The word health can be broken down into two components—physical and mental—and most people know that their mental health impacts their physical health and vice versa. In fact, personal health has four parts: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Since there are so many different columns to personal health, this article will focus on the mental column of personal health, namely why it’s important and what you can do to keep it in tip-top shape.
What is Spiritual Health?
Contrary to popular belief, spirituality does not refer solely to the religious. My brother is as atheist as atheist can be, and even he has spiritual health. This column of health has to do you with your beliefs, whether religious or spiritual of any kind. Those who have religion or faith to fall back on are no healthier in their spiritual health than those who do not.
So, let’s right now separate the further conversation here from religion or faith. That is not what we are talking about. Okay?
How Do You Take Care of Your Spiritual Health?
Now that we’ve established all people have spiritual health even if you’re not religious or spiritual in that way, how do we take care of it? Unlike physical health, your spiritual health is not a tangible entity. Managing it requires a heightened sense of self. So, that’s the first step.
Finding Your Sense of Self
How cryptic is that? Find your sense of self — what the heck does that mean?
Simply, it means, find your purest, truest you. I know, it’s not that easy. But there are ways to help you get there.
MEDITATION OR PRAYER
Neither of these things needs to be religious, although they often are. We’ll talk about beliefs in a bit, but for now, let’s talk about silence.
Research in silence has been growing in the recent years, and it all comes down to: Silence is great for you. In our fast-paced, social media-driven world, it always feels like we’re go, go, go. Under the pressure and the speed, sometimes we get left behind in the shuffle. The whole of our personal health suffers.
Whether it be meditation or prayer or simply stillness, the innate silence of those activities give your soul the chance to reset, to expand beyond the barriers that keep it contained. Your self will feel full and free, and we all need that.
JOURNALING
Another way to make space is to get the feelings out. Whether this be a stress list or a practice in gratitude or spilled-out words narrative-style, writing it down makes space on the inside.
You can do this step with the previous or alone, but either way, your soul will thank you for the extra space.
ART
Just like journaling, art makes space for your soul by dumping out the feelings and stresses and words stacked up inside. This art of yours might be music or painting or cooking or writing; it might be something else entirely. Art brings joy, and art brings rest. Your soul needs both.
Finding Your Purpose
Now, ain’t that vague? How does anyone find their purpose? It’s not like God’s got a Help Window for such a question. You can pray on it, but sometimes the Big Guy’s office is backlogged.
As someone who’s not Christian and therefore has a very different relationship with the world’s ruling spirits, I think we’re mostly on our own in this regard. We will know when something falls into place, but we have to do the work of sifting through all the things, trying to find which one fits.
Our guiding light? It’s joy.
[GIF: Miranda Bailey “Don’t take my joy.”]
“You can’t give from an empty cup.” We’ve all heard it. Often at a time when we don’t want to hear it. But it’s true. Your purpose is no different. Sometimes we think we’ve found our purpose—sometimes we fully believe it and sometimes we think, this is just what one does; sometimes a purpose no longer serves us. If any of these are true, re-evaluate. You might need new joy.
You’ll know when that joy fills you that you’re where you belong. But you have to get moving first. And joy is the easiest place to start.
Gratitude & Mindfulness
Both of these are hard. Gratitude requires a disconnect from society’s demand to think outside yourself. You can be grateful for silly things as well as big, world-scale things. Gratitude is supposed to bring you joy. For those who can practice it without the socially-injected guilt, it does. I’m someone who feels far too much (unjustified) guilt to achieve the benefits from practicing gratitude. (Im working on it. Anyone else?🙋🏻♀️?). If gratitude works for you, do it. Do it! If it doesn’t, you’re not lost. You can still practice mindfulness.
What is mindfulness? It means you have an awareness of your whole self. Whether you get this through meditation or prayer (or sleep!), you are doing an internal check-in with yourself. Which parts of yourself hurt? Physical pain? Emotional? Mental? Spiritual? What do you need? What do you want? Answering these questions each day connects you with yourself and allows you to make adjusts to better yourself.
And for everyone else…
Faith, Belief, Religion
At the beginning of this post, I asked you to separate religion from spirituality. I’m now going to ask you separate “faith” from “belief” from “religion”. These are not the same.
Beliefs are those things which must be true in order for the world to make sense.
Faith is the trust of something outside of your control.
Religion brings belief and faith together.
Your spiritual health—whether a practicer of religion or not—requires both belief and faith. Faith that if you drink water, your body will stay hydrated. Belief that the sun will rise again tomorrow and you will have another day.
Imagine just how gloomy your world would be if you didn’t have faith and you didn’t believe… Let’s not put ourselves through that!
In Review
Spiritual Health is the most abstract of all the healths. It requires constant check-ins and the promise to not leave it behind when you get busy. We’ve all been through a world now where our spiritual health often got left behind (COVID); we know what that did to us.
Spiritual health requires different attention than the other columns. It will rise or fall in relation to the others, but it also needs special attention. This blog post was a pathetic attempt at opening the door towards awareness of your spiritual health. It did not, by any means, give true answers. Spiritual health is as unique as you are. It answers only to you. You’ll need to do the work and figure out what works for you and you alone. The care of your spiritual health is journey you must take alone.