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Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King, and you’re listening to With & For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance towards spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose.
Jill Westbrook: Hello everyone, Jill Westbrook here. I’m Senior Director at The Thrive Center and work with Pam to produce this show. We are so very grateful for this amazing first year of the show. And during our off season, we’ve been hard at work on season two of With & For, interviewing fabulous new guests and preparing to launch again with brand new full episodes on January 6th, 2025.
And until then, we’ll be sharing a bunch of new practical resources from our brilliant host, Dr. Pam King.
Starting today for the next six weeks, we’ll work through a series from Pam on the five A’s of agility for spiritual health. Why do we need to develop agility as a practice? If we are trying to live purposefully, there are going to be roadblocks along the way.
In an ideal world, our environment would support our well being. But wow, in our modern world, our environments change quickly. Maybe more quickly than we can manage. So we need practices to help us navigate change. These five steps can be applied and modified in so many ways throughout the rhythms of your life. They mark key milestones on the journey toward spiritual vitality as a foundation for the purposeful pursuit of thriving.
In today’s episode, Pam introduces the 5 A’s and explains how they can be operationalized in your life to help you develop more agility and adaptivity. Key Traits of a Thriving Life Then each week after that, we’ll explore one step at a time for an in depth look at each of these components of agility in spiritual health.
As you embark on this journey with us, remember that this five step process is something that can be integrated throughout your daily life. Thanks for following along. Enjoy.
Pam King: In my research and work on thriving, I’ve come to realize that spiritual health is central to the ways in which we make meaning, the ways in which we connect to God or the transcendent, our sense of identity, how we behave in this world. And in order to pursue spiritual health and thrive, I’ve developed something I call the five A’s.
It’s a cycle of practices synthesizing research on different contemplative practices from different spiritual traditions, and then some of the psychological research around the efficacy or the impact of different types of spiritual practices on human well being and health.
The A’s work together. And that they are a process, a cycle that attunes us to our bodies and our physiology, allows us opportunities for insight and awareness of what various feelings and sensations might mean, how they point to areas of mattering and purpose and value in our lives and also attuning us to things that are perhaps not fitting or off kilter as well as engage us not just in our emotions and our thoughts and values but also move us to action and behaviors that enable us to live out a thriving.
I developed the five A’s as a practice that one could habituate to deal with the complexities of our chaotic and ever changing daily lives. We are in an era where things are less predictable and that central to thriving is the ability to adapt and grow and live out one’s purpose in the context of change, of opportunity, of challenges, and of suffering.
And so the A’s are put together in a way that allows us to deeply attune to ourselves, our sources of mattering, whether it’s people or sacred significance, and understand how our purpose should take shape and evolve in the context of everyday lived life. By engaging in these activities, you will be able to cultivate more spiritual vitality, more clarity about who you are, who God is inviting you to become and your role in this world.
Agility is really important to thriving, because at the center of thriving is adaptive growth. There is no prescribed way to grow, but we know that we always need to grow through the thick and thin of life. Sometimes growth involves loss or pruning, sometimes growth is accelerated, but we always need to adapt.
We want to make the best fit possible with the environment that we have. Or we need to think about changing our environment. But we want to be able to grow and we want to be able to grow in a purposeful direction. Within psychology, we talk a lot about the importance of purpose. of having an actionable, enduring goal that is meaningful to oneself, that is an articulation of who you are, and that’s meaningful to the world.
It’s adaptive growth towards being able to pursue that purpose. So sometimes you say thriving is living life on purpose. And part of that purpose is not just like what we do, our legacy, or the mark we’re making in this world, but part of our purpose is to be relational. is to be connected with people.
Agility is super important because it allows us to balance those purposeful goals, those purposeful relationships, and the values that keep that all balanced. I created this practice to enable people to be agile and to adapt in the crux of constant change. We are all too familiar with chaos and change these days and the ground beneath us.
is shifting. And we need practices that can root us and connect us despite what’s going on in the world around us. And furthermore, we need purposes that keep us directed and growing towards God.
So where do we go from here? We’re going to dive into the five A’s. We’ll start with attunement, which is attuning and becoming rooted and connected to our body and our feelings. Then we’ll go to aware, which is becoming aware of what these sensations mean in our lives. And then we shift to alignment.
Alignment has to do with aligning our lives to our values, to what matters most, to what brings us the most joy. Fourth is activate. Activate is when we actually put these values into action. And we specifically take one small step towards living out what matters most and pursuing purpose. And then finally, we wrap it up with a sess, where we take some time to reflect, to reattune to the feelings, to take inventory of how it’s going, and to see what’s working and what’s not.
Really grateful that you’ve joined me, and looking forward to sharing these practices with you. I invite you to consider how this can become a daily habit and lead to a life that gives you a sense of thriving.
Jill Westbrook: Thanks for listening, everyone. Next week, Pam will walk us through attunement, the first of the five A’s cycle, which is about connecting to embodied perception of our immediate feelings and sensations.
Until then, you can find a wealth of practices and resources on our website, the thrive center dot org. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to WithinFour to catch each of our weekly episodes this fall. Join us again next week.
Pam King: With & For is a production of the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary.
For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter.org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose. I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the thrive center and our within for podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our senior director and producer. Lauren Kim is our operations manager. Wren Juergensen is our social media graphic designer. Evan Rosa is our consulting producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology in Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Pamela Ebstyne King, Ph.D.
Pamela Ebstyne King is the Executive Director of the Thrive Center and the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science in the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Her life’s purpose is to help people thrive. To this end, her academic work focuses on psychological and theological perspectives of human thriving and social flourishing. Her psychological research focuses on spiritual and moral development; the role of transcendent beliefs, narratives, and emotions in virtue development; and environments that promote thriving for diverse people. TheThriveCenter.org translates research into resources that promote wholeness, thriving, and spiritual health, and she is the host of the With & For podcast.
Episode Summary
How can we cultivate agility and adaptivity in our chaotic, shifting times? Dr. Pam King offers a research-backed cycle of practices to incorporate into the rhythms of your daily life—helping you navigate change and work through life’s obstacles. She calls them the 5 A’s of Spiritual Health: Attunement, Awareness, Alignment, Activation, and Assessment.
Show Notes
In this episode, she introduces the 5 A’s, explaining the context, process, and benefits. She comments on the contemplative practices and psychological science that support this cycle of habits and offers reflections on why these simple movements can be so transformative.
ANNOUNCEMENT: With & For Season 2 launches on January 6, 2025!
Show Notes
- With & For Producer Jill Westbrook introduces the episode
- “Why do we need to develop agility as a practice?”
- Developing agility and adaptivity
- What the 5 A’s are: “a cycle of practices synthesizing, research on different contemplative practices from different spiritual traditions …. and psychological research around the efficacy or the impact of different types of spiritual practices on human well being and health.”
- Attuning to our bodies and physiology
- What sensations might mean
- Engaging emotions, thoughts, values, actions, and behaviors that lead to a thriving life
- Dealing with complexity and unpredictability
- Tuning into our sources of meaning and purpose
- How to cultivate more spiritual vitality and sense of purpose
- “At the center of thriving is adaptive growth.”
- “We want to be able to grow in a purposeful direction.”
- “Thriving is living life on purpose.”
- Agility allows us to balance goals, relationships, and values.
- Attunement
- Awareness
- Alignment
- Activation
- Assessment
About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
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
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