A Psychology-Backed Framework for Healthy Spirituality

Listen Here:

Episode Summary

“Spirituality is deeply rooted in love, enables us to receive and experience love from beyond ourselves, and enables us and invigorates us to live out love as ourselves.”

The precarious times we live in fill us with anxiety. The rifts and shifts of culture, politics, and religion are leaving us feeling unmoored, disconnected, and alienated from ourselves and each other.

And a psychologically informed approach to spirituality is the antidote.

In this episode, Dr. Pam King discusses why spirituality is so essential to the human experience, and how it operates as the antidote to the culture of anxiety and despair around us.

She works through the Thrive Center’s 6 Facets of Spiritual Health (T.H.R.I.V.E).

1. Transcendence & Spirituality
2. Habits & Rhythms
3. Relationships & Community
4. Identity & Narrative
5. Vocation & Purpose
6. Ethics & Virtues

Learn more about the 6 Facets of Spiritual Health at thethrivecenter.org.

ANNOUNCEMENT! With & For Season 2 launches on Jan 6, 2025!

Show Notes

  • With & For Season 2 launches on Jan 6, 2025!
  • Living in precarious times, which gives us a sense of unrest and dis-ease
  • Feeling “unmoored” and paralyzed by shifting religious affiliation and beliefs
  • Spirituality is the antidote to the anxiety of this cultural moment.
  • Spiritual health slows us down, and helps us reflect and connect.
  • How Thrive aims to help you move toward and align with healthful and helpful spirituality
  • What is spirituality? A definition
  • Spirituality as experience and response to transcendence
  • Spiritual and religious harm and abuse
  • Harm is done at personal and communal levels
  • “Spirituality is deeply rooted in love, enables us to receive and experience love from beyond ourselves, and enables us and invigorates us to live out love as ourselves.”
  • Thrive’s spiritual health framework is a unique, research-backed psychological approach to faith and spirituality that contributes to whole-person thriving by focusing on 6 key areas of human life and experience.
  • Facet 1: Transcendence & Spirituality
  • “Awareness of and connection to a source of invigorating love offers meaning and inspires purpose. For many this is God, for others it may be a higher power or nature.”
  • People experience transcendence in many different ways
  • Examples of transcendence: Prayer, Worship, Nature, Beauty, Contemplation, Reason, and Music
  • “Transcendence is important because it is invigorating. It's emotional, as well as mind opening.”
  • Points to meaning and purpose beyond ourselves
  • Practical Questions for Transcendence & Spirituality: Do you feel cared for and loved by God or a higher power? Do you have practices that connect you to awe or bring you joy and meaning?
  • Facet 2: Habits & Rhythms
  • “Habits and rhythms have to do with healthy spiritual practices and regular rhythms that allow us to slow down, to gain insight, connect to love and energize us into purposeful endeavors.”
  • Forming us and changing us
  • Practices to help us regulate, relate, and reflect
  • How traditional spiritual practices contribute to thriving and well-being
  • Examples: Sabbath, Celebration, Play, and more
  • Practical Questions for Habits & Rhythms: Do you have regular rhythms of rest or sabbath? Do you have practices that help you regulate your emotions? Do you engage your gody in spiritual practices like breathing, walking meditations, or singing?
  • Facet 3: Relationships & Community
  • “Connections provide a space of belonging where we can be fully known to ourselves and others and learn to give and receive love.”
  • We’re relational beings created to be known and loved.
  • “When we are known, seen, and know that we matter, our brains relax and we’re able to grow.”
  • Practical Questions for Relationships & Community: Do you have a spiritual community in which you feel loved and supported? Do you respect people who practice their faith differently from you?
  • Facet 4: Identity & Narrative
  • “Growing in clarity about who we are as a beloved, unique, embodied person and how we are related to others and the greater world.”
  • The stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are
  • “It’s hard to get a clear sense of our identity.”
  • “Our identities are spread so thin, it's hard for us to have a cohesive story about our lives.”
  • Who you are
  • Whose you are
  • Where your life’s going
  • Is spirituality a journey of finding a static “true self”?
  • Considering the evolving narrative of our lives
  • Earliest attachments
  • Meaning, hope, and direction—a sense of being beloved, with all the beauty and the brokenness
  • Practical Questions for Identity & Narrative: Do you understand your life as part of a bigger story? Do you seek to understand who you are and who you are becoming?
  • Facet 5: Vocation & Purpose
  • “Contributing our strengths to the world by living out our response to love.”
  • Spiritual beliefs point us to purposes beyond ourselves—bigger than ourselves, noble, and life-giving
  • “Our lives are part of a much bigger story than ourselves.”
  • Strengths, who you serve or love, and who you’re becoming
  • Finding purpose in the most mundane or quotidian (daily) practices
  • Practical Questions for Vocation & Purpose: Do your beliefs motivate a sense of purpose in your life? Do you seek to contribute your gifts and talents to contribute something good to the world?
  • Facet 6: Ethics & Virtues
  • “Our beliefs about love and how we live out love through values, views of right and wrong, and cultivating virtuous habits.”
  • Moral compasses that point to the true north of virtue, the good, the just, and the right
  • Practices that enables us to become the good people that we want to be
  • Examples: forgiveness, patience, and compassion
  • Practical Questions for Ethics & Virtues: Does your spirituality/religion guide how you treat others? Do you seek to stand up for what is right even when it is difficult?
  • “Healthy spirituality invites us into practices that cultivate habits that enable us to be virtuous and to be good people in situations that are complex. How does spiritual health enable us to live out love? It's one thing to talk about love—it sounds good. It's another thing to live it out.”
  • We all want to thrive, and in the 6 faceted spiritual health framework, we have the tools and resources and practices to enable ourselves and others to become whole.
  • “As humans we’re in this together. We need to be with and for others.”
 

About the Thrive Center

 

About Dr. Pam King

Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.  Follow her @drpamking.  

About With & For

  • Host: Pam King
  • Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
  • Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
  • Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
  • Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
Special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

Share

Explore More

Love

Healthy Spirituality – The Focus is Love: Why is Love So Hard?

Love

Healthy Spirituality – The Focus is Love: The Role of Leaders

Spirituality

Do you have practices to support healthy spirituality?

    You Got It!