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Article Excerpt
Spirituality often is conceptualized as a vital, if not essential, aspect of holistic wellness. The spiritual lives of counselors and counselors-in-training, therefore, are considered with an emphasis on healthy spiritual practices that encourage mindfulness, heartfulness, and soulfulness.
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People say that what we're seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
--Joseph Campbell (Campbell & Moyer, 2001)
Various scholars have posited that spirituality is the core of wellness and inseparable from other aspects of wellness (Chandler, Holden, & Kolander, 1992; Myers, Sweeney, & Witmer, 2000; Sweeney & Myers, 2005; Witmer & Sweeney, 1992). In addition, spirituality is receiving attention in the counseling profession at a level unparalleled in history, as evidenced by the inclusion of spirituality in the accreditation standards of the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP; 2001), a V-code for Religious or Spiritual Problems in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text, rev.; American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and a proliferation of scholarly writing on the subject (Cashwell & Young, 2005; Frame, 2003; G. Miller, 2002). Although the emphasis of wellness models, accreditation standards, diagnostic criteria, and much of the scholarly literature on spirituality is on client wellness and development, the spiritual lives of counselors and counseling students warrant attention as well. The purpose of this article is to define spirituality, to consider how the spiritual lives of counselors may affect their overall wellness and effectiveness, and to consider how disciplined spiritual practice may enhance counselor mindfulness, heartfulness, and soulfulness as aspects of counselor wellness.
TOWARD DEFINING SPIRITUALITY
Spirituality has been described as a universal phenomenon (W. Teasdale & Dalai Lama, 1999), and empirical evidence attests to the importance of spirituality and religion in the lives of Americans. One group of researchers (Princeton Religion Research Center, 2000) found that 96% of persons living in the United States believe in God; more than 90% pray; 69% are church members; and 43% have attended a church, synagogue, or temple within the past 7 days. These numbers only paint part of the picture, however, because there are many persons for whom their primary expression of spirituality is private rather than public. Furthermore, researchers have found spirituality to be highly important in the lives of mental health professionals (Carlson, Erickson, & Seewald-Marquardt, 2002; Young, Cashwell, & Wiggins-Frame, in press). Although our assumption cannot be empirically validated, it is our working assumption in this article that spirituality is universal.
Although research evidence suggests that spirituality and religion are far-reaching within society, there are challenges inherent in defining the construct of spirituality. Although we, the authors, consider spirituality to be a universal phenomenon (i.e., available to all people), it is also highly personal and developmental. That is, each person develops a highly personal spiritual life that changes over time. Thus, it is not possible to provide a single definition that is wholly inclusive (Fukuyama & Sevig, 1999). When individuals attempt to define spirituality, they discover not its limits but their own (Kurtz & Ketcham, 1992). As a result, many have chosen global definitions of spirituality. Unfortunately, such definitions lend themselves to a type of relativism that does not adequately mirror the growing body of literature on spiritual development (Faiver & Ingersoll, 2005).
These caveats notwithstanding, we choose here a discussion of spirituality that is highly practical. We consider spiritual development to be a consciousness-altering process. As Huston Smith (2000) has eloquently stated, altered states are only useful if they lead to altered traits. For this article, we define spirituality as a developmental process that is both active and passive wherein beliefs, disciplined practice, and experiences are grounded and integrated to result in increased mindfulness (nonjudgmental awareness of present experiences), heartfulness (experience of compassion and love), and soulfulness (connections beyond ourselves). We believe that this definition is useful for several reasons. First, it makes no assumptions about the relationship between spirituality and religion for a given individual. That is, some people may find that their religious and spiritual lives are inextricably linked and mutually supportive, whereas others may find that their spiritual development occurs outside of the context of organized religion. Second, this definition emphasizes the developmental nature of spirituality. Growth and change are essential aspects of spiritual development. Wilber (1997) described this when he discussed the transformative versus the translative aspects of religion. That is, although it is important to develop personal beliefs and schemas to make meaning in the world, the spiritual path ultimately is about transforming one's life, literally transcending the ego rather than strengthening it. Third, the recognition that spiritual development is both active and passive considers that there are external factors and forces, both desirable and undesirable, that occur throughout the life span to affect spiritual development and that the developmental process has an active component in which an individual engages in study to inform beliefs and develops a disciplined spiritual practice. Finally, this definition emphasizes that spiritual development has tangible outcomes--namely, increased mindfulness, heartfulness, and soulfulness--aspects of the spiritual journey discussed by Lesser (1999). This aspect of the definition helps in distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy spiritual beliefs and practices. Unhealthy spiritual beliefs and practices will not have a positive impact on mindfulness, heartfulness, and soulfulness. Two examples may be helpful here. If a person holds beliefs that emphasize her or his negative attributes, the harsh self-judgment and self-hatred of the inner critic's voice is neither mindful, heartful, nor soulful. At the other extreme, one who abuses spiritual beliefs and practices to lead to spiritual narcissism (the belief that I am better than you because of my spiritual evolution) is not increasing mindfulness, heartfulness, or soulfulness. Both of these cases typify unhealthy spiritual processes.
CHARACTERISTICS OF "SPIRITUAL" PEOPLE
Maslow (1998), often deemed the father of transpersonal (literally, "beyond the ego") psychology, provided a list of attributes of people he labeled transcendent self-actualizers, that is, people who are developing spiritually. The term spiritual is in quotation marks in the section heading to emphasize that, given the developmental nature of spirituality, the dichotomization of people into categories of "spiritual" or "not spiritual" is an artificial dichotomy. Rather, the following attributes represent personal characteristics that evolve through a lifelong process of spiritual study, practice, and experience:
* Independence from environment and resistance to enculturation
* Social conscience
* Intimate personal relations
* Nonhostile sense of humor
* Move from egoism to altruism
* Acceptance of self and others
* Spontaneity and simplicity
* Freshness of appreciation
* Creativity and originality
* Peak experiences, a term Maslow used to describe nonreligious quasi-mystical and mystical experiences. Peak experiences are sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, and possibly the awareness of ultimate truth and the unity...
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