What is Spiritual Health?

Spiritual Health opens our lives to love – love of God (or higher power), love of self, and love of neighbor. Like other types of health, our spiritual health changes over the course of our lives, ebbing and flowing with circumstances and practices. Sometimes life can knock us down, but support from healthy spirituality can help us navigate during difficulty. We can cultivate spiritually healthy habits and communities to support us, but we cannot always control the challenges and obstacles we face, just as we cannot control physical health challenges.  In the same way that a frantic life-style, with few moments for reflection and gratitude, can lead to spiritual struggles, lifestyle can lead to disease in the body and mind (think high blood pressure, anxiety.)  We have power over our choices, and we can use psychology to illuminate practices that support spiritual health.

Spirituality is an essential part of human life. Seeking and experiencing God or something beyond the ordinary realm—a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves—that provides meaning, direction, and inspiration has been evident since humans were drawing on cave walls. Spirituality that grows our capacities to love God (higher power, or our source of divine love), ourselves, and others, and deeply connects us in reciprocal ways to others is spiritually healthy. Psychological research demonstrates that spirituality can take on many forms and that some beliefs, practices, and communities are more beneficial than others for individual and societal well-being. In other words, not all spirituality is created equally. 

What is spirituality?  

Spirituality involves our experience of and response to transcendence—our understanding of who or what is sacred. Experiences with transcendence creates the “big picture” for our beliefs and values, connects us to others and the divine, and directs us toward our purposes in order to live full lives.

Our experiences and responses to transcendence—the sacred, God, ultimacy—orient us and help us clarify what truly matters in life. If we are thoughtful, what matters to us should inform how we live. For many, we experience spirituality in the context of religion, but for others spirituality is experienced in nature or through service. Regardless, psychology informs us that there are many psychological capacities that we can nurture and develop that allow us to experience or attune to transcendence—whether that is the presence of God or a beckoning from the Universe. 

What is healthy spirituality?

Healthy spirituality is a way of engaging God or a source of transcendence where you feel deeply connected to something much bigger than you are, and this supports our ability to experience love and share love with others. Healthy spirituality helps us develop capacities for love and it also helps us to access the love and reassurance that we need – the reassurance of sacred love, a sense of connectedness with others, the deep sense of well-being that comes from knowing and being known, and an assurance that we are indeed beloved.  

Our culture that values progress and goal-driven behaviors often pushes us to move in unhealthy rhythms. The pace of life can inhibit healthy spirituality. For example, when we are constantly rushing and our minds are filled with incessant worry, repetitive thoughts, lists of things to do, or if we are preoccupied by checking texts and emails or are distracted by social media, it is hard to find the stillness necessary to hear a divine whisper. We might even be unaware of our own desires or experiences of discord. We so often fall into roles, scripts, jobs, external obligations that we end up living many of our days on autopilot. Slowing down to hear ourselves, or what our partner is really saying, or what God might be inviting us to can be challenging. 

Moreover, some forms of spirituality can be very individualistic and lead to self-improvement without the consideration and awareness of others. Other forms of spirituality can be very inspiring, but might motivate us towards detrimental ends for ourselves or others (cults, for example).

Living out love is difficult and complex. Healthy spirituality helps us develop capacities to forgive. Healthy spiritual practices help us to become more observant and aware of our thoughts and the thoughts of others. Spiritual practices help us regulate and live more intentionally. Because we are all different, we will live out love in different ways, but doing so requires us to clarify our values, understand what we find meaningful, and grow in the knowledge of who we are, who we belong to, and what it means for us to live purposefully.

What is Spiritual Health?

Spiritual health is the aspect of human health that deals with experiences of transcendence (a sense that we are part of or connected to something bigger than ourselves). Spiritual health affirms us as unique, embodied individuals and involves growing capacities to derive meaning from our experiences that inform our purposes.  Importantly spiritual health involves our capacities for giving and receiving love. We don’t arrive at an ultimate destination of spiritual health, but rather healthy spirituality involves a life long journey of practice within the context of community. Our spiritual practices should bring more hope, peace, joy and love to our lives.

The Thrive Center offers a framework to explore six facets, each contributing uniquely to spiritual health, which include having experiences with the sacred, spiritual habits and rhythms, relational support, a sense-of-self as beloved, purposeful goals, and habituated virtues like patience, compassion, and honesty.

These facets spell THRIVE to make them easy to remember.

Transcendence & Spirituality

Habits & Rhythms

Relationships & Community

Identity & Narrative

Vocation & Purpose

Ethics & Virtues

We can grow our capacities for spiritual health throughout our lives, but engaging in spiritual practices for our own sakes, or at the expense of others, falls far short from spiritual health. Because humans are so relational, and because we come to know who we are, and whose we are, in the context of relationships, and because we learn how to love through relationships, spiritual health requires growing capacities to be relational and learning to love others as we love ourselves.

“Ultimately, the telos of healthy spirituality is to become a Reciprocating Self.” – Pam King

That doesn’t mean that we live only for others at the expense of our deepest passions and desires.  Each person is unique and healthy spirituality should develop the individual to live into the fullness of their lives. Yet, spiritual health requires us to live in ways that help others, with an openness to seeing people who are different from us with curiosity and care. Just as we grow and change throughout our lives, so do our spiritual needs, and there will be seasons where we need to re-evaluate our practices, support systems, and even our beliefs.