Tag Archives: spiritual wellness

The Importance of Spiritual Wellness for People from all Faith Backgrounds

People use the phrase “mind, body, spirit” all the time. We acknowledge that an equilibrium of these three dimensions is foundational for our thriving and wellness, and yet we give very little attention to the spirit. Our energies are poured into exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, meditation, and even therapy, but tending to the spirit feels unfamiliar and intangible, especially in the many hours spent living beyond the walls of religious institutions.

The idea that spiritual wellness is tied exclusively to places and rituals of formal religious groups is a notion that keeps many people afraid of diving deeper into spiritual exploration. There are an overwhelming number of people who have experienced some form of church abuse or disillusionment, and who cast aside their spiritual needs thinking that if they are unchurched or unsure of their religious affiliations that spiritual wellness is something unattainable or irrelevant, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

 

 

I’m one of the lucky ones. I was raised in a healthy religious community by parents who gave me a stable foundation but also allowed me the freedom to think critically and explore my own beliefs. For this reason, I’ve felt comfortable contemplating what spiritual wellness means to me within the context of my own faith while also considering its importance and application to people from diverse backgrounds.

These are some questions I’ve sat with over the years and that have guided my journey for clearer answers:

Is spiritual wellness the same for people from different spiritual belief systems?

Does spiritual wellness require identifying with a specific religion or is a person still able to pursue it if they’re temporarily (or permanently) disaffiliated from a formal place of worship?

Is spiritual wellness attained by adhering to specific daily practices or is there flexibility to engage in different aspects of spirituality depending on the circumstances?

Is spiritual wellness best achieved alone or in community? In quiet meditation or group worship and prayer?

How and why is spiritual wellness relevant for atheists and non-religious individuals?

The answers I have found are not elitist or exclusive. They come from many years spent studying wellness and striving to better understand and educate others about it. In the simple diagram below you will see the various main components of spiritual wellness including morals & values, prayer, community, compassion, beliefs, meditation, private contemplation, and service.

 

 

Each of these eight aspects of spiritual wellness are important for a person’s well-being; however, each person will find that they gravitate towards certain expressions of spiritual wellness more than others. For example, an atheist might be more drawn to compassion or service over prayer. A Christian might pour more energy into prayer and community than meditation. A Buddhist might practice meditation and private contemplation more than community. A Hindu devoted to practicing Ashtanga is potentially and uniquely engaged in all of the components of spiritual wellness, or is at least encouraged to pursue them.

It’s okay to spend more energy in one area of spiritual wellness over another, and what we focus on or need is likely to ebb and flow throughout life. The important thing is to recognize that ALL of these eight components are fulfilling to humans and aid us in spiritual meaning and growth. Also, despite some beliefs to the contrary, each of these components is applicable across religious and non-religious belief systems.

 

 

There are some Christians who believe meditation is sinful because it allows the mind to wander and be tempted by “the evil one,” but meditation can be practiced in a Christ-honoring way, focusing the mind on the Cosmic Christ’s love, peace and light within. Similarly, atheists might feel that prayer is ridiculous because they don’t believe in a higher power, but prayer can come in the form of communicating with creation (“Dear Universe”), privately and intentionally confessing one’s overwhelm or needs, or saying a prayer directed towards expressing love and learning from one’s ancestors or hope and healing for future generations. In this way, you begin to see how each component is important even if a bit unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

I want you to consider how the components of spiritual wellness work within your own life. I invite you to ponder which areas could use more growth, which ones intimidate you (and why), and which ones feel most organic for how you desire to live with purpose.

Lastly, I encourage you to lean gently in the direction of what puts you out of your comfort zone. I believe wholeheartedly this is where we are invited to grow the most in unexpected and beautiful ways that foster greater spiritual wellness and mind/body/spirit health.

 

 

I hope that putting spiritual wellness into a tangible framework and terms helps you focus on it in more meaningful and holistic ways. All of our souls are thirsty, but they can be quenched and live life to the fullest.

The world is in dire need of more people who recognize and recommit to living a spiritual life. Will you be one of them?

Yours in health and wellness,

Maggie

 

 

 

Every Woman is Worthy

Out with the old and in with the new!

I’m excited to (verbally) introduce the new slogan for WellnessWinz: Every Woman is Worthy!

In the video below, I dive into why this slogan gets to the core of wellness and the heart of the site’s content over the past seven years. Included in our discussion are the four aspects of wellness covered through long-form content on WellnessWinz – physical wellness, emotional/mental wellness, spiritual wellness, and most recently, social wellness. There are a handful of other dimensions of wellness that are important such as occupational, intellectual, creative, environmental and financial, but I will leave other more qualified experts to dive into those.

So, for now…let’s explore what “Every Woman is Worthy” means, how judgement of the self and others holds us back, and why living this message out is so important for women from diverse backgrounds.

(Ps – An alternative to watching me through the whole video is to start playing it but listen as though it’s a podcast while you cook, clean, exercise, etc.)

(Please be patient while the video loads – thanks!)

I would love to hear what you think every woman is worthy of. Fill in the blank in the comments:

Every woman is worthy of ______.

Yours in health and wellness,

Maggie

Spiritual Bypassing: Why it Hurts Wellness

Spiritual bypassing was coined by John Welwood, a prominent psychotherapist and author. I owe Rachel Ricketts, author of Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy, thanks for putting this term on my radar. In her book, Ricketts makes excellent points about how damaging spiritual bypassing can be and how commonplace it is. So, what exactly is spiritual bypassing – and why does it hurt wellness?

 

 

Spiritual bypassing involves a large degree of avoidance and repression of emotions, resorting instead to spiritual ideals in pursuit of enlightenment. As described in Welwood’s book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, spiritual bypassing is when someone uses “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”

Spiritual bypassing is a means of side-stepping hard emotions and truths through spiritual ideology and idealism. It’s succumbing to binary thinking and accepting black-and-white views of circumstances. Through spiritual bypassing people avoid the often painful and complicated realities of life by always trying to find a silver lining in traumatic events or saying “everything happens for a reason” instead of facing deep-seeded and difficult feelings. This happens because people mistakenly believe that we must rise above our “unreliable emotions” instead of facing them and allowing them to serve as inner wisdom in raw form.

Spiritual bypassing can look like the following go-to phrases during hard times:

  • Everything happens for a reason
  • There is no pain without purpose
  • There’s always a silver lining
  • God will never give you more than you can handle
  • Only positive energy and vibes are welcome
  • Your life’s circumstances are a product of the energy you attract

These statements are commonplace in everyday conversation about tough circumstances. They’re a way of glossing over the situation; an often underrecognized defense mechanism. My guess is that you’ve heard one of these phrases or something along these lines over the past year as the world has battled a deadly and devastating virus.

 

 

According to VeryWellMind, other signs of spiritual bypassing include:

  • Avoiding feelings of anger
  • Believing in your own spiritual superiority as a way to hide from insecurities
  • Believing that traumatic events must serve as “learning experiences” or that there is a silver lining behind every negative experience
  • Believing that spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer are always positive
  • Extremely high, often unattainable, idealism
  • Feelings of detachment
  • Focusing only on spirituality and ignoring the present
  • Only focusing on the positive or being overly optimistic
  • Projecting your own negative feelings onto others
  • Pretending that things are fine when they are clearly not
  • Thinking that people can overcome their problems through positive thinking
  • Thinking that you must “rise above” your emotions
  • Using defense mechanisms such as denial and repression

Kelly Germaine, a trauma therapist, wrote on Medium that although Christians most notably use spiritual bypassing, “The church is not the only culprit. Those of us disillusioned with the faith lineages our people come from frequently escape into Eastern spiritual traditions.”

Kelly continues by explaining that when westerners pursue Eastern spirituality, it’s “often an attempt to escape the roots of violence our people have enacted and been complicit in. We run away to nature, India, or Latin America to meditate, tree pose, permaculture, and breathe our way out of the reality that we live in an empire dominating the world along the lines of class, race, and gender. Our attempts to go anywhere else on the globe to get away from this reality are futile. We cannot bypass the truth and holing ourselves off will not save us. We cannot escape our global, interlocking crises of oppression.”

These forms of bypassing, defense mechanisms, and escapisms deny our innermost feelings and needs on both individual and collective levels. As Kelly highlights, spiritual bypassing inherently denies the harsh realities of those who are oppressed by society or have difficult lives. It turns a blind eye to people who suffer at the hands of others who seek to explain away such undue hardships.

Spiritual bypassing hurts wellness. Big time.

We can never thrive or be collectively well when it’s at the expense or denial of others’ difficult circumstances. We also can never achieve individual well-being when we deny our feelings or refuse to face reality. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be spiritual or religious. We can!

 

 

True spiritual wellness is essential.

Spiritual wellness is defined differently by each person but it generally relates to a sense of greater meaning in one’s life and connection to others and/or a higher power. More specifically:

Spiritual wellness provides us with systems of faith, beliefs, values, ethics, principles and morals. A healthy spiritual practice may include examples of volunteerism, social contributions, belonging to a group, fellowship, optimism, forgiveness and expressions of compassion. Spiritual wellness allows one to live a life consistent with his or her’s own belief and moral systems, while we establish our feeling of purpose and find meaning in life events.”

Here are a few ideas to embrace spiritual wellness without resorting to spiritual bypassing:

  • Listen in earnest to the cries, laments and needs of others
  • Demonstrate compassion
  • Attune to your personal emotions and the roots of them
  • Live in the here and now
  • Admit when things are hard and you need help
  • Engage in works of justice, charity and service
  • Connect meaningfully with others
  • Bring honesty into your community of worship
  • Heal from trauma
  • Accept your anger, grief, shame, etc. and find professional help when needed to work through these feelings
  • Stay emotionally present with the people around you
  • Avoid telling someone in pain how to feel or behave
  • Admit that it’s OK to *not* be OK all the time
  • Acknowledge your personal trigger responses, work towards healthier responses where appropriate, and set boundaries

 

 

Spirituality can help us achieve wellness when we avoid spiritual bypassing and find positive beliefs within our faith and moral systems. As mentioned, a person’s propensity to be overly positive and idealistic can be a harmful form of emotional repression. Positive belief systems are a bit different though. Positive beliefs associated with a higher power and our connection to others can be beneficial to one’s health.

On the other hand, negative spiritual beliefs can be damaging in many ways. For example, one study of over 200 people suffering from a range of conditions such as cancer, traumatic brain injury, chronic pain, and more, found that individuals who harbored negative spiritual beliefs had increased pain and worse mental health than those who held positive spiritual beliefs. Negative spiritual beliefs were associated with feeling disconnected from or abandoned by a higher power. The people with negative beliefs attended religious experiences less often and had lower levels of forgiveness.

Sometimes, for our overall health’s sake, we need to push the pause button and tune in to how our spiritual wellness is doing: Is it positive or negative? Are we making time for it? Is is helping us become more self-aware and fulfilled? I really like the reflection exercise (below) that I found on the Laborer’s Health and Safety Fund of North America:

Personal Reflection

Take a moment to assess your own spiritual wellness by asking yourself the following questions.

  1. What gives my life meaning and purpose?
  2. What gives me hope?
  3. How do I get through tough times? Where do I find comfort?
  4. Am I tolerant of other people’s views about life issues?
  5. Do I make attempts to expand my awareness of different ethnic, racial and religious groups?
  6. Do I make time for relaxation in my day?
  7. Do my values guide my decisions and actions?

 

 

As you can see, spiritual wellness involves diving deeper within and connecting to our most authentic self, values and beliefs. In doing this, we also convene with a greater power that connects all of life. The authentic practice of spirituality has the capacity to change the world and it reduces the amount of spiritual bypassing that is used in an effort to avoid the real work of wellness.

Yours in health and wellness,

Maggie

 

 

 

 

 

The 6 Dimensions of Wellness

Wellness has six dimensions, and although this blog has so far provided more information about the physical dimension, the other five are just as important.

Before jumping into what other dimensions make up what I call the “wellness wheel,” it’s important for us to understand how the wheel works…

All six dimensions of wellness exist in equilibrium, like spokes coming out from the center of a wheel. If one spoke is too short and another is too long, the wheel won’t roll smoothly down the road. Each dimension is ideally balanced out by another, creating harmony and smooth movement for the wheel. This balanced lifestyle has been called, by some spiritual leaders, the “whole life.”

While this sounds lovely, like butterflies, rainbows and flowers, it’s more than just idyllic. It’s a naturally occurring ebb and flow within our lives. Physical, emotional, social, occupational, intellectual, and spiritual wellness work concurrently to satisfy us. One is not more important than another.

I was actually shocked to hear Pastor David Stine, a spiritual leader in the DC metro region, say that being overly focused on being spiritual, at the cost of our physical health (and/or other components of wellness), can become just as unhealthy for us as not being spiritual at all. Yes, it’s true. A faith leader actually said this. His congregation responded with cheers and gasps of surprise. This demonstrates the power of living in wellness.

wellness wheel

Take the following examples of people who are having a hard time growing and/or who are living one-dimensionally…Maybe you can relate to one of these?!

Out of Balance

Julie works incredibly hard as a consultant. Approximately several times a year she will go through a 4-6 week long period where she doesn’t sleep more than 5-6 hours each night and forgoes the gym to work extended hours at the office. She usually takes Saturday nights off during this time and likes to go out for a handful of strong cocktails with friends, anxious to let go of some tension. On Sundays, she wakes up tired but she slugs down some coffee and gets back to work. After the 4-6 week period is done, she goes into overdrive at the gym, to make up for not working out. Julie tries to put in 1.5-2 hours each workout during this time but usually quits the gym entirely after 2-3 weeks because work starts to get busy again.

Dimension Stagnation

Martha has a stable job working for a tech company. She gets to work reasonable hours and can count on getting home to her family in time to cook dinner, put the kids to bed, and have a little personal time with her husband. Her family is financially comfortable and has a great network of neighbors and friends to keep them busy and happy. But, Martha just can’t understand why she feels so depressed since everything in her life seems picture perfect. The only thing she can think of is that she hasn’t been stimulated at work in over 3 years and can no longer imagine growing within her company. Every time she thinks about starting the job hunt she gets anxious but every time she looks around her office she feels underutilized.

One-Dimensional Focus

Last year, Brittany set a goal of losing 50 lbs because she was unhappy with her body. She went from hating the gym to waking up extra early to attend fitness classes and work out. A little over halfway through the year she has already surpassed her weight loss goal. She feels so empowered that she has decided to keep the ball rolling. She will try to lose another 25 lbs in the next three months even though she has reached a healthy weight. Her boyfriend has told her that she is beautiful how she is but every time Brittany hears this she rolls her eyes. She doesn’t want to go out for date nights anymore, fearing food at restaurants where she is unsure of the calorie count. Brittany’s friends also can’t convince her to go to brunch, or even to attend church together, because she says it will cut into her gym schedule. She has started arriving 15 minutes late to work because she wants to fit in extra cardio in the mornings and she often leaves work a little early to hit the gym again. Her boss notices that her job performance is deteriorating and her boyfriend is on the verge of breaking up with her.

Do any of these women sound like someone you’ve known?

Do any of them sound like you?

6 dimensions of wellness

 

I’m not saying we haven’t all “been there” because of course we have! We may have walked in similar shoes as Julie, Martha or Brittany, or our “wellness wheel” may have been dysfunctional due to other factors. Living in balance is NOT easy; however, living in balance is a worthy goal.

If this seems challenging and elusive to you, you’re not alone. Pursuing self-improvement in each dimension at once is admirable but also darn near impossible. We’re never going to be “perfect” but we can definitely strive to improve and become self-aware. We can challenge ourselves to balance out work and life. We can work to grow spiritually while also becoming socially vibrant. We can juggle our emotional worlds even when they are juxtaposed to our mental realities. The desire to grow, even if it means a little back-sliding and upheaval, is the ultimate catalyst for achieving satisfaction in the deepest parts of ourselves.

And so, we will season the content of this blog by sprinkling in wellness topics, interviews, and discussions. By touching on each of the six dimensions over time, we will grow ourselves and the women around us. I hope you’re as excited for the journey as I am.

PS – To show how dedicated I am to opening up these transparent discussions about women’s fitness and wellness, I will be sharing a personal story about emotional wellness very soon.

Yours in health and wellness,

Maggie

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References:

http://www.dcmetro.org/media/sermons/a-life-lived-whole/video/