Spirituality
Spiritual healing techniques and spiritually based health care systems are among
the most ancient healing practices. Spirit is the liveliness, richness, and beauty of
one’s life. Spirituality is the drive to become everything one can be, and it is bound
to intuition, creativity, and motivation. It is the dimension that involves relation-
ships with oneself, with others, and with a higher power. It involves finding signifi-
cant meaning in the entirety of life, including illness and death.
The materialism of North American culture of the 1980s has given way to a period
of reflectiveness. People are searching for a “wholeness” in their lives and a way to
allow their innermost selves to grow and expand. Spiritual healing practices guide
people to places within themselves they did not know existed, through techniques as
ancient as prayer, contemplation, meditation, drumming, storytelling, and mythol-
ogy. In consciously awakening the energies of the spirit, people are able to move
toward healing places and sacred moments in their lives.Spirituality and Suffering
During periods of stress, illness, or crisis, people search for meaning and purpose in
their pain and suffering. They ask questions like “Why am I sick?” or “Why did this
bad thing happen to me?” This spiritual quest for meaning can lead to insight and
healing or to fear and isolation. In the words of Buddhist philosopher Ken Wilber,
A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life, is, at the same time,
beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering
smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and
forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply,
to touch ourselves and our world in ways we have heretofore avoided. It has
been said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace.
Spirituality is not religion. Spirituality, however, is the search for wholeness and pur-
pose that underlies the world’s religions. Remove the dogma, the politics, and the
cultural influence from any of the world’s religions, and you find the same ques-
tions, the same seeking, and the same answers. The concept of spirituality does not
undermine any religion but rather enhances all religions by illuminating their com-
monalities and the commonality among all people. It makes us far more similar to
each other than it makes us different.Spiritual Guides.
Many traditions also speak of spiritual guides. Some of us think of them as guardian
angels, others as Beings of Light who guide people through near-death experiences.20 ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TOALTERNATIVE MEDICINE