The self-help and "mind-body-spirit" scenes are billion dollar industries, but how has the commodification of spirituality affected our ability to practice it? As sacred principles are co-opted and watered down to sell feel-good mass-market products, those unwilling to sellout spiritual principles are pushed further to the margins - where they are increasingly maligned as "cultist" for putting spirituality ahead of materialism.

Alternative spiritual teachings and groups that encourage a way of life outside of mainstream values are being marginalized and suppressed from all sides.

On one side, what is deceptively being presented to the general public as a viable and appealing alternative to mainstream religious institutions is largely owned by corporations and individuals looking to profit from people's natural interest in spirituality, making it nothing more than a cleverly disguised offshoot of the mainstream itself.

Corporations and individuals who sell spirituality select fragments of ancient spiritual concepts or teachings and then repackage them to be more appealing as a product to sell. In the process, however, they violate the integrity of the original source and distort the original meaning and purpose.

Additionally, by charging money to access the majority of their products, these merchants of spirituality break the timeless cycle of freely giving and receiving spiritual knowledge (which is a fundamental spiritual principle found within the origins of many spiritual traditions).

This has created a confusing landscape that is difficult to navigate for spiritual seekers looking for truth beyond the mainstream and has begun to change the very definition of what "spirituality" is, as it turns more into an alluring commodity to be bought and sold instead of a way of life.

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother." Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a "bread sandwich" tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as "resilience." (He is widely credited with being the first to study the concept in an experimental setting.) Over many years, Garmezy would visit schools across the country, focussing on those in economically depressed areas, and follow a standard protocol. He would set up meetings with the principal, along with a school social worker or nurse, and pose the same question: Were there any children whose backgrounds had initially raised red flags—kids who seemed likely to become problem kids—who had instead become, surprisingly, a source of pride? "What I was saying was, 'Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school?' " Garmezy said, in a 1999 interview. "There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came. If I had said, 'Do you have kids in this school who seem to be troubled?,' there wouldn't have been a moment's delay. But to be asked about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds—that was a new sort of inquiry. That's the way we began."

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Waking Times Editor's Note: This list was gathered and collated by Brendan D. Murphy with kudos to Mark Passio, Tim McClew for the distillation, and Juliet J. Carter.

"Real compassion kicks butt and takes names and is not pleasant on certain days. If you are not ready for this FIRE, then find a new-age, sweetness and light, perpetually smiling teacher and learn to relabel your ego with spiritual sounding terms. But, stay away from those who practice REAL COMPASSION, because they will fry your ass, my friend." - Ken Wilber

Mark Passio's 10 Basic New Age Deceptions

1. Ignore the "Negative"

The notion that you make things worse by focusing on negative issues is false. Ignoring negative issues, like ignoring symptoms of an illness, only serves to make the issues worse. Refusing to look at critical information, just because it makes you uncomfortable, is willfully choosing a state of ignorance—to remain un-conscious.

Correction: Seeing the negativity for what it is creates an ability to steel oneself against its harmful effects and perhaps avoid them entirely.

If you are looking for a radical new way to dispose of your body after death, look no further than mushrooms, says TED Fellow artist Jae Rhim Lee. Coming on the market this year, her "death suit" will allow bodies to decompose in an environmentally-friendly manner.

The "death suit," which is actually a pyjamas-like suit containing colonies of specially selected fungi, offers an alternative option to burial or cremation and is also available for pets.

I have a lot of respect for Native Americans — those who populated this land before the first European white man set foot on these shores.

History rarely mentions it, but countless thousands of those Indians were killed by disease and carried in the boats of those early traders. But before that, the American Indian had a thriving culture, in tune with nature and appreciative of the beauty around them.

Of all the cultures referred to as "primitive" by supposedly civilized society, this is the culture we know the most about. Yet at the same time, we know very little about them. Sadly, history and Hollywood has not treated the Native Americans fairly, portraying them as a barbaric culture, mostly responsible for attacking white settlers and committing atrocities on them.

It hardly comes as a surprise that we're our own worst enemies, but new research appears to conclusively prove that our brain is the biggest saboteur of success, and leads to self-deception on a grand scale. The culprit? Dopamine.

As some may know, dopamine is the chemical that gives us pleasure whenever we receive a reward.

So what if you promised yourself to start getting up earlier, or eating dinner at preset times? According to new research from Johns Hopkins University, none of this really matters, because the memory of something much sweeter always lingers in the brain.

"We don't realize our past experience biases our attention to certain things," Professor Susan M. Courtney at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences said.

Social support has well-known benefits for physical and mental health. But giving support -- rather than receiving it -- may have unique positive effects on key brain areas involved in stress and reward responses, suggests a study in Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

"These results add to an emerging literature suggesting that support giving is an overlooked contributor to how social support can benefit health," according to the report. The lead researchers were Tristen Inagaki, PhD, of University Pittsburgh and Naomi Eisenberger, PhD, of University of California, Los Angeles.

A new study from Rutgers University reports that meditation and aerobic exercise done consecutively can help reduce depression, rumination, and overwhelming negative thoughts. The combination of mental and physical (MAP) training through focused meditation and aerobic exercise is a relatively new concept and clinical intervention for major depressive disorder (MDD).

Depression is estimated to affect approximately 20 percent of the population at some point in their lives. Among other symptoms, the inability to focus your attention in positive ways is a hallmark of depression. Currently, the most common treatment for depression is psychotropic medications and talk therapy.

The researchers at Rutgers wanted to explore the neuroscience behind alternatives to current treatments that would allow individuals to acquire new cognitive skills so they could bounce back more quickly from stressful life events. The team found that learning how-to focus attention through meditation combined with the neurobiological benefits of aerobic exercise created a powerful double whammy for fighting depression.

For the first time horses have been shown to be able to distinguish between angry and happy human facial expressions.

Psychologists studied how 28 horses reacted to seeing photographs of positive versus negative human facial expressions. When viewing angry faces, horses looked more with their left eye, a behavior associated with perceiving negative stimuli. Their heart rate also increased more quickly and they showed more stress-related behaviors. The study, published today (10 February) in Biology Letters, concludes that this response indicates that the horses had a functionally relevant understanding of the angry faces they were seeing. The effect of facial expressions on heart rate has not been seen before in interactions between animals and humans.

Believing that no harm can come your way, no matter what, can lead you to become a victim of the myth of invincibility. There is a reason for saying that "pride goeth before a fall," and that excessive pride or hubris, commonly regarded as a tragic flaw, will lead to your own undoing. Once you've convinced yourself that you're invincible, you fail to see yourself in an accurate or realistic light. Whatever shortcomings you've avoided coming to grips can then come back to haunt you and if they're serious enough, can lead to your downfall.

We see plenty of examples in the media of celebrities and politicians who think they can do no harm. Most recently, Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, given the "Superman" designation prior to Super Bowl 50, failed to live up to expectations when the big game came along. Although his team certainly would have gone into that game well-prepared and ready, who knows how much his head, and focus, was turned by the accolades foisted upon him by the media?

Anyone who goes into a competitive situation convinced of his or her own invincibility is liable to suffer a similar fate. Once you see yourself as the inevitable hero or victor, you'll fail to prepare yourself for the reality of what might end up being a very challenging situation. Imagine that you're going into a high-pressure meeting where you need to talk your boss into agreeing to a request or you need to beat out a coworker looking for the same plum outcome. Instead of methodically going through in your mind the rationale of your approach, you gloss over the details, thinking only of how great it will feel to win. When your boss asks for those details, you'll be stumped, and your competitor will carry the day.