Chapter Eight: Spirituality And Tapping Broader Realities

In the last chapter, we examined the compression of time as a major contributor to burnout.  This chapter takes a look at the compression of our conscious experience and the role of spirituality in expanding our horizons.  

What is the compression of conscious experience?

When we are stuck in routines and bound by a procession of demands and deadlines, our experience becomes trapped.  We utilize a small portion of our bodies' capacities.  We experience a narrow range of emotions.  We narrow the scope of our thought.  Indeed, if we think of ourselves as occupying space across three dimensions--physical, emotional, cognitive-- we can see that our basic dilemma is that we are small, thin oblongs, when in fact we could and should be large spheres.  Typically, we are more developed on one dimension than others--and we are not nearly as developed on any dimension as we could be.

It is when we broaden ourselves across those dimensions and occupy new space that we experience ourselves as renewed.  One important gateway to such broadening is spirituality.  Spirituality stretches us emotionally, cognitively, and physically, enhancing our functioning at work, home--and in markets.

What is spirituality?  What role can it play in the expansion of our lives?  How can it renew our trading?  Let's explore.

Understanding Spirituality

To better appreciate spirituality, let's start in a most unlikely place:  crowdsourcing.  Most readers are familiar with online forms of crowdsourcing.  If we are interested in a book, we can go to an online book seller, read reviews, and decide if the text is something we might want to purchase.  There are crowdsourcing sites for all kinds of interests, from craft beers to movies to travel destinations.  The idea behind crowdsourcing is that we can benefit from the experience of others.  Any single review could be biased, reflecting a writer's agenda or idiosyncratic taste.  When we scour many independent and informed reviews, we detect patterns of strength and weakness.  If dozens of experienced beer drinkers rate a scotch ale very highly and express similar reasons for their favorable ratings, the odds are pretty good that this would be worth purchasing if we love malty brews.

Behind the idea of crowdsourcing is the notion of "wisdom of the crowds".  Once we assemble multiple informed perspectives, the idiosyncratic and taste-based elements of individual reviews balance out and we're left with an informed consensus.  A product with 2000 reviews gets twice as many negative ratings as positive ones?  Hmmm...we'll probably keep shopping.

So what does this have to do with spirituality?

I propose a very simple but important idea:  the world's great spiritual and religious traditions are one of the largest and longest crowdsourcing exercises in history.  For generation after generation, millions of people have found wisdom and inspiration in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and many other spiritual traditions.  From ancient religions to early native cultures to modern practices, people have spent significant time and effort pursuing beliefs and practices connected to realities beyond ordinary, daily life.  Indeed, it is difficult to think of cultures that do not embrace some form of spirituality as an important element of human experience--and that have not done so for generations.

This perspective may be uncomfortable for some readers.  It challenges our assumptions that reality is right in front of us and can be fully grasped by the human mind.  If there is a common theme among the world's spiritual traditions, it is that our perceived and experienced reality is a relatively small subset of ultimate reality.  Spirituality directs our experience not just toward the self but beyond it.  For those attached to the things of this world--from our political beliefs and personal identities to our work, belongings, and social status--spirituality can be unsettling.

The crowdsourcing notion poses a challenge for a very different reason.  It raises questions regarding the triumphalism that declares one particular religion or form of spirituality to be higher than--or more true than--the many alternatives.  Not so long ago, psychotherapists practiced different "schools" of therapy, each contending superiority of their psychoanalytic, behavioral, cognitive, systems, etc. perspective.  As outcome research unfolded, however, it became clear that all the major approaches worked--and worked for surprisingly similar reasons.  What followed was an integrative consensus that there are multiple paths to change.  The key is finding the path most productive for each person, problem, and therapist.

Such an integrative perspective on spirituality is less concerned with the relative superiority of insights from the Buddha, Muhammad, Christ, Moses, etc. and more focused upon the processes by which people find meaning, purpose, and renewal across these rich traditions.  The challenges of radical renewal are by no means new.  They have been objects of inquiry for wise individuals from many traditions across the globe.  The body of spiritual wisdom--almost wholly ignored in the modern training of practicing psychologists--is a rich source of practical insight, and it is hiding in plain sight.

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Can Trading Become A Spiritual Experience?

A quantitative portfolio manager I worked with utilized innovative mathematical approaches to identify patterns in financial markets.  A key ingredient of the approach was the division of market periods into "regimes", based upon criteria of stationarity (uniformity).  Once divided in that fashion, it was possible to identify patterns that occurred and recurred on varying scales within each regime.  

Interestingly, the manager's reaction to his research discoveries had little to do with anticipated profits.  Rather, he thought about how these recurring patterns were part of a larger, natural order.  He felt privileged to have a glimpse of this order.  Somehow he had merited a look into a Divine scheme.  That produced a deep sense of gratitude and fulfillment.

As you might imagine, he had no problem extending this research framework to a variety of markets.  The work gave him energy and enthusiasm because it spoke to his spirit, as well as his reasoning mind.  With that continually renewed energy, he extended the research to the relative relationships among asset classes, creating entirely new ways to trade relative value.  Quite literally, his spiritual experience fueled his trading growth and innovation.  Inspiration turned out to be a much more powerful, durable, and productive form of motivation than "discipline".

It turns out that this is not an uncommon experience.  I have worked with medical and basic science researchers who have been deeply connected to their religious roots.  They view their discoveries as a glimpse into Divine order:  a privilege, not an achievement of the ego.  This is not so different from the teacher, physician, or social worker who experiences their work as doing good, making the world a better place.  Spirituality begins when we place our efforts in a larger life context of meaning and purpose.  Through right efforts, we become a bit more Buddha-like, Christ-like, Divine, transcending our selves.    

When I first encountered the Traders4ACause group, I was struck by the seriousness with which participating traders took the causes to which they contribute.  It was clear that it was important to them to succeed by sharing knowledge; it was equally important to share the fruits of success with worthy causes.  The higher purpose energized their learning and trading, making their efforts more than the ego gratification of profits.   

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Once we look at human behavior--now and over the ages--as a great crowdsourcing, we can appreciate that people derive benefit from tapping into experiences and realities beyond their daily routines.  If we look across spiritual traditions without the presumption that any one is the possessor of Universal Truth--but with the understanding that all incorporate time-tested spiritual paths--we open the door to broad and deep insights into the radical renewal of our lives.

The Essence of Spirituality

In a remarkable small volume, psychologist Abraham Maslow links three important facets of human experience:  religion, values, and peak-experiences.  He summarizes his work by explaining, "Man has a higher and transcendent nature, and this is part of his essence" (p. 15).  The hallmark of self-transcendence is the "peak experience":  profound experiences that place us in a much larger context of meaning.  The term that William James uses for the quality of such peaks is "solemn".  They are more than enjoyable or even fulfilling.  They are transforming.  Maslow contends that they are at the heart of religious experience, though they also occur outside religious practice.  Indeed, Maslow's research finds that that all of us are capable of peak experiences, though many of us are not comfortable with them and actually resist them.

In his well-known text Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow links peak experiencing to creativity.  When we transcend the self, we transcend our usual ways of viewing and experiencing the world.  He provides an excellent example in the improvisation of jazz musicians.  It is when the musicians are most fully immersed in the rhythm and tune that they are able to find their "groove" and produce something that hadn't been heard before.  This is very important.  Jazz players could not have come up with their riffs on their own, playing from sheet music.  It is the immersion in the flow of the music of the group that enables them to improvise.  Innovation does not occur in normal, habitual states of consciousness.

A good example of this is the writing of this book.  If you were to see me right now, you'd see me at my desk typing with no notes or rough draft.  Music is playing in the background:  a kind of music that captures my attention and imagination, tuning out extraneous thoughts.  In the next room is a stack of 19 books that I have been reading simultaneously.  After a period of reading, common themes jump out and I become able to synthesize the multiple perspectives.  As long as nothing jumps out at me, I keep reading and don't write a word.  Once the themes become apparent, I write and write and write without the books in front of me.  During that writing, I'm in a zone, lost in the music and immersed in the flow of ideas.  I have no clue what will come out of the writing.  I don't work from any outline.  The ideas come to me; I don't write my preconceived ideas.  And I certainly don't worry about how popular the book will be, how it might be reviewed, etc.  

It isn't a great leap from this writing process to the process of trading.  I can approach markets looking for the next trade, waiting for my ideas to set up in markets.  When I've done that, I've consistently lost money.  When I've approached markets like writing, watching and watching and watching how stocks and sectors are behaving, how the volume of buyers and sellers are waxing and waning, how related asset classes are acting, how news impacts prices, eventually it hits me between the eyes that there is selling that cannot push the market lower or buying that cannot yield new highs.  Fading those moves becomes obvious at those moments.  It's nothing I predicted and it has nothing to do with my bullish or bearish preferences, my views on politics and the economy, my needs for profits, etc.  It is improvised:  the markets are playing a tune and I find my spots to riff.

When traders talk about their views--their "conviction"--I generally can tell that they're trading from the ego.  When they talk about P/L, I can tell that they're trading from the ego.  Do I care if my writing comes out garbled or with poor grammar?  Of course not; that's what proofreading is for.  You can't be in flow if you're worrying where the stream is heading.  There are no ego-laden peak experiences:  no one ever experienced the grandeur of mountains or the beauty of a symphony by focusing on their own needs and desires.  Great trades come to us; we don't go after them.  They are products of the soul, not the ego:  they emerge from peak states of consciousness.  

To be sure, there is more to the creation of great music, science, and trading than the transcendent moment.  As Maslow emphasizes (p. 143), "A peak-experience happens to a person, but the person makes the great product."  Inspiration creates insight, but the perspiration of effort gives that insight concrete expression as a formal work of art, a business, or a trade in a financial market.

The antithesis of self-transcendence is self-absorption.  As we've seen, when we are caught in routine, the peak experience becomes impossible.  All things being equal, we are more likely to "peak" standing in front of the Grand Canyon than standing at our usual bus stop.  We're more likely to peak while holding our newborn child for the first time than holding our briefcase going to work.  The focus in the peak experience has some element of specialness and grandeur.  We become absorbed in the moment, like that improvising musician.  

Now here's the great challenge that we face in financial markets:  Our creativity depends upon our capacity for self-transcendence, our ability to generate peak experiences.  It is during our absorption in market behavior that we are most likely to detect hidden order and themes, perceiving relationships that others miss.  To profit from such perception, however, we must structure the insight as a trade or as a system.  Toward that end, we become process-driven:  grounded in prudent risk management and position management routines.  Thus immersed in repetitive "process", we lose our access to the peak experience.  I have worked with very disciplined traders who very rarely generate fresh market insights.

For any creative professional, there is an interplay between spirit and ego:  the transcending of self in perceiving the world anew and the maximizing of self in giving our insights concrete, effective form.  If we do nothing but paint one picture after another, we eventually will run out of inspiring visions to put to canvas.  If we do nothing but follow markets and place trades, we eventually run out of ideas worthy of our risk capital.  If the essence of spirituality--and ultimately creativity--is the peak experience, we must find a way to transcend the normal routines of trading.  As a writer, I need my time searching and re-searching through many books, I need my time writing to the beat of music, and I also need my time reviewing my writing:  proofreading, reorganizing, clarifying.  Spirit and ego flow in and out to generate a final creative product--or an actual set of trades.

(Note something crucial:  long before jazz musicians can improvise, they must spend long hours and years mastering the basic playing of notes and intricacies of their instruments.  Similarly, traders need long exposure to markets and simulated trading before valuable ideas come to them.  The creativity of the peak experience is intimately linked to intuition.  That intuition only comes to those who have paid the tuition of lengthy exposure to performance.  As we've seen, sustaining that exposure is only possible when we love our creative domain; when it provides play.  The majority of traders, looking for mere "setups" in markets, have no access to creative intuition:  they are not immersed, nor do they have a rich fund of experience to bring to any immersion.)

Notice that to this point we've said little about profits and losses.  Overlay the need to make money, the need to not lose money, the need to catch moves and not miss them, the need to make good market calls on our trading--and suddenly it becomes clear how difficult it is to find the peak experience in trading.  The ego concerns of profits and losses can overwhelm both the need for sound trading process and the need to approach markets with the mindset of the improvisational musician.  Many, many traders oscillate between the tugs of profits and losses and the need for stable trading routines.  Caught in that oscillation, they never get to the essence of spirituality, the peak experience.

Colin Wilson, in his powerful description of a "new existentialism", explains:  "For biological reasons, we are 'blinkered', like horses in the traffic.  The blinkers are a device for enabling us to concentrate on the present and its problems.  The painter who is painting a large canvas has to work with his nose to the canvas; but periodically he sits back to see the effect of the whole.  These over-all glimpses renew his sense of purpose" (p. 154).  It's a great metaphor: it's the standing back and perceiving the whole that provides us with renewal.  Yes, we must have our nose in what we do if we are to be precise and disciplined.  But precision and discipline themselves cannot provide the artistic vision or inspiration.  No one ever found renewal as a trader by staring at screens.

Radical renewal implies living life in such a way that we have ongoing access to the spiritual.  That means ongoing access to the peak experience and the transcendence of routine.  

The problem, Wilson explains, is that consciousness typically operates at too low a pressure to sustain self-transcendence and the peak experience.  We become fatigued, we become bored, we become preoccupied--even when we are surrounded by beauty, meaning, and significance.  How is it, he asks, that we can fall in rapturous love with another person and, after a year's time, take them for granted?  In our preoccupation with the everyday, our meaning-making muscles grow flabby.  It's back to "use it or lose it":  if we don't generate peaks, we lose our capacity for immersion and become consigned to a flat life.

Now we can see how the traditional tools of trading psychology can help the ego do its work better.  They make us better at our work when our nose is to the canvas, but do not provide us with tools for the soul:  tools that exercise our capacity for meaning and the peak experience.  If we are looking for ways to expand ourselves spiritually--that is, to grow our capacity for meaning, creativity, and the peak experience--it is not to traditional psychology that we must turn, but to the spiritual traditions that have honed paths to self-transcendence for millennia.  We will begin to explore those paths in the next chapter.

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Resources and Perspectives  

*  In the Japanese tradition of Morita Therapy, inpatient treatment begins with a period of bed rest in which people refrain from usual purposeful activity.  Without the usual distractions of daily life, they begin to expand their thinking, focusing on what is truly important to them.  That is the first step in reaching the point of arugamama, acceptance of life as it is.  Each of us is seen as having a need for actualization and fullness and a need for comfort and security.  In our attachments to the latter, we thwart our development and create unhappiness and anxiety.  Arugamama means shedding our ideas of what life should be and embracing what is.  How many times as traders do we focus on the moves we miss and the mistakes we make?  This sows dissatisfaction and impairs our mindset for future decision-making.  Once we embrace our fallibility and the inherent uncertainty in the outcome of any given trade, we can turn our attention away from ourselves and truly focus on markets.

*  Related to Morita work is ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  The goal of ACT is an achievement of psychological flexibility by observing and accepting our experience and staying grounded in the present.  As in Morita therapy, the idea is that fighting our experience only heightens it, creating distress and unhappiness.  When we can embrace uncertainty at a given juncture in markets and not try to force certainty, there is no longer the need to overtrade.  As we will see in the coming chapters, there are perspectives within Buddhism and Hinduism that are very relevant to our ability to detach from individual outcomes in life and ground ourselves in the present.

*  Many interested in trading question its value as a pursuit, since it is not explicitly meant to improve the world or help others.  Here is a post that addresses the meaning of trading as a performance activity; here is a post on the value of trading.  The issue, from the perspective of spirituality, is:  How does trading make you a better human being?  I can name many ways in which trading has enriched me beyond P/L.  It has taught me a rigorous way of thinking; it has helped me be more organized and process-driven in all areas of life; it has helped me think more rationally about risk and reward in all my decisions; and it has pushed me to live more mindfully and to be more self-aware when making decisions.  From this perspective, we can always have a personal growth P/L that is independent of the money we make or lose at any given time.  If trading refines us as people, that reverberates to all our relationships and work.  We become more valuable to ourselves and others when we make our trading a vehicle for our growth.

*  Not all psychology ignores the spiritual, as Maslow's work attests.  A worthwhile contribution in this area comes from psychologist Kenneth Pargament and his book Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy.  For Pargament, spirituality is all about finding the sacred within the ordinary world.  He refers to this process as "sanctification" (p. 34), quoting a researcher who defines transcendent perception as the ability to see "the more".  An example he cites is a Van Gogh painting, which can be viewed as smudges on a canvas, or a work of music, which can be viewed as a series of sounds.  When we perceive the pattern behind those brushstrokes and musical notes, we experience a sense of meaning and grandeur:  the something "more".  In an important sense, markets are nothing but series of transactions and sequences on charts.  It is in perceiving the patterns within these that we find meaning in the ordinary and can appreciate something greater than ourselves.  This is why so many spiritual experiences are accompanied by feelings of awe and wonder.

*  In a blog post, I describe the challenge of trading as "achieving in the material world by refining ourselves spiritually".  As I note in a Forbes article, many spiritual traditions emphasize that everything in the world--including ourselves--comes from the Divine.  Those traditions emphasize that each of us has the Divine within us, which becomes covered over by the needs and concerns of daily life.  When we view the Divine as imminent--within us--and not just transcendent, we can see that all our involvements in the world--from our relationships to our careers--can become paths toward cultivating our transcendent natures.  As I noted earlier, a key question for traders is whether their market participation makes them a better person.  Does your trading bring you closer to the Divine?  

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How Spiritual Practice Expands Our Experience

Consider five common elements across most of the world's spiritual traditions:

*  Reflection and Introspection - This is accomplished through meditation, prayer, and periods of solitude with specific activities designed to enhance focus, reduce distraction, and turn attention to what we find important outside daily routine.  It is the purpose of such reflection to achieve a fresh state of consciousness connecting us to larger life meanings.  Some of this introspection is designed to enhance positive experience (appreciation of the Divine; giving thanks; celebration); some of it channels remorse over misdeeds and shortcomings as part of personal and group redemption; some is simply meant to tune out the everyday world and find a deep sense of peace, connection, and fulfillment.  The key is that sustained not-doing (refraining from normal thought, feeling, and action) can lead us to heightened awareness and new meanings.

*  Ceremony - This is typically accomplished in a social context, bringing a community together in shared meaning-making.  An important function of ceremony is the creation of sacred spaces in which we can express deeply held beliefs and attain higher levels of awareness.  Prayer in a congregation is an example of ceremony, as are rituals connected to birth, marriage, and death.  Ceremonies often make extensive use of music and rhythm/chanting to evoke emotional experience and transport us beyond the ordinary.  Many faiths celebrate holidays that commemorate meaningful historical events, keeping a sense of tradition alive.  Some prayers have elements of ceremony, as in the saying of grace before and after meals.  Within many faiths, a defining element of a devout person is the embedding of rituals and ceremonies within daily life, so as to maintain broader awareness in real time.  An observant Jew, for example, begins the day with a prayer of thanksgiving (thanking the Lord for restoring his/her soul) and a blessing over the act of washing hands.  That ensures that the day begins on a note of gratitude and connection to the Divine.

*  Teaching - Embedded within each spiritual tradition is a body of accumulated wisdom.  Inside spiritual communities, there are those steeped in this wisdom who are acknowledged as leaders and learned, wise, holy people.  Indeed, much spiritual growth across traditions comes from the passing down of wisdom and practice from elders to initiates, as well as from parents to children.  Many religions emphasize spiritual/religious education in childhood as a curriculum parallel to that of traditional, secular education.  All of the major faiths and disciplines honor unique, exemplary practitioners from the past who serve as role models and inspirations.  A great deal of religious and spiritual teaching consists of learning from the wisdom and practices of these exemplars.  In immersing ourselves in the lives of role models, we internalize ideals that shape our aspirations.  Across the disciplines, there is an understanding that following the path of the greats is more important than gaining honors or wealth in everyday life.

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The Quest For Greatness

The role-modeling function of religions and spiritual traditions cannot be understated.  Christianity teaches that we must become more Christ-like; Buddhism encourages us to follow the Buddha's path and seek enlightenment.  These traditions channel our desires for achievement in spiritual directions, so that we continually seek to improve and refine ourselves as people.  A challenge in the trading world is that our achievement needs can become enmeshed in the quest for profits.  That buries us in daily life rather than helping us transcend the ordinary.

[As I am writing this at my usual perch at the Darien, CT Whole Foods, I notice a greeting card on display.  It says, "Open Your Window And Count The Stars."  That is the whole point.  When we become so absorbed by profits and losses and the squiggles of moment to moment market movement, we operate with closed windows.  We cannot count our stars.]

It is not unusual to find successful traders who feel a strong desire to "give back" and utilize their earnings to support worthy causes.  Once the achievement needs of this world are fulfilled, it's only natural to seek wider goals.  It's also not unusual to find traders who have difficulty fully devoting themselves to markets, as they feel the tug of other life priorities.  Each of us needs to clearly identify how, specifically, we will seek greatness and the deepest fulfillment of our talents and values.  Many traders fail because markets ultimately are not their path to greatness.  Trading may or may not support them financially, but it fails to support them spiritually.  Successful trading must be an expression of the soul, not a window closed on our stars.

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* Social Action - Spiritual traditions typically incorporate systems of ethics: codes for desirable and undesirable behavior.  Many of these pertain to maintenance of social structure (honoring one's parents; prohibition against killing) and a great number encourage thought and behavior outside of the sphere of narrow self-interest (helping the needy, doing for others).  It is common for congregations to organize volunteer efforts for causes deemed worthy, including group efforts at worship and education.  Behaving in the right ways toward others is seen as a path to self-development, as is expressed in the Golden Rule.  In many traditions, the Creator is seen as all-giving (having given us the world), so that our giving to others is a way of enacting the Divine within us.  When there are natural disasters or other events that leave people in need, members of spiritual communities donate to relevant rescue and relief efforts and volunteer their time.  Through our social efforts, we expand our sensitivities and our value to the world, enhancing our experience and our sense of self.  I have worked with many older, successful traders who have renewed their careers by creating teams and mentoring young traders.  In giving, they receive many times over.        

*  A Belief In A Greater Power/Reality - Not all spiritual traditions are explicitly theistic, but all seek to connect the individual and community to a transcendent reality.  The Greater Power or ultimate reality serves as an organizing principle and priority for individual and collective life.  Tapping into the transcendent, the initiate is required to put aside day-to-day concerns and pursue life in a holy fashion.  Because the Higher Power is often seen as imminent and not only transcendent--we are created in the Divine image--many spiritual practices can be appreciated as techniques for accessing the Divine within us.  Viewed from this perspective, life is all about soul refinement and the pursuit of a course that cultivates the best within us.

With this as backdrop, it becomes easier to see that systems of spirituality are to self-transcendence what systems of counseling and therapy are to self-development.  

This is a very important idea.

The world's great spiritual traditions are playbooks for expanding our selves.

Expanding the Self

You may be wondering at this point what all of this has to do with trading and our effectiveness in financial markets.  Indeed, you may feel a tension between activities that seek to make money and activities that seek our spiritual growth and expansion.

Let's go back for a minute to an idea from earlier in the book.  People enter therapy when they are stuck.  They find themselves in unfulfilling, repetitive patterns and cannot exit these patterns even when they are aware of their existence.  What therapies do is enhance experiencing via the relationship with a therapist:  they get people in touch with powerful thoughts, feelings, and memories underlying behavior patterns--and then they recast those patterns in a totally fresh manner.  It is this "translation" of our patterns that opens the door to potential solutions, and it is the enhancing of experiencing that helps people internalize that translation.

Perhaps I've had one unsuccessful romantic relationship after another, failing to deeply connect with partners and pushing them away in various ways.  I've come to the conclusion that I'm unlovable and a failure in relationships.  When some of those patterns begin to replay themselves in my relationship with my therapist, the therapist does not push away but instead helps me truly feel the fears underlying my defensiveness with others.  The therapist enables me to see that what I'm doing in my current relationships is a replaying of my coping during my childhood years growing up with rejecting parents.  It's not that I'm unlovable; it's that I have never truly learned how to experience and accept love.  That shifts my view of my situation, fueled by my re-experiencing of my childhood pain.  Understanding my patterns in a different light opens the door to new thought and action patterns and introduces a long-missed sense of hope and optimism.

We seek spiritual solutions for much the same reason:  we are stuck in our current life situation, recognizing dead ends but unable to exit from them.  The spiritual setting, filled with introspection, prayer, learning, support, and a helping guide, allows us to see our challenges in an entirely new light, opening fresh doors.  Perhaps our religious faith describes how everything happens for a reason and is part of a larger purpose to help us refine ourselves and bring ourselves closer to the Divine.  Suddenly, what I took as a setback becomes a life learning lesson and a part of my growth.  Instead of feeling defeated, I feel inspired.  I deepen my experience and achieve a fresh, constructive perspective.

When we trade with a spiritual perspective, everything we do in markets becomes a way of refining ourselves.  Even losses can become meaningful and inspirational in that renewed mindset.

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Letting Go

Perhaps the greatest challenge traders encounter is the decision to let go of trading.  Intellectually, we know that, in any performance field, only a small fraction of participants sustain a living from their craft.  How many artists make a living from their painting or sculpture?  How many would be athletes make it to the Olympics or the big leagues?  This is an important difference between performance fields and other career domains.  An average manager or mechanic can probably find and sustain a job.  An average trader loses money and cannot possibly sustain a living.

To accept that reality and let go of trading can feel like failure.  It can feel like the death of a dream.

But it can be the start of a new life.

Years ago, I worked with a trader who did well, but not outstandingly well.  He was a former athlete who looked to excel.  He tried building a team at his fund and threw himself into the teamwork.  He made money, but struggled.

That's when he decided that he could achieve his dream elsewhere.  He stepped back and asked himself what meant the most in his life.  He reviewed his most fulfilling, meaningful experiences.  That's when he figured out that he was successful as an athlete because he helped lead his team.  He was interested in trading as a way of replicating that experience.  It wasn't truly about trading.  It was about pursuing goals with others and finding shared success.

Armed with that insight, he began his own business with two partners and found quick success in the food industry.  He loved running the business and he especially loved providing fun experiences for people.  No amount of analysis of his trading problems could have helped him turn his life around.  It was only when he reflected on his spirit and what meant the most to him that he was able to radically renew his career.

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Spirituality expands our experience in much the same way as therapy, but with one important difference.  Through our belief systems, we explicitly seek and achieve understandings that place ourselves in broader life contexts.  Therapies help us redefine ourselves.  Religions and spiritual traditions take us beyond ourselves.  Trading cannot work if it narrows us; it can only succeed if it becomes a vehicle for expanding who we are.

What soul needs are met by your trading?

Is trading expanding your understanding of yourself and the world?  Is your trading an active vehicle for self-mastery?  Does your trading connect you with people that make you a better human being?  Does trading provide you with the income and tools to make a difference in the lives of others?  

There are so many ways in which trading can expand us.  And there are many ways in which trading can narrow us, limiting our focus to bars on charts and entries in profit and loss ledgers.  Many traders fail, not because of grand psychological conflicts and problems, but because the ways in which they pursue trading shuts off their greatest strengths and values. If trading is going to work, it has to be enhancing, not soul killing.

The Transcendent Importance of Transcendence

Now we can appreciate why spirituality is central to our renewal.  Our basic human dilemma is that we are trapped in repetitive life patterns.  We cannot exit those because we are trapped within a relatively narrow band of consciousness.  All change is mediated through the expansion of our experiencing.  In circumscribed ways this occurs through counseling and psychotherapy.  At a much broader level, it occurs through our spiritual pursuits.

The world's great spiritual traditions are highly evolved systems for expanding our understandings, expanding our experience, and ultimately expanding our selves.  We experience this expansion as renewing, for we are truly making ourselves anew.  When we shift our focus and life directions from the pursuit of worldly goals--income, prestige, possessions--to the pursuit of spiritual aims, the result is radical renewal.  We tap into parts of ourselves that we may never have known or appreciated.

Let's take a simple example:  Suppose you find yourself overtrading, taking trades that don't meet your criteria for favorable reward relative to risk.  How might you solve that problem?  A psychological approach would have you work on yourself by trying to change the conditions that may have led to the overtrading.  For instance, you might work on your self-talk during trading, or you might practice a variety of relaxation and focus methods during the trading session.  Alternatively, you might trace the overtrading to unmet emotional needs and take time outside of trading hours to address those.

All of those are plausible ways of working on the problem.  They are aimed at self-improvement.

Consider, however, methods that might be aimed at self-transcendence.  Suppose, for instance, that you decide that the overtrading is caused by an ego intrusion:  an undue attachment to short-term profits.  Your goal is not simply to stop yourself from trading, but to become less ego-focused.  Like Marlon, you enter a martial arts program that teaches you control over your body and its movements, from breathing to striking.  You learn to quiet the mind and stay grounded in the present, so that you can flow with the exercises taught by your dojo master.  In immersing yourself in the martial arts work, you become more centered in other areas of your life.  You begin to trade with an inner stillness, without a need to make trades happen.

That is renewal.  It becomes radical when we embrace a spiritual tradition and make that a platform for accessing and cultivating the soul.

Now does this mean that any spiritual tradition is as good as any other for developing ourselves?  Is being Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist a matter of choice no different from selecting a red coupe versus a blue sedan?

Not at all.

An analogy will be helpful:  Careers are ways in which we develop ourselves.  I can grow within the profession of psychology; I can grow as a teacher, as a physician, as a business owner, or as an athlete.  All of these are paths to  development.  The challenge is to find our paths.  My unique interests, values, talents, and skills will determine whether I can best develop myself in one career path or another.  If I tried to pursue the career of an athlete, my personal development would be quite limited.  As a psychologist and teacher, my growth has been far greater.

Similarly, the various schools of psychotherapy have been found to be effective in facilitating change, across a range of people and problems.  What makes therapy profound for a particular person, however, is the fit between their strengths, the specific activities prescribed by the therapy, and the qualities of the therapist.  Someone who is action and achievement oriented may benefit most from a cognitive-behavioral framework, which structures specific activities and goals for the change process.  Someone who is reflective and interpersonally oriented may find that behavioral approaches leave them cold.  Interpersonal and psychodynamic modalities, with their emphasis on insight and the use of relationships to recast and reshape problem patterns, may very well speak more powerfully to that person.  In many cases, it will be the fit between the personalities of therapist and client that will facilitate the greatest change.

The right spiritual framework transforms us by inspiring us.  Trapped in lives that are less than totally fulfilling, we begin to look outside ourselves; we begin to ask larger questions.  Specific spiritual teachings--and specific spiritual teachers--may speak to us and most effectively guide our development.  Stephen Prothero, in his book God Is Not One, makes a compelling case that all the world's religions are not simply different means toward the same ends.  They embrace different priorities, different practices, and different values.  What is meaningful to one person could leave another cold.

Once we open ourselves, our paths find us.  Inspiration draws us.  When ordinary experience becomes extraordinary, infused with broader meanings and significance, we know we are on a path of renewal, a truly transcendent path.  Let's now take a closer look at three distinct paths of spiritual development and how we might find our unique ways of pursuing these.

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Key Takeaways - The spiritual traditions and religions of the world are collections of insights, teachings, and practices that can move us forward in the development of soul.  Each places us in a larger, inspiring context of meaning that allows us to escape ego-laden routines.  When trading succeeds, it is because it taps into spirit:  what we find intrinsically rewarding and meaningful.  When trading fails, it narrows us, trapping us in our small selves and keeping us attached to the ego-gratifications of being right and making money.  

Practical Exercise - Taking breaks before and during trading to sustain the right mind frame is a valuable practice.  What if you were to supercharge your breaks by using break time as spiritual time?  Imagine meditating upon and re-experiencing your most spiritually inspiring moments; using break time as prayer time to contact the Divine; engaging in a particularly meaningful reading.  The idea is to turn your break time into soul time, truly taking a break from ego.

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