AWE AS AN ANTIDOTE TO FEAR

The shadow side of humanity is at play. The news is disturbing. Our own situation can be daunting. And yet...

“When I play, I feel the vibration in my heart,” the cellist Yumi Kendall told Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who studies awe. “It is beyond language. Beyond thought. Beyond religion. It is like a cashmere blanket of sound.” Per Atlantic writer Peter Wehner, "...the research we do have indicates that a sense of awe can have positive effects on individuals, including calming down our nervous system, reducing feelings of anxiety and stress, and lowering inflammation markers in the body.

Awe is often evoked by being in the presence of great beauty, something powerful and sublime, mysterious and even overwhelming. It can elicit amazement and veneration." It makes us humbler. Where joy floods our hearts in unexpected moments.

"Awe, then, is more than a feeling,” Heschel wrote in God in Search of Man. “It is an answer of the heart and mind to the presence of mystery in all things, an intuition for a meaning that is beyond the mystery, an awareness of the trans­cendent worth of the universe.”

In the midst of the rush and scrum of daily living, when and where might you get lost in a song, honor your own heroism, breathe the scent of Ponderosa Pine, unfurl in a cathedral of silence, or contemplate the hair's breadth of your human journey? These are just a few examples of the vast and mysterious phenomena that can evoke feelings of wonder, reduce self-focus, and foster a sense of connection to something larger than oneself, according to Keltner's research and book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder. 

What rose might you stop to smell along your way today?

Soul Essent Coaching is dedicated to infusing our conversations with awe and putting it into a practice. From there, we discover fresh possibilities, do the work of life with more ease and grace, and embrace life with clarity, meaning, and purpose. Warts and all.