Anchor Point Counseling Center

Tolerance

The concept of tolerance is a natural result of practicing “non-judgment.”  This quality of “allowing” requires practice. It may be useful to consider the opposite of tolerance in the social, cultural, and/or religious context.  The opposite of tolerance would be to persecute or have an attitude of intolerance.  Isn’t that interesting, most people recognize and reject persecution yet how often do we practice intolerance?

Therein lays the dilemma.  Socially we are tolerant of different attitudes and beliefs…most of the time.  Culturally we are tolerant of different ethnicities mostly out of respect for their origin.  Yet religiously, we sometimes notice, intolerance and even persecution rearing up more often than we care to admit.  Occasionally, this manifests itself in the simple act of complaining about our style of worship.  In a perfect world, we would find God in any and every style of worship.

Intolerance and persecution are spin offs from “judgment” which was our topic in my last blog entry.  Yet, intolerance is more subtle than “passing judgment.”  Persecution can be as subtle as rolling your eyes when we see someone with spiked hair or eccentric tattoos.      Enough about the problem of intolerance; what is the solution?  The ideal attitude for tolerance is neuroplasticity.  Another name for this attitude is cortical re-mapping.  This is good news for all of us.  To this writer, as a counselor and therapist, I promote the concept of change through mind-full awareness.  In other words, prayer and meditation (cortical re-mapping) helps the brain become more flexible (neuroplasticity).  The opposite of flexible in this context is stubborn or rigid.  The goal of cortical re-mapping is to become more elastic in our attachments and specifically our attachment to our beliefs.

In conclusion, Newberg and Waldman (brain researchers) write in their book, “How God Changes the Brain” the benefits of meditation, relaxation and especially compassionate communication.  The research shows that meditating using a specific practice for twelve minutes per day will improve your memory.  This is truly counter-intuitive.  The good news is that when we practice our faith we become more flexible and relate better to our fellow human beings.  Finally, we have a clear cut alternative to our competitive, fast paced culture and its values of “more is better.”  The alternative of prayer and meditation (mindful awareness of the Holy) heals the brain and therefore, heals the body, heals our attitudes, heals relationships and can heal ______________ (fill-in-the-blank).