Spirituality & Our Mental Conundrums
Spirituality is like a resource on which many people rely in times of crisis, unrest, and personal challenge. It reinforces our inner peace and provides a sense of connection to a force that’s much bigger than ourselves. Spirituality has the power to relieve the stress of everyday life, particularly when it’s directed with intentional practice.
Research has proven that spirituality can benefit both the mind and the body. Whether someone is coping with cancer or clinical depression, spiritual exercises help them increase their acceptance, decrease their negative emotions, find deeper meaning, and deepen their relationships with others.
Spirituality can also help address various issues like poor self-esteem, low confidence, lack of self-control, and a deep fear of tackling life’s challenges. That’s why we should look at it as a helpful extension to mental health treatment plans.
It can also be an easy way to keep our mental health on track. In fact, even those who do not practice a religion can find great comfort in spirituality, since it is such a prevalent concept among secular communities. Individuals who have never learned to draw upon spiritual resources can do so rather easily.
Spirituality at its core
For a very long time, religious practices were associated with mental illness. Luminaries in the field of psychology, such as Freud or Charcot, envisioned religion as some kind of pathology that indicated mental health issues in patients.
That’s why psychology avoided religion, as well as its less formalized cousin, spirituality, for many years. Nowadays, we have this viewpoint as a counter to the human condition. Spirituality is this widespread (almost universal) human trait that people approach in various different ways, ultimately having the same goals.
What they want is to find meaning and value in their day-to-day lives, to make sense of it, as well as to connect with something bigger than themselves. Spirituality is also a way of integrating our own experience with the idea of something way more overarching and timeless than ourselves. Spirituality is often needed to:
- strengthen their relationship with themselves and others
- find a bigger purpose in life
- find comfort in hardship, whether it’s an illness, bereavement, breakup, or unemployment
- understand the idea of the afterlife (even if one’s belief is that there’s no life after death)
- gain and cultivate more hope
Are religion and spirituality identical?
Spirituality and religion aren’t the same. Religion is a specific type of codified spirituality. All followers share the same faith and pray to the same deity. Religions have their own specific ceremonies and rituals, meeting places, and congregations.
Religions have well-established rules with different consequences for breaking them. More often than not, they tend to indoctrinate children from a very young age. Spiritual practices might rely on such factors, but it’s not always a rule.
Anyone who even stood on a mountaintop and felt immense awe at a view marveled at ancient architecture, or simply felt a sense of profound fellowship at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, has felt spirituality. In the end, spirituals help interpret life. From love to hate, birth to death, success to unjust outcomes, spiritual practices aid us. In fact, constantly tuning in to the spiritual side of life can increase our health, including our mental wellness.
What is spiritual health?
As the ideas of mental health and spirituality have become increasingly more mainstream, “spiritual health” is often a term that loses ground. Many people seem to mistake it with a synonym for spirituality, but there’s a notable difference there. As a 2018 study has shown, spirituality is a much broader term that references various experiences or states of being that cover a person, whereas spiritual health is something one can invest in or work toward.
Spirituality can also take another form for everyone. Spiritual health can easily apply to any type of spirituality or religion. As spirituality is a source of potential that everyone has access to if they wish, spiritual health is a wide spectrum on which everyone falls in one way or another. Due to this, it is way more concrete.
Below, you will find some of the most common traits of spiritually healthy people.
- They are quite reserved and thoughtful as far as their emotional reactions go, even during life’s greatest challenges.
- They possess an innate ability to feel and express emotions where called for, particularly when dealing with grief and loss.
- Daily practices to help you process hardship, changes, as well as emotions.
- A deep ability to deal with the challenges other humans bring into our lives with as much kindness and understanding possible.
- Flexible beliefs that can bend as needed to new circumstances or information.
- Mindfulness and presence when eating, exercising, working, and enjoying time with loved ones.
- The power to explain one’s inner state to others, if needed or desired.
If these traits don’t seem familiar to you, that’s not something to worry about. All these examples take time to cultivate. A spiritual leader or mental health professional can help you find ways to strengthen them through consistent practice.
How to practice spirituality
The ways in which spirituality is seen in the world are endless. Spiritual practices could differ depending on various aspects of a person’s life and surroundings, as well as their religious upbringing and choices, their geographical location, their culture, and the way their mind works. Spirituality can take many different forms. But some of the most common approaches to spirituality also include:
- mindfulness practices, like meditation, prayer, reflection, or yoga;
- reading rituals, which can also include holy texts, self-actualization books, and literature;
- time spent with art, music, or any other forms of media that could increase your spiritual connection to the world as well as other people;
- time in nature, like hiking, backpacking, kayaking, and hunting;
- religious services and worship, complete with rituals and ceremonies;
- creative practices conducted on your own, like painting, sculpting, writing, and welding;
- journaling or otherwise recording your thoughts.
Deepening the spiritual mindset
As soon as people manage to establish a spiritual basis for living, they can easily deepen their spiritual mindset. This often implies looking inward through practices like listening, stepping into others’ shoes, looking for the best in others, as well as cultivating compassion and forgiveness.
As other people form an integral part of an individual’s spiritual mindset, such practices are often people-centric. They can include community service, volunteering, and helping others on their spiritual journey, like leading meditation, yoga, journaling sessions, and other similar practices.
They might also be interested in trying a service position in a 12-step program or faith community, as well as reading or writing literature on spiritual topics. Constant attention and focus on one’s spiritual health are bound to improve one’s connection to the world and other beings who inhabit it. Just like mindfulness, it enhances one’s own sense of joy, community, and belonging. Nevertheless, it is mandatory to keep in mind that not all spiritual practices are healthy.
Are there any downsides?
Young or emotionally weary people, for example, might prove to be vulnerable to people looking to increase a flock or start a cult. Even if this isn’t that common, neither is it that far-fetched for spiritual individuals to “recruit” others to their way of thinking.
It’s fairly important to be cautious around self-described gurus or leaders. It’s also advised to be aware of religious groups that try to convert you to extreme ways of thinking. If what you believe in pits you against every friend and family member before encountering it, that’s unhealthy.
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