In a 1967 interview, "What I Believe,"[1] John Lennon opened up to the world about how he discovered God.


"You don't have to have a great faith or anything. The whole thing is so simple -- as though it's too marvelous to be true," Lennon said of discovering Transcendental Meditation in India with guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, during the interview with The Daily Sketch. "I don't and never did imagine God as one thing. But now I can see God as a power source, or as an energy."


Lennon went on to say, "It's all like one big jelly. We're all in the big jelly." Now, with nearly one in five Americans identifying as "spiritual but not religious,"[2] and countless successful people in a range of professions saying that meditation is their greatest secret to success[3] , some of America's most beloved public figures and successful business leaders are following suit, opening up about their first "big jelly" moments of spiritual awakening -- and telling the world why they believe.


Here are 10 amazing spiritual "coming out" stories from successful thinkers, performers and business leaders.


Jim Carrey


jim carrey


In 2009, Jim Carrey gave a heartfelt talk[4] about the first time he realized that his self was something bigger than his mind, body or thoughts. Carrey said of his spiritual awakening:


"I understood suddenly how thought was just an illusory thing, and how thought is responsible for, if not all, most of the suffering we experience. And then I suddenly felt that I was looking at these thoughts from another perspective, and I thought, 'Who is it that is aware that I'm thinking?' Suddenly, I was thrown into this expansive, amazing feeling of freedom -- from myself, from my problems. I saw that I was bigger than what I do, bigger than my body, everything and everyone. I was no longer a fragment of the universe. I was the universe."

In a 2006 "60 Minutes" segment[5] , Carrey also said that spirituality has helped him through bouts of depression, and helped him to engage with the world from a more loving place.


Gabrielle Bernstein


gabrielle bernstein


New York Times best-selling author and guru to young professional women [6] Gabrielle Bernstein was a hard-partying New York City PR girl (and cocaine addict) when she "hit bottom" -- and turned inward to find a new way. Bernstein said in a TEDxFiDiWomen talk[7] that she woke up one morning and heard a voice tell her: "Get your life together, girl, and you will live beyond your wildest dreams."


After 25 years of looking for direction and happiness "in all the wrong places," Bernstein got clean, began following Joseph Campbell's metaphysical text "A Course in Miracles" -- which she says helped her move from a place of fear to one of love -- and soon afterward wrote her ultra-successful self-help book, "May Cause Miracles." [8]


Steve Jobs


steve jobs


Steve Jobs was a practicing Zen Buddhist. At 18 years old, the tech visionary dropped out of Reed College and went to India[9] to find himself -- and came home with Buddhist values that would shape the rest of his life and career. At his memorial in 2011, Jobs had arranged for guests to be given copies of "Autobiography of a Yogi," the classic spiritual memoir on the power of self-realization.


"That was the message: Actualize yourself," friend and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who attended the funeral, said at the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference[10] . "If you look back at the history of Steve and that early trip to India ... He had this incredible realization that his intuition was his greatest gift. He needed to look at world from inside out ... His message was to look inside yourself and realize yourself."


Ellen Degeneres


ellen degeneres time magazine


When "Ellen" host Ellen Degeneres first came out as a lesbian in 1997, the reaction from Hollywood was devastating: Advertisers pulled their funding and she was forced to cancel her show for three years. During that period, Degeneres told TODAY's Ann Curry in 2012[11] , she began to look for happiness and wholeness within herself.


"I don’t think it was a failure, but it certainly gave me a lot of time to sit still and go, ‘Who am I?’" Degeneres said.


During that period, Degeneres found her center and created a spiritual lifestyle by becoming a vegan, yogi and, in 2011, a Transcendental Meditation practitioner. "[TM] just gives me this peaceful feeling and I love it so much," Degeneres said at a David Lynch Foundation event[12] .


Oprah


oprah


Oprah Winfrey has become a guru for modern Americans, doling out self-help, spiritual guidance and meditation tips. Winfrey has said that the only life is a spiritual one -- something she knows because she has "lived in the space of spirit [her] whole life." Oprah knew this truth even when she was four years old, she claims, when she profoundly felt the truth of her favorite Bible verse, Acts 17:28 ("For in him we live and move and have our being").


"There is a force/energy/consciousness/divine thread that connects us all spiritually to something greater than ourselves," Oprah said during an Oprah's Life Class program in 2012, defining spirituality [13] as "living your life with an open heart through love."


Tina Turner


tina turner swiss citizenship


Tina Turner turned on to Buddhism in the 1970s when she was struggling to put an end to her abusive relationship with husband and fellow musician Ike Turner. Turner now follows a sub-sect of Buddhism known as Soka Gakkai, which emphasizes chanting and follows the teachings of the Lotus Sutra. Beyond, an album of Buddhist and Christian music, features Turner chanting the Lotus Sutra ("Nam Myoho Renge Kyo"[14] .


"I feel that chanting for 35 years has opened a door inside me, and that even if I never chanted again, that door would still be there," Turner told Shambhala Sun in 2011[15] . "I feel at peace with myself. I feel happier than I have ever been, and it is not from material things. Material things make me happy, but I am already happy before I acquire these things. I have a nature within myself now that’s happy."


Tim Ryan


tim ryan quiet time caucus


Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), author of "A Mindful Nation: How A Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance and Recapture the American Spirit," has been instrumental in bringing mindfulness to the nation's capital -- and into schools and communities across the U.S. Since last December, he's led a silent meditation time on Mondays for members of Congress, the "Quiet Time Caucus."[16]


The Catholic former high school football player turned to meditation (which he now practices for 45 minutes every morning) when he was feeling stressed and overwhelmed with campaigning and constant work travel. So he went on a five-day mindfulness retreat in the Catskills with Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction -- and the trip changed his life.


“I had two BlackBerrys,” Ryan told the Washington Times[17] . “I checked them at the door. You learn to follow your breathing, appreciate how your mind works. When it starts to wander off, you come back to your body."


“By the middle of the retreat I felt my mind and body sync up. Like being in the zone."


John Mackey


john mackey whole foods


In 2008, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was going through a rough patch in his life. Whole Foods was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission after acquiring its largest competitor, Wild Oats, and Mackey himself was caught in the middle of a stock market scandal[18] . It was then that the "Conscious Capitalism" author turned to spirituality.


Mackey found solace in the practice of holotropic breathing, which led him to several important epiphanies and acted as something of a spiritual awakening.


“I had this very powerful session, very powerful. It lasted about two hours,” Mackey said in a CD released with his "Conscious Capitalism."[19] “I was having a dialogue with what I would define as my deeper self, or my higher self.”


Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna


Like Mackey, Bertolini turned inward and explored alternative healing remedies in the wake of a traumatic event. After the Aetna CEO broke his neck in a skiing accident, he was hooked on painkillers for a year. But then he found natural pain relief through mindfulness practices like yoga and meditation. Now, he's been practicing viniyoga for nearly seven years.


Bertolini has become an outspoken advocate of mindfulness[20] , which he credits with improving decision-making skills in the workplace. At Aetna, he introduced a 12-week mindfulness and yoga program for employees, and according to Bertolini, it's resulted in dramatically lower stress levels and increased productivity among its 34,000 participants.


"Every morning I get up and I do my asana, pranayama, meditation, and Vedic chanting before work," Bertolini said in an interview with yoga website Alignyo in May[21] . "It’s helped me be more centered, more present."


Paul & Sonia Jones


In 2012, Tudor Investments fonder Paul Jones and his wife Sonia donated $12 million to establish the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. The exploration of contemplative and yogic practices is close to both of their hearts.


"We both started practicing Ashtunga Yoga in 2000 and it changed our lives," the couple said when they announced the gift[22] . "Our hope is that every person that goes into the Contemplative Sciences Center can have the same great experience that my wife and I and our family and all our friends have had."



Also on HuffPost:




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  • You can change the brain's structure and functioning.


    Neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson's groundbreaking research on Tibetan Buddhist monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that years of meditative practice can dramatically increase neuroplasticity -- the brain's ability to use new experiences or environments to create structural changes. For example, it can help reorganizing itself by creating new neural connections. "The findings from studies in this unusual sample... suggest that, over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains," <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/" target="_blank">Davidson wrote in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2008.</a>




  • You can alter visual perception and attention.


    In 2005, <a href="https://eprints.usq.edu.au/2552/1/Carter_Presti_Callistemon_Ungerer_Liu_Pettigrew_CB_v15n11_PV.pdf" target="_blank">researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and University of California at Berkeley</a> traveled to India to study 76 Tibetan Buddhist monks, in order to gain insight into how mental states can affect conscious visual experiences -- and how we might be able to gain more control over the regular fluctuations in our conscious state. Their data indicated that years of meditation training can profoundly affect a phenomenon known as "perceptual rivalry," which takes place when two different images are presented to each eye -- the brain fluctuates, in a matter of seconds, in the dominant image that is perceived. It is thought to be related to brain mechanisms that underly attention and awareness. When the monks practiced meditating on a single object or thought, significant increases in the duration of perceptual dominance occurred. <strong>One monk was able to maintain constant visual perception for 723 seconds -- compared to the average of 2.6 seconds in non-meditative control subjects.</strong> The researchers <a href="https://eprints.usq.edu.au/2552/1/Carter_Presti_Callistemon_Ungerer_Liu_Pettigrew_CB_v15n11_PV.pdf" target="_blank">concluded</a> that the study highlights "the synergistic potential for further exchange between practitioners of meditation and neuroscience in the common goal of understanding consciousness."




  • You can expand your capacity for happiness.


    Brain scans revealed that because of meditation, 66-year-old French monk Matthieu Ricard, an aide to the Dalai Lama, has the largest capacity for happiness ever recorded. University of Wisconsin researchers, led by Davidson, hooked up 256 sensors to his head, and found that Ricard had an unusually large propensity for happiness and reduced tendency toward negativity, due to neuroplasticity. “It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” <a href="http://india.nydailynews.com/newsarticle/7b470adb0a9b6c32e19e16a08df13f3d/buddhist-monk-is-the-worlds-happiest-man" target="_blank">Ricard told the New York Daily News.</a> Davidson also found that when Ricard was meditating on compassion, his brain produced gamma waves <a href="http://india.nydailynews.com/newsarticle/7b470adb0a9b6c32e19e16a08df13f3d/buddhist-monk-is-the-worlds-happiest-man" target="_blank">"never reported before in the neuroscience literature."</a>




  • You can increase your empathy.


    Research at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education made some incredible findings last year. Neuroeconomist Brian Knutson hooked up several monks' brains to MRI scanners to examine their risk and reward systems. Ordinarily, the brain's nucleus accumbens experiences a dopamine rush when you experience something pleasant -- like having sex, eating a slice of chocolate cake, or finding a $20 bill in your pocket. But Knutson's research, still in the early stages, is showing that in Tibetan Buddhist monks, this area of the brain may be able to light up for altruistic reasons. "There are many neuroscientists out there looking at mindfulness, but not a lot who are studying compassion," <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Stanford-studies-monks-meditation-compassion-3689748.php#page-1" target="_blank">Knutson told the San Francisco Chronicle.</a> "The Buddhist view of the world can provide some potentially interesting information about the subcortical reward circuits involved in motivation." Davidson's research on Ricard and other monks also found that meditation on compassion can produce powerful changes in the brain. When the monks were asked to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion," their brains generated powerful gamma waves that may have indicated a compassionate state of mind, <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai.html" target="_blank">Wired reported in 2006.</a> This suggests, then, that empathy may be able to be cultivated by "exercising" the brain through loving-kindness meditation.




  • You can achieve a state of oneness -- literally.


    Buddhist monks can achieve a harmony between themselves and the world around them by breaking the psychological wall of self/other, expressed as by particular changes in the neural networks of experienced meditation practitioners,<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12661646" target="_blank"> the BBC reported.</a> While a normal brain switches between the extrinsic network (which is used when people are focused on tasks outside themselves) and the intrinsic network, which involves self-reflection and emotion -- the networks rarely act together. But Josipovic found something startling in the brains of some monks and experienced meditators: They're able to keep both networks active at the same time during meditation, allowing them to feel a sense of "nonduality," or oneness.