus: improved mental health.

Interestingly, shoulder slouchers tend to have a more negative outlook on life. Upright walkers more positive.

Maybe tai chi helps contribute to your feeling active, a benefit we talked about here on a Meditation Mondays installment.

Anyone out there a tai chi devotee? I’d love to hear your experience with this activity. I just purchased Wayne’s Introduction to Tai Chi. Can’t wait for it to arrive so I can have one more tool in my graceful aging toolkit! Wayne is also the author of Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi.

Until next week, branch out, think integrated movement, and pick a activities that strengthen, coordinate and balance your body.

Blessings,

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan is an award-winning inspirational writer, fitness pro and chaplain. She writes and works to help people live their best lives—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

How to Improve Your Happiness with Future-Mindedness!

In a recent newsletter, Greater Good Science Center’s Greater Good Magazine (online) managing editor, Kira Newman, highlighted three main takeaways from her recent excursion to Melbourne, Australia, where researchers from over 60 countries gathered for the International Positive Psychology Association’s 6^th World Congress. She said that the findings the researchers shared “added depth and complexity to our understanding of major keys to a flourishing life.”

We’ve already looked at how positive solitude and feeling active can increase happiness.

Today we’ll do the final installment with:

Future-mindedness.

How much do you plan and daydream?

Do you still daydream, make a mental (or literal) list of things you’d like to accomplish tomorrow, next week, next month or next year? Even though they don’t always come to fruition (and we intuitively know they won’t all bear fruit), it turns out that our future ponderings actually contribute to our happiness and well-being.

Newman gives a run-down of what social psychologist Roy Baumeister presented at the conference.

“Happy and optimistic people tend to think about the future more often than their less-upbeat counterparts. Thinking about the future seems to come in two flavors: First we dream big and imagine fantasy outcomes; then, we ‘get real’ and come up with a pragmatic plan.”

And evidently future-mindedness benefits us both personally and relationally. Some of those bennies include:

allowing you to develop more concrete goals
solving romantic-partner relationships (by projecting your feelings about it into the future.

That latter practice can lead to less blaming and more forgiveness and greater relationship well-being.

Dangers of faulty future-mindedness—

Negative focused future-mindedness can contribute to:

depression
anxiety
other psychological disorders

That may be why so many popular therapies being used today—future-oriented, hope, solution-focused, and cognitive –behavioral—therapies help you improve the way you think about the future.

How to improve your future-mindedness—

Want to try to improve your future-mindedness at home?

Try journaling—the positive, rather than woe-is-me type of constant lamenting. Write about what opportunities might come your way, what opportunities you could create for yourself.

Make time for future-minded dreaming, individually and as a couple, if you’re married. My husband do a future-minded retreat every year, usually around our anniversary, to take stock of our current life and talk about dreams we have as individuals and as a couple. Hearing someone else’s heart and dreams helps us draw closer and know how to better support one another.

Big future-mindedness—

Societies may also be moving toward being future-minded too, both individually and together.

I think that idea started 50 years ago, when our young President John Fitzgerald Kennedy posed a challenge to both the United States and the world when he said:

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what American will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

After nearly 60 years, perhaps we are finally embracing the possibilities Kennedy espoused with his most decidedly future-mindedness.

But let’s not overlook the end of Kennedy’s inaugural speech:

“…let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

And to that I add an Amen!

Until next week, start doodling your daydreams and planning (and hoping) for the future and note how it affects your happiness.

Blessings,

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan is an award-winning inspirational writer, fitness pro and chaplain. She writes and works to help people live their best lives—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The Brain Benefits of Tai Chi

I think most of us who have traveled around the sun 50 revolutions or more know that our “older” age translates to a duller, slower brain. In fact, cognitive changes start occurring at the age of 50. Some of the things we lose are our ability to rapidly process information and focus on details.

By age 70 one in six people has mild cognitive impairment—almost 17% of us! If you can do something now to prevent ending up being part of that sorry statistic, then I would say have at it!

Old beliefs about brain function and plasticity—

It wasn’t that long ago that scientists believed that the brain, once you reached adulthood, stopped changing. That it lacked plasticity—the ability of the brain to change throughout a person’s life.

That’s what I was taught in college. It was depressing.

Thankfully, scientists discovered that their theories were wrong, and it’s not true. The brain actually changes throughout a person’s life, and what we do—or don’t do—has a dramatic effect on those changes.

Now scientists know that the brain can:

Grow new cells (which means it has some capacity for repair)
Make new connections
Increase in size

And all of these bonuses can improve cognitive function.

What helps the brain get sharper?

We now know that cognitive exercises, learning new things, socializing and exercise can improve brain function and keep it in top condition for longer than expected. In fact, some neuroscientists say that when you’re exercising the body, you’re really exercising the brain.

But what exercises are good at keeping the brain in top form, or actually improving its function?

It turns out that the internal martial art of tai chi is a real winner because it offers exceptional brain benefits.

Harvard Health noted a meta-analysis (statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies) of 20 studies on tai chi’s effects on cognition. What they found in people with cognitive decline was that tai chi appears to improve their:

Ability to multitask
Manage time, and
Make decisions

In those suffering mild cognitive impairment, tai chi’s slow, precise movements slowed the progression so all-out dementia more than any other types of exercise.

And it improved cognitive function in a similar or comparable way to other types of exercise or cognitive training.

That’s a big deal!

More good news about tai chi—

In one study, 400 Chinese men and women with the same cognitive impairment performed either tai chi or a stretching-toning combination program, 3 times a week for a year.

A year later, tai chi participants showed greater improvements in cognition and only 2% of them showed progression to dementia.

For the group doing only the traditional stretching-toning program, 11% progressed to dementia.

How does tai chi compare to walking?

Tai chi won that competition too.

When researchers compared tai chi to walking, social interaction, and no intervention, the MRIs of the participants’ brains showed that the brain volume of the tai chi exercisers had increased the most. So they won the brain volume contest, too.

And this happy group also performed better on cognitive tests.

I think I’m going to order a tai chi for beginners DVD. I tried it once before, but I got my DVDs from the library and had to return them before I had a good handle on the activity. I also took a tai chi class on the beach years ago during a Mexico getaway. And in college, I watched a friend of mine participate in the activity. He really bought into the spiritual aspect and acted a little weird about it.

The precise tai chi movements were harder than I thought they’d be, with the slow, deliberate motions, but I could tell right away that my balance would improve tremendously with sustained participation. And I would most likely benefit from the meditative aspect of the exercise. Although therein lies a word of caution.

Warning about tai chi—

Tai chi is an Eastern, internal martial art developed by a Taoist monk. It’s based on that religion—Taoism. So I would warn anyone participating in the exercise to drop the Taoist meditations and focus and zero in on Jesus, the Holy Spirit and His presence. Use it as a mind-centering exercise, without emptying your mind and opening the door to any old spirit looking for a place to entrench itself.

Be very careful what you open yourself up to.

You can reap the benefits of tai chi without sacrificing your soul or beliefs.

NEXT WEEK we’ll look closely at what makes tai chi such a successful activity. What are its special components?

Until then, think about adding different exercise routines to your repertoire, expanding yourself to something besides walking. Your brain will likely thank you for it.

Blessings,

Andrea

How Feeling Active Improves Happiness

I had an interesting email show up in my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the Greater Good Science Center. The subject line of how being alone can increase happiness snagged my attention. But there was a lot more information in the email that lead to additional cogitating.

In the article, which I clicked through to, Greater Good Magazine managing editor, Kira Newman, highlighted three main (revelations-to-her) takeaways from her recent excursion to Melbourne, where researchers from over 60 countries gathered for the International Positive Psychology Association’s 6^th World Congress. She said that the findings the researchers shared “added depth and complexity to our understanding of major keys to a flourishing life.”

The second point Newman highlighted in her article is what I want to share with you today.

It centered on the positive emotion—or perception—of feeling active.

Benefits of positive emotions—

Researchers have discovered that people who experience more positive emotions benefit in numerous areas. They tend to enjoy—

Stronger immune systems
More frequent exercise engagement
Lower risks of heart disease
Longer lives

Researcher Sarah Pressman wanted to answer another question about feelings and emotions:

What role does “feeling active” play in our health and well-being?

Pressman and her colleagues found a sizable link between positive emotions and different health measures. As Newman notes in her post:

“For men, feeling active was the positive emotion that predicted how long they lived.”

That finding gives me a lot of insight as to why my formerly athletic husband consistently complains about “not getting enough exercise” and not feeling accomplished at work, even though he has—by all observations—accomplished much and has a very successful and distinguished career.

But there was another interesting finding in the research:

Feeling active didn’t necessarily correspond to how physically active people actually are.

Translation?

It doesn’t just matter how physically active you are but how active—energetic, vigorous, and vital—you feel. It’s all about your psychology state.

Most of the research in this area has been derived from workplace settings and what psychologists refer to as relational energy—how some people rev us up while others drain and exhaust us.

Personally, my feeling active quotient has been in the tank lately, and it’s negatively affecting every aspect of my life, from my family relationships to friendships and beyond. I don’t feel active. I feel like a slug. A broken-down, washed up and washed out slug. Most of the time, anyway. As my injuries improve, the pain subsides, and my energy level increases, I feel more active. But I know I’m more active than the average person, so my feeling active meter might look a lot different than someone else’s.

**Future feeling active research—**

What do researchers want to learn about this feeling active measurement and perception in the future? These might be some things they look at:

What makes us feel active?
How is that beneficial in other ways? (What other areas of life does this feeling affect?)
Can we get happier just by “boosting the pep in our step”? In other words, I guess, can we fake it ‘til we make it?

Your turn—

If you’re up for it, get a journal and write down all of the activities, hobbies, interactions, etc. that make you feel active? As the old sixties’ saying goes: What turns you on?

Conversely, what turns you off? What drags you down emotionally, physically and spiritually? Since research is more and more proving the inter-relationship of these life components, it’s an important consideration.

NEXT WEEK we’ll look at how future hopes, dreams and planning increase your happiness.

Got any daydreams you’d like to turn into real happenings?

Until then, remember, the joy of the Lord is your strength. All of this other stuff we’re learning to help us enjoy life more is simply icing on the cake!

Blessings,

Andrea


Andrea Arthur Owan is an award-winning inspirational writer, fitness pro and chaplain. She writes and works to help people live their best lives—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.