Life is hard for everyone. That’s why it helps to have an assortment of tools to navigate life’s inevitable lows.

And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap: Finding Peace and Fulfillment When Life Hurts. Harris is a psychotherapist and renowned expert in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The book is based on ACT’s principles.

The reality slap is a term that Harris uses to refer to life’s various lows, which include everything from losing a loved one to experiencing failure or envy.

According to Harris, after a reality slap strikes, we face another problem: “the reality gap.” The reality gap consists of two sides. One side is the reality we have; the other side is the reality we want.

The bigger the gap between these realities, the more painful our emotions.

Our lives do not exist in a vacuum. If they did, I suppose life might …

There’s a cartoon picturing a chicken and an egg in bed together. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a very satisfied expression on his face, and the egg is restless and disgruntled. The egg finally looks over to the chicken and says, “Well, I guess that answers that question.”

That’s how I think of the relationship between religion and depression: like the chicken and the egg debacle.

I can’t say which came first in my life, because they were both there from the start. And you need only read through a few of the lives of the saints or walk the exhibition aisles at the Religious Booksellers Trade Exhibit to see that holy people aren’t all that happy much of the time.

How is it that we depressives tend to be more spiritual? Or is it that the more religion you get in your life, the more depressed?

If you sprinkle a hefty dose of Catholic (or Jewish) guilt unto a fragile biochemistry headed toward a severe mood disorder, you usually arrive at some kind of a religious nut. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! For I am one.

I have said many places that growing up Catholic, for me, was both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing in that my faith became a refuge for me, a retreat (no pun intended) where my disordered thinking could latch unto practices and traditions that made me feel normal. Catholicism, with all of its rituals and faith objects, provided me a safe place to go for comfort and consolation, to hear I wasn’t alone, and that I would be taken care of. It was, and has been throughout my life, a source of hope. And any speck of hope is what keeps me alive when I am suicidal.

But my fervent faith was also a curse in that, with all of its stuff (medals, rosaries, icons, statues), it dressed and disguised my illness as piety. So instead of taking me to the school psychologist or to a mental health professional, the adults in my life considered me a very holy child, a religious prodigy with a curiously intense faith.

I don’t remember learning about transpersonal psychology in my clinical psych program. (With all that reading and lack of sleep, it’s also possible I just missed that lesson.) So I was intrigued when I recently came across the term, and decided to do some digging.

In the Foreword of The Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology, writer Ken Wilber defines “transpersonal” as “personal plus.” He explains that transpersonal work integrates both personal psychology and psychiatry but then “adds those deeper or higher aspects of human experience that transcend the ordinary and the average—experiences that are, in other words, ‘transpersonal’ or ‘more than personal,’ personal plus.”

It turns out that transpersonal psychology focuses on the spiritual. Bruce W. Scotton, M.D., one of the editors of the book, describes “spiritual” as “the realm of the human spirit, that part of humanity that is not limited to bodily experience.”

I don’t live in a big city. (In fact, the only noises I typically hear are birds chirping or cats in heat. Don’t ask.) But I’ve lived in NYC and have been visiting my family there several times a year for over a decade. So I have a fairly good grasp of what it’s like to be surrounded by a cacophony of car horns and ambulance sirens, a flurry of feet pounding the pavement, and hours (many hours) of traffic. Though it has many perks, city life is rarely peaceful or serene.

That’s why I really like the book Urban Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace, Presence & Purpose in the Middle of It All by Jonathan S. Kaplan, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and founder of UrbanMindfulness.org. In it, he addresses specific problems that plague city dwellers and gives readers a variety of strategies to feel more calm and fulfilled. (He lives in NYC, so I think he knows what he’s talking about.)

He breaks his book down into exercises you can do “At Home,” “At Play,” “At Work,” “Out and About” and “Anytime, Anywhere.”

The positive psychology movement is surely gaining momentum. In a recent discussion with two of my colleagues we joked that positive psychology’s really about a type of recovery from negative thinking.

This got me wondering if a 12-step process might be worth identifying. So guess what…? I think it is.

Here is what I propose for the 12 steps of positive psychology.

“We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world,” wrote Helen Keller.

How I wish she were wrong.

Disappointments leave us with the unpleasant task of squashing, crushing, and pinching lemons to extract any and all juice.

Here, then, are a few of my techniques to turn sour into sweet, to try my best to overcome disappointment.

1. Throw away the evidence

Albert Einstein failed his college entrance exam. Walt Disney was fired from his first media job. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Get it?

People of all shapes, sizes, colors and nationalities get depression. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to whom it strikes and when.

Many people swear by certain things to help them keep depression away. Some people use exercise, while others throw themselves more into their work. Others take a daily dose of a herb like St. John’s Wort or fish oil, because of the association these ingredients have had with a reduction in depression in some studies.

But what about religion? Can a strong sense of spirituality or religion help you ward off depression?

“Just as an untamed elephant can do damage, trampling crops and injuring people, so the untamed, capricious mind can cause harm to us and those around us.”

So writes Jan Chozen Bays, M.D., a physician and Zen teacher, in her book How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures in Mindfulness: Simple Daily Mindfulness Practices for Living Life More Fully & Joyfully.

How often have you let negative thoughts run your life? Let a punitive perspective take over so you end up beating yourself up for the smallest of supposed offenses? Or just experienced the days like you’re listing through a boring book, going through the motions but skimming the significant stuff?

In November 2007, religious historian Karen Armstrong won the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) award because of her many contributions that have made a profound difference in the world. Each recipient is given $100,000 and a wish for a better world.

So, three months later, when Armstrong accepted the award, she asked TED to help her create, launch, and propagate a Charter for Compassion that would be designed by prominent thinkers, philosophers, and leaders from a variety of different faiths. Its mission? To restore compassion to the heart of religious and moral life at a time of such flagrant violence and terrorism in the name of race and religion.

As I read through excerpts of Armstrong’s book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, and reviewed her interview earlier this year with NPR’s Neal Conan, I was inspired by Armstrong’s ferocious passion and single-mindedness with which she is pursuing this dream of hers. Her charter embraces five key principles, the final being “to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings — even those regarded as enemies.”

A new study conducted at Baylor University indicated that families with a mentally ill member would like their congregation to offer more assistance. The study, published in the journal “Mental Health, Religion and Culture,” was the first to look at how mental illness of a family member influences an individual’s relationship with the church.

“Families with mental illness stand to benefit from their involvement with a congregation, but our findings suggest that faith communities fail to adequately engage these families because they lack awareness of the issues and understanding of the important ways that they can help,” said Diana Garland, Ph.D., dean of Baylor’s School of Social Work and co-author of the Baylor study.

The study surveyed nearly 6,000 participants in 24 churches representing four Protestant denominations about their family’s stresses, strengths, faith practices and desires for congregational assistance. Families with mental illness ranked help from the church as a second priority; however, families without mental illness ranked it 42nd on their list of requests from churches.