Spirituality and Mental Health

Seven Stages to Seeing the Sacred Within Yourself So You Can See It in Others

Holly K. Oxhandler

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781599475929
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

There are many kinds of helpers in our world, the caregivers among us. They are the social workers who serve the vulnerable, the nurses and doctors who treat the ill, the teachers who instruct the young, the first responders who rescue the imperiled, the faith leaders who comfort the congregation, the volunteers who support the community. And whether or not it is our professional calling, each of us is likely to serve as a caregiver at some point in our lives, as a parent raising a child, for instance, or as a loved one caring for an aging relative. These and many other efforts to serve are among the most noble pursuits we can imagine, but they come with a danger worth recognizing. In their devotion to the well-being of others, caregivers routinely put their own well-being  last and can unintentionally burn themselves out physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Their self-neglect, paired alongside a deep desire to help others, has the potential to stir up feelings of anger and resentment, leading to a sense of guilt and shame. They often believe that if they were to grant themselves any rest or grace, they would be at risk of failing in their duty. In The Soul of the Helper, Dr. Holly K. Oxhandler shows caregivers and fellow helpers a more self-compassionate way to cope with their overwhelming responsibilities and to attend to their own needs, particularly when it comes to their mental health and spiritual journey. She invites them to pause and realize that if they let their personal resources run dry, they cannot possibly care for others as fully as they wish. In fact, their efforts are likely to cause more harm than good. With a background in spiritually-integrated mental health, Dr. Oxhandler teaches helpers a seven-step process to slow down and reconnect with the stillness within themselves. It is in this space of stillness that Oxhandler guides helpers to reconnect with the "sacred spark" within their soul. By allowing themselves to enter that stillness, caregivers will recognize that they, too, are worthy of care. And with that realization, they will see anew the sacred spark that dwells inside everyone else, especially within those they're helping.As a social worker, researcher, and person of faith, Dr. Oxhandler writes in a warm and welcoming style, shares many relatable stories, and widens her scope to include believers of all faiths and spiritual traditions. Her book is for caregivers everywhere who sense the sacred spark within them saying, in effect: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

PART I

Spirituality and Mental Health

Two Key Considerations for Seeking the Sacred Within

CHAPTER 1

Considering the Spiritual Journey

Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing; we are in it.¹

—Fr. Richard Rohr

“Just pick a box!”

A dear colleague looks at me in a virtual meeting as I try to find an answer that best fits the question, “What’s your religious affiliation?” My answer—Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, None, whatever—will help a part of the work we’re doing, and I think he’d like to hurry me along. But if I’m honest, I don’t think my spiritual journey neatly fits within any of these boxes. How can a lifetime of dynamic beliefs, experiences, practices, and even doubts fit within a tiny square?

Struggling to answer, my mind wanders to one of the richest conversations I’ve had on spirituality with a prominent social work scholar. As we walked together outside a conference hall in 2013, she asked about my dissertation research. I sensed her cautious curiosity as I explained that I was studying social workers’ attention to clients’ spirituality in treatment. As we walked under the old trees on campus, she disclosed that she identified as atheist and shifted into a beautifully poetic explanation of her preference for the words wonder, awe, and beauty.

Listening to this academic draw on examples of what these words meant, I watched with deep curiosity as something tangibly shifted in her. Her whole being softened while simultaneously lighting up, and her voice became tender. For this academic, these terms—wonder, awe, beauty, mystery, presence—touched on something sacred within her and her connection with everything, which couldn’t be ignored, corrected, or dismissed. And in that moment, I recognized the honor of holding vulnerable space to listen to what these words meant to this fellow image-bearer of God who didn’t believe in God.

I return to the boxes, continue to contemplate them. There’s no option for “Wonder.” There’s no option for “Awe” or “Mystery” or even “Spiritual.” Instead, every option is hard and fast. I am either one religious tradition or another, and the rules don’t allow me to check more than one box or add caveats to the side. It is an impossible task, so I simply choose “Protestant” and move on.

Religion and Spirituality

The Latin root of spirituality, spiritus, means “breath of life,” and I’ve loved Dr. Pargament’s simple definition of spirituality over the years: “the search for the sacred.”² For the purpose of this book, I want to stretch this definition a bit further and define spirituality as follows: The experiential search of the mystical, sacred spark or image of God within that connects us to our truest selves, to one another, and to all that surrounds us. Spirituality, in other words, cultivates an inner sense of connection with the immanent and transcendent sacred love found in others and in all of creation.

My reference to the image of God within us is from Genesis 1:26–27 and reflects this idea of the sacred spark, which has been written across various mystical traditions. As Christian mystic Meister Eckhart notes, there is a “light in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable,” an essence within the soul that cannot be separated from God. Eckhart explains that our purpose in life is to discover this divine spark in our own hearts and then realize this spark is in all of life.³

Religion is quite different, although it has some overlap with spirituality when it comes to our emotions, thoughts, and experiences. As noted by social work professor and researcher Dr. Edward Canda, religion is a “systematic pattern of values, beliefs, symbols, behaviors, and experiences that are oriented toward spiritual concerns shared by a community and transmitted over time in traditions.”⁴

For many of us, our spirituality brings us together and leads us to organize within certain religions. These religions attempt to guide us in our spiritual interactions. Put another way, spirituality is generally (and hopefully) the focus of religion, though that isn’t always the case.

Another relevant term you’ll see threaded in this book is faith. Professor and theologian Dr. James Fowler defines faith as “a generic feature of the human struggle to find and maintain meaning [that] may or may not find religious expression.”⁵ For many of us though, our faith is inherently connected to both religion and spirituality.

Just as we are biological, psychological, and social beings, we are also spiritual beings. As a result, similar to how we experience physical health, psychological health, and social health (relationships with friends, loved ones, and others) on a spectrum, we also experience spirituality on a spectrum of “health.” Like these other areas of our lives, spirituality can be neglected or cultivated, starved or strengthened, or change in ways beyond our control. Spirituality develops over time, not in a prescriptive, linear fashion but through complex and layered growth based on experiences, supports, resources, and needs.

Religious Affiliation, Beliefs, and Practices

As of 2015, three out of four adults in the United States consider religion to be important in their lives, with 71 percent identifying with a Christian tradition, 2 percent Jewish, and about 1 percent Muslim, 1 percent Buddhist, 1 percent Hindu, or 1 percent Other.⁶ About one in four are unaffiliated or not religious at all. Even within these categories, there are additional subgroups and blended belief systems.

These percentages and ways of organizing information help us generally understand where we are grouped in terms of our religious affiliation, but they do not capture the nuances within each group’s or individual’s experiences, views, beliefs, and practices. One person may identify as Protestant and fiercely advocate for the recognition of same-sex marriage, while another Protestant might fiercely fight against the recognition of same-sex marriage. Both might cite their faith as the motivation for their advocacy. Meanwhile, a Catholic and a Buddhist may find more in common in their daily meditation practice than a Catholic and a Protestant, though the Catholic and Protestant both identify as Christian. Similarly, a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam may connect over discussions of mystical experiences and find authors from the other’s religious tradition who help them grow closer to God in their own journey.

Put another way, just because two individuals identify with the same religious tradition doesn’t mean their beliefs, practices, and interpretations of holy texts are the same. Likewise, just because two individuals identify with different religious traditions does not mean their spiritual beliefs and practices don’t align, at least in some ways. We are complex beings, each on our own journey.

In addition, spirituality and religion can have a degree of fluidity and change as we age. In fact, nearly half of us don’t identify with the religious tradition of our youth.⁷ And this doesn’t take into account those who have left and returned to the tradition of their youth or those who are currently deconstructing and reconstructing their faith, even though they haven’t yet jumped ship. I’ve experienced this firsthand. I grew up within the Catholic church, and my husband, Cory, grew up within the Church of Christ. Grateful as we are for the spiritual lessons we learned in our upbringing, over the course of our marriage we’ve attended nondenominational, Nazarene, and Baptist churches. For us, the priority has always been connecting with fellow travelers within a local faith community that closely aligns with our values and honors where we currently are as a family along our faith journey.

These days, we hear a lot about religious affiliation numbers and the decline or growth of various denominations. And though those numbers might offer a snapshot of trends and how many members there are in each group, they can be reductionistic or overly simplistic. The data points fail to capture the depth, complexity, and nuance of each respondent’s spiritual journey.

In 2018, the General Social Survey reported that 78 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves to be religious and 89 percent identify as spiritual.⁸ A few years prior, the Pew Research Center reported that nine in ten believe in a higher power or God, and seven in ten believe in heaven.⁹ Roughly half of us feel a sense of spiritual well-being and wonder weekly.¹⁰ These and other data points indicate that although the U.S. population is still largely religious, there seems to be a shift toward spirituality. People may attend religious services less, but at least half of adults in the United States practice their faith by praying daily, a third read scripture weekly, and 40 percent meditate at least weekly.¹¹ Even among those who consider themselves unaffiliated, atheist, or agnostic, three out of five believe in God, two out of five feel spiritual peace and well-being weekly, and one in five pray daily.¹²

These private and communal religious or spiritual practices are important to consider as we think about how we and those we care for lean on faith in times of joy and struggle.

The Spiritual Journey

Some philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers have written about various stages of faith or spiritual movements in an effort to help us understand the complexity of our spiritual growth and development. Examples of these include Dr. James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Dr. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (which later included self-transcendence), and Phileena Heuertz’s Pilgrimage of a Soul, among others.¹³ Each of these offers a robust examination of the shape of the spiritual life, which grows and develops like our bodies and minds. Each highlights the fact that the spiritual life requires care, attention, and practice, and sometimes progress is slow.

In his work, Dr. Fowler notes there are seven stages of faith, in which a person moves from the “infancy and undifferentiated” stage to the “universalizing faith” stage.¹⁴ Although aging plays an important role in biological and intellectual development, Fowler notes that progression through stages of faith doesn’t happen automatically as we age. What’s more, the speed of navigating through each stage can vary, and people may remain in any stage for most if not all of their adult lives.

Spiritual director and teacher Phileena Heuertz makes a similar observation in her book Pilgrimage of a Soul. She highlights seven nonlinear stages of spirituality—awakening, longing, darkness, death, transformation, intimacy, and union—and notes:

Picture seven three-dimensional rings all interlocked. Each ring represents a movement or season in the soul’s development. During a process of formation, the soul moves throughout these rings at various times, in no particular order. The spiritual journey is more cyclical than linear. Each moment in a certain movement or ring provides a necessary experience for personal and spiritual growth and development. At times we may progress from one ring to another, only to find ourselves revisiting a former ring for a deeper work in our ever-expanding soul.¹⁵

Recognizing that this is a lifelong process, Heuertz explains, “We continue in this cyclical pilgrimage until that final day when we will make our last passage from death to life and find ourselves in eternal, constant union with the One whom we have longed for since we took our first breath.”¹⁶

This spiritual journey requires time, patience, and a degree of commitment to the process. Just as the frontal lobe in our brain doesn’t fully develop until around age twenty-five, and our hair doesn’t naturally gray until later in life, it also takes time for our spiritual growth and development to unfold.

This ongoing journey might help us understand why it can be more difficult to make space for spiritual perspectives outside of our own when we are young or earlier along in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Soul of the Helper Advance Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Intention
• Introduction
• PART I Spirituality and Mental Health: Two Key Considerations for Seeking the Sacred Within
• PART II The Journey of Seeking the Sacred: Finding the Sacred Within Ourselves to See It in Others
• PART III “So What?”: Cultivating a Practice of Seeking and Serving the Sacred for the Journey Ahead
• Notes
• Resources
• Gratitude
• About the Author