Making Sense of Spirituality

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Making Sense of Spirituality
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Why Bother With Spirituality?
Religion and spirituality are among the most
important factors that structure human
experience, beliefs, values, behavior, and
illness patterns.

• Lukoff D, et al. Journal of Nervous
• and Mental Disease 180673-682, 1992.

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What is Spirituality and what are its key
features?
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Are religion and spirituality the same things?
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Why bother with spirituality?
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Believing and BelongingThe Rise of Spirituality
in Western Culture
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Religion
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Religion

• A formal, system of beliefs, usually centring
  around some conception of God and expressing the
  views of a particular religious community.

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  The Major World Religions Christianity 2
billion Islam1.2 billion Hinduism 900
million Secular/Non-religious/Agnostic/Atheist
900 million Buddhism 350 million Chinese
Traditional Religion 225 million Sikhism 19
million Judaism 15 million
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Religion is seen by some to be an impediment to
medicine

• Jehovahs Witness who refuses a life saving blood
  transfusion
• Christian Scientist who refuses allopathic health
  care in favor of a Reader
• Various religions that may decry contraception or
  forbid pregnancy termination.

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Spirituality

• Spirituality is a belief system focusing on
  intangible elements that impact vitality and
  meaning to lifes events.
• Maughans (1995). The SPIRITual history.
• Archives of Family Medicine, 511-16.

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Spirituality

• Meaning , hope, value, purpose, love,
  connectedness and for some God.

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Key spiritual questions

• Who am I?
• Where do I come from?
• Where am I going to?
• Why?

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A question of meaning

• It is not as important what happens to a person,
  as to the meaning that the person gives to what
  has happened.

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Mans Search for MeaningVictor Frankl

• Sometimes external circumstances in our life
  situation are beyond our control.
• Frankl maintains that the attitude we choose to
  take toward our life situation is within our
  control.
• The spiritual journey relates to our inner
  struggle to shape our attitude toward illness and
  even death itself.

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Spirituality, Religion and medicine
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Science indicates that religion and spirituality
might have importance for health and well-being
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What Primary Care Physicians Claim

• 50-75 of primary care patients present with
  psychosomatic problems or problems related to the
  stresses of life, for which there is no medical
  answer.
• Problems of somatization complaints or symptoms
  without a precipitating medical or organic
  cause.
• Problems of depression and anxiety.
• Spiritual issues arise in primary care

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• Dying patients have less death anxiety than
  healthy patients. Religious meaning and the
  strength of ones religious beliefs play an
  important role in ones not being afraid to die.
• Gibbs, H.W., Achterberg-Lawiis, J. J. Spiritual
  Values and Death Anxiety Implications for
  Counseling with Terminal Cancer Patients.
  Journal of Counseling Psychology (1970) 25(6)
  563.

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What relevance might religion and spirituality
have for current health care practices?
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The Religion and Health Movement
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Demonstrated Benefits of Regular Church Attendance

• Demonstrated Benefits of Regular
• Church Attendance

• Greater Physical and Mental Health.
• Lower Rates of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
• Increased Quality of Life.
• Enhanced Recovery From Illness.
• Marital Happiness and Fewer Divorces.
• Happier and More Successful Children.
• Increased Life Expectancy.

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The Clinical Effects of Intercessory Prayers (393
Patients on the CCU)
The Clinical Effects of Intercessory Prayers
(393 Patients on the CCU)
Prayed for n 192
Controls n 201
4 10 3
7 2 7 0
6 2
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Episodes of CHF Cardiopulmonary
Arrest Pneumonia Intubations Antibiotics
Randolph Byrd,Positive Therapeutic Effects of
Intercessory Prayer in a CCU Population,Southern
Medical Journal 81 (1988) 826-29
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Healing Power of Prayer

• Prayer and Meditation Potentially Blocks the
• Cascade of Stress Hormones (Adrenaline)
• That Would Ordinarily Boost Blood Pressure
• Dampen the Immune System and Damage
• a Variety of Body Systems.
• Herb Benson, Chief, Mind/Body Medical Institute,
  Berth
• Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston.

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Why are we spiritual?
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Andrew Newberg

• Why God Wont go Away

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The neurophysiological correlates of meditation.

• Studies highly experienced Tibetan Buddhist
  meditators using a brain imaging technology
  called single photon emission computed tomography
  (SPECT).
• SPECT imaging allowed him to image the brain and
  determine which areas are active by measuring
  blood flow. The more blood flow an area has, the
  more active it is.

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Meditation and the brain

• Two sets of images were taken, showing slightly
  different parts of the brain. The first image
  shows that the front part of the brain, which is
  usually involved in focusing attention and
  concentration, is more active during meditation.
  This makes sense since meditation requires a high
  degree of concentration.

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Image 1
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Image 2
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The biological roots of mysticism

• The second image shows that there is decreased
  activity in the parietal lobe. This area of the
  brain is responsible for giving us a sense of our
  orientation in space and time. Newberg
  hypothesized that blocking all sensory and
  cognitive input into this area during meditation
  results in the sense of no space and no time
  which is so often described in meditation.

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David HayThe Biology of God
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Spirituality as a Human Universal

• All human beings have a spiritual dimension.
• This spiritual dimension/spirituality has
  biological correlates
• Spirituality is present in human beings for
  evolutionary purposes
• It is this inherent spirituality that lies behind
  the creation of religions and religious systems

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Relational Consciousness
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Spirituality and Religion

• From Hays perspective this is the source of the
  experiential basis of religion, seen as a social
  construction in response to spiritual experience.

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The Spirit of the Child

• Children are inherently spiritual
• This spirituality is present for
  biological/evolutionary purposes
• Childrens spirituality/relational consiousness
  is present from birth

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De-spiritualising Institutions

• Children are taught to think logically and
  rationally and to downgrade or even exclude the
  pre-school spiritual experiences that were so
  formative of their early perceptions of the
  world.
• Hay identifies this spiritual repression with
  certain forms of frustration and aggression
  encountered by children in their teens.

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The social construction of Secularism

• Individualism is a myth
• Secularism is a myth which has been created by
  western culture and which now appears normal.

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Is Hays position reductionistic?

• A particular view of evolution
• A dangerous view of the significance of biology
• A significant challenge to secularism and
  individualism

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Spirituality and the caring professions
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What is a disease?
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A disease is first and foremost a meaningful
human experience
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Lipowski how we view illness

• Illness a challenge
• Illness as enemy
• Illness as punishment
• Illness as weakness
• Illness as relief
• Illness as strategy
• Illness as having value

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A persons spirituality shapes their illness
experiences
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Jane and Elizabeth
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• Who am I?
• Where do I come from?
• Where am I going to?
• Why?

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Seeing things differently

• When we begin to seek after answers to these
  questions, we begin to see the world quite
  differently.

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Spiritual Reframing
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Mental Health Care
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The Sorrows of Young men

• The problem of suicide in Western cultures

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Depression

• 1 in 6 people will have depression at some point
  in their life.
• The World Health Organisation estimates that
  depression will become the second most common
  cause of disability worldwide (after heart
  disease) by 2020.
• In the UK children as young as 4 are being
  diagnosed with depression.

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Depression amongst young women in inner city
London George Brown and Tirril Harris

• Most people who become depressed do so as a
  result of there being something wrong with their
  lives not with their personality.
• Most serious life events are losses i.e.
  important relationships or life projects
  fundamental to peoples identities.
• Meaningful social support essential.
• How we deal with life events is affected by early
  upbringing or basic or core beliefs.
• Social Roles, Context and Evolution in the
  Origins of Depression George W. BrownJournal of
  Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Sep.,
  2002), pp. 255-276
• Brown, G.W. and Harris, T.O. (eds) 1978 Social
  origins of depression a study of psychiatric
  disorder in women. London Tavistock.

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Depression in the Hebrides
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Caring with disabled people
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What is Disability
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A focus on spirituality forces us to ask
different questions and in answering these
questions we begin to care differently
Spiritual reframing
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The Double Narrative of Disability
All forms of disability have two narratives which
can be told about them, one scientific and
biomedical, the other experiential and deeply
personal.
Spirituality relates to the personal narrative
which, whilst often does not have a high profile
in professional or sometimes even pastoral
thinking, may be crucial to the care of the
individual and the community.
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Signing in heaven
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The Body of Christ has Downs Syndrome?
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Growing Old,Keeping the Faith

• Spirituality and dementia

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Forgetting whose we are

• Jeans Story

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Rementia

• Clear examples have been noted of rementing, or
  measurable recovery of powers that had apparently
  been lost a degree of cognitive decline often
  ensued, but it was far slower than that which had
  been typically expected when people with dementia
  are in long term care.

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We are Persons-in-Relation
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We relate therefore I am!
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Spiritual care with people who have dementia
reminds us that we are not our own.To be me, I
need you to be you you need me.
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Re-membering the Person