Like many other pages in this digital garden, here I’m going to attempt to define “spirituality” as what it means for me personally. I won’t claim this definition universally applies to everyone.
Being spiritually healthy means that a person lives their life…
- in alignment with their core values (i.e. what they believe is important)
- with recognition that there is a greater whole that they are a part of
Backstory
Quite a while back when I set out on an exercise of Redefining Health for myself, many sources I came across mentioned a “spiritual health” category. And having been raised fully atheist within a Soviet USSR regime, which had a declaration: “religion is opium for the masses”, my initial reaction to that whole broad category was, “I don’t need that one; it doesn’t apply to me.”
However, what struck me was the description of “spiritual health” that many of these sources offered. The basic gist of it was, being spiritually healthy means you live with the purpose and meaning in your life. My initial reaction to digesting that description was, “wait, life has meaning?? all I do is wake up, work, hang out with family, watch TV, eat, poop, sleep and repeat the cycle. Isn’t that all there is?” And that’s a very bleak outlook on life, isn’t it?
So I put the quest of Redefining Health on hold and set out on a new side quest, searching for answers to what does it mean to have purpose and meaning in one’s life? The general guidance I’ve learned through that quest was that meaning and purpose came from connectedness. Your daily life being connected to your core values and you recognizing your connection to the larger fabric. This larger fabric is different for many people, some refer to it as God, others see the universe, or society as a whole. While each individual might find something different here, the universal agreement is that all of us are a part of a (much) larger picture.