DEBRA AND WILLIAM MILLER ON SPIRITUALITY

Interview with Debra and William Miller

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Any other thoughts or views you would like to share with our readers?

As we wrote in our very first article for the Times of India,

"Many people see life as a pie, with different slices belonging to family, personal time, health, learning, work, and spirituality/religion. We see it differently. We think of the pie of life as all spiritual, rather than spirituality being only one slice. Therefore, family, personal time, health, learning, and work are all spiritual activities.

"From this view, work is an important aspect of spiritual life. But how well do we use that time for spiritual development and for expression of our spiritual values? Most working adults spend 50% or more of their waking hours engaged in work. What a waste of spiritual time if we don't consciously put our spirituality to work!"

In relation to this, we encourage people to make spirituality the basis for all of their life, especially their work. We have them start by defining what spirituality means to them and then creating for themselves a "spiritual theme" in three or four words. (You can see and do this exercise for yourselves from our article on "Spiritual Character" available on the website http:// spirituality.indiatimes.com).

The key practice from this exercise is to see every situation through their "spiritual lens", asking, "From my spiritual view of life, what do I see in this situation?" Only then do we encourage people to respond, again in accord with their spiritual view.

Given our perspective that true spirituality is always inclusive, rather than exclusive, this naturally leads to thoughts, words, and deeds that exemplify spiritual values found in all spiritual/religious traditions we know of: Truth, righteousness, peace, love and non-violence. Then there is true spiritual character being brought forth.

And as President Abdul Kalam told our colleagues in an interview for our spiritual-based leadership research:

"The most important thing is righteousness (dharma). When there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world. You see the beautiful connectivity between these. The question before all of us today is, how do we get righteousness in the heart?"

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