Spiritual Health

Spiritual health is a key aspect of your overall wellbeing and safeguards against the pitfalls of materialistic, fragmented, illusory, and self-centred living. It involves tending to your spiritual needs and honouring your spiritual nature. Your spiritual health represents a state of wellbeing achieved by integrating your personality with your true self and the greater multidimensional whole.

Finding your true self through mindfulness, meditation, and self-inquiry is central to spiritual health. These tools free you from the reactive mind that can trap you in the illusion of a narrow or fragmented self and its projected overlays of distorted and illusory thought. They allow you to expand your identity beyond the limits of your narrow ego self into the greater spiritual whole of life, healing any isolated sense of self, fragmentary worldview, and existential angst.

Spiritual health is maximised when you are fully engaged and present in the world from your true self, valuing the Earth as a school for spiritual growth and honouring your sacred connection with all things—with your thoughts, feelings, and actions. In this way, spiritual health increases your capacity for compassion towards others and all life, motivates you to build strong community, and improves your ability to live sustainably and ecologically so you honour the Earth and all life as sacred.

Spiritual Health is Necessary in Today’s World

Spiritual health is needed to meet the challenges we face in the modern world, where a spiritual connectedness with all life is essential. Today, the global population is rising to a level that is increasing the pressures on social and ecological sustainability, to the point where we are having less and less opportunity to get away with selfish acts that cause division, disintegration, and suffering.

Spiritual Health Requires Mindfulness

Mindfulness, the practice of consciously directing your attention in the present moment, without reactivity or judgement, is crucial for your spiritual health. When you practise mindfulness regularly, it builds powerful and transformative metacognitive states that help you connect with and embody your true self. Mindfulness also strengthens your ability to come off autopilot and disentangle from your thoughts and emotions. You can then see more clearly and act more freely, in alignment with your true self and your spiritual values. You can also more easily overcome your fears and resistances to healing and embracing your full spirituality.

Spiritual Health is Reflected By the Earth

The Earth is the matrix that sustains us and is a great barometer of our collective spiritual health by showing the consequences of our actions through the web of life we are part of. Look at these facts:

• 10,000 species become extinct each year
• 12-15 million hectares of forest are lost each year
• 1 percent of topsoil is eroded each year

We are responsible for this situation and for changing it. Mindfulness, by disentangling us from maladaptive thought patterns and automatic thinking, restores the power of choice. We no longer need to close our eyes in denial and dissociate by losing ourselves in distraction to avoid responsibility. We can be present to life and change the course of our collective lives by choosing to honour ourselves and the whole that we are part of, which includes creating nourishing life structures and supporting activities that honour that whole. Blaming governments or corporations and waiting for them to act doesn’t help: we are all culpable—we are the ones that give governments and corporations their power, authority, and reason to be. The power is always in our hands to make a difference and together be the change that we want to see in the world.

Spiritual Health Boosts Compassion and Gratitude

Spiritual health connects you with all life through a sense of shared identity and essential unity. By opening your felt awareness to your interconnectivity with all things, it gives you the capacity to feel suffering in others and to desire to relieve it with compassion, or to rejoice in their freedom from suffering.

Spiritual health also increases your gratitude for your world. When you become mindful of the blessings of life that you habitually overlook, you value life and the world more, creating a powerful motivating force for positive change and healing.

Spiritual Health Reflects Embodied Spirituality

Spirituality can be experienced as spiritual transcendence (beyond the physical) and spiritual immanence (within the physical). The key to spiritual health is to experience both, so that you expand your consciousness and ground it into form as embodied spirituality. This means, for instance, expressing your spirituality through your actions in all areas of your life, and contributing to networks of light and collective structures of living that embody spiritual values and honour the spiritual self-realisation of all.

In contrast, using transcendent spiritual states to escape your challenges and responsibilities of living in the physical world is more about disengaging, dissociating, and avoiding the responsibility to anchor your light into physical form. The narrative of transcendence bound up in many spiritual practices does not help with this tendency.

Spiritual awareness reveals your essential interconnectivity with all things, and dissociating from any of these things takes away your sense of connection with them, preventing your spiritual self-realisation through them. An engaged spirituality empowers you to heal and transform your relationships, life structures, and experiences for greater spiritual health, with the understanding that the physical world is where your spirituality is most needed to be integrated. A world of spiritual health is where the essential unity of all things is enshrined continually by acts of love, compassion, joy, gratitude, peace, wisdom, and healing.

Spiritual Health and Wholeness

Spiritual health restores your connections with your whole self and the whole of life. Restoring wholeness explains the meaning of healing: the root meaning of the word “heal” comes from the Old English hael, meaning “to make whole”. The sense of individual separation, division, dissociation, isolation, and estrangement that characterises the dominant culture of mass society is based on people’s over-identification with their narrow ego selves and their loss of identity with the whole. In other words, a lack of spiritual health. This can lead to conflict, illness, and a selfish disregard for others and the greater whole.

In 3 Ecological Principles for Authentic Living and 9 Ways to Honour the Earth, I discussed how you can help restore ecological wholeness by embracing your greater, ecological self, which is the extension of your self into nature along the pathways that interconnect life. In The Greatest Ongoing Challenge We Face and Why We all Need Authentic Community, I discussed how you can help restore social wholeness through community building, which requires you to transform your sense of self beyond a narrow, separate, and disconnected one. In both cases, mindfulness is the key. It takes you out of any trance of dissociation and enables you to be more present and embody your true self, which is defined as much by its connections within the whole as by its existence as a centre of being.

Spiritual health won’t occur if you sacrifice yourself to the whole or to collective ideologies, such as religions and social and political movements. To evolve spiritually, you need to be in your individual power while integrating your individual self with the whole, without sacrificing yourself.

Spiritual Health Grounds Your Light

As you purify your mind and body and honour and embody your spiritual self, your distortions start to clear, and the light of your spiritual nature shines through you to bless your life. Grounding your light is the process of bringing through the light of your spiritual self (your light body) into form and expression, so that you, your actions, and your impact on the world are light-filled. The things you create and the imprints you leave will hold a higher degree of light, embodying the spirit of wholeness and enlightened states of consciousness.

As light embodies in your vision, and your metacognitive states increase, the distorted conceptual overlays projected upon reality, which you once mistook for reality, start to dissolve. This gives way to a clearer, light-filled perception in which the magic of life reveals itself. Here you see clearly the things your heart is grateful for: the acts of love, the beauty of nature, and the spirit of life.

As your light shines more and you embody it further, the unresolved emotions and patterns of personal evolution that you have avoided come up for transformation and healing. By holding them in the light of your spiritual self without avoidance, they will have no choice but to resolve and clear in the light.

View every moment as an opportunity to be fully present, to self-realise, and to embody your spiritual light.

Spiritual Health Checklist

Now, let’s turn insights into action. Take a moment to reflect on the following Spiritual Health Checklist to identify areas in which you can grow.

• Do you consider yourself to be embodied in your true spiritual self?
• Are you able to remain fully present on a regular basis?
• Do you feel whole?
• Are you dissolving dysfunctional patterns and inner resistances?
• Are you clearing cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, and cognitive dissonances?
• Are you processing unresolved emotions?
• Are you purifying your mind and body?
• Are you in good mental, emotional, and physical health?
• Do you feel inner peace?
• Do you feel joy and enthusiasm for life?
• Do you feel that you have an inner resourcefulness and internal guidance system and honour this?
• Do you feel a sense of interconnectedness and community with all life?
• Do you regularly honour the interconnectedness of all things?
• Do you value the whole of life as sacred?
• Are you able to resolve conflict?
• Do you have healthy relationships?
• Do you bless and filter out of your life the people and things that drain you or are incompatible with your light?
• Do you practise ecological living?
• Do you practise community building?
• Can you find meaning and life purpose through your participation in the greater whole?
• Do you regularly practise mindfulness, meditation, or self-inquiry?
• Do you practise compassion for all life, including yourself?
• Do you experience daily gratitude for your life experience?
• Can you experience your oneness with all that is?

This checklist is your road map to spiritual health. Pick three items from the checklist that call to you and consider how to work on them, with the insights of this post, to bring greater spiritual health into your life.

Next Step: Embodying your spiritual self is essential for your true happiness, fulfilment, and ability to navigate life’s challenges with wisdom, empowerment, and compassion. To discover effective ways to do this and further develop your spiritual health and self-development, request a Guidance Call with me.