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Practice From the Inside Out: How Healthy Is Our Spiritual Life?

Practice From the Inside Out: How Healthy Is Our Spiritual Life?

Last updated on: August 3, 2017 at 6:21 am by Greg Richardson

Practice From the Inside Out: How Healthy Is Our Spiritual Life? 2017-08-03T06:21:58-08:00 Greg Richardson

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How Healthy is Our Spiritual Life?

There are people who see spiritual life pretty much the same way they do physical health.

They sit nervously in their doctor’s waiting room hoping everything is basically OK. Some people know they need help from the doctor and worry about what they will learn. Others have a vague sense of discomfort but are not sure what might be wrong.

A few people take their physical health very seriously. They are just here for a routine checkup.

Each of us will face questions and testing. Some of us will leave reassured and some will be surprised. The anxious time on the waiting room may be rewarded. There may be recommendations we change our attitudes or behavior.

We can try to start new practices and change existing ones. Some of us might resist change, even if it is our own best interests. Established patterns may be too comfortable or seductive for us to start acting healthier.

It may be too late for some of us to change.

By the Numbers

I have a doctor who believes in living by the numbers. Some of us are like her. We measure and test everything. When some numbers go up we respond by trying to push them down. When other numbers go down, we try to drive them up.

Our understanding of our own health may be all about the numbers.

For me, health includes plenty of things which are difficult to measure. There is no number for how well I feel or the quality of my life.

I know some numbers are important. They tend to be meaningful because they reflect things which make a difference to us. There is nothing magic about blood pressure or cholesterol, but they suggest deeper truths.

That is how spiritual life works. Some things we can measure and they have meaning because they reflect something bigger.

We may have been raised paying attention to the numbers of spiritual life. Keeping track of attendance or what we have read, constantly taking our own spiritual temperature. Even verses in the Bible have numbers in their references.

Spiritual life is greater than the sum of our parts, more than we can measure.

There are times we are so busy measuring and assessing we lose track of spiritual life. Spiritual life is not our performance, not our scores on standardized tests. We live in relationship to the deepest, most Sacred truths. No matter what our percentile, spiritual life surrounds us and fills us.

Living Into Healthy Spiritual Life

Spiritual life is not healthy because it scores well, no matter how we try to measure it. Our attempts to measure spiritual life are only significant because they reflect deeper truths.

Being healthy is more elusive, more intuitive than all the numbers we use to describe it. We are healthy, at least in part, because of how we feel. Health is part of how we relate to ourselves, to each other, to everything else. When we become sick or injured we need to heal, to regain our health. It is more than what we can do or objective facts. Part of being healthy is how we understand ourselves.

Spiritual life shares a good deal with our health. The number of times we visit a spiritual place or how often we meditate do not measure spiritual life. Spiritual life is beyond our understanding and our ability to chart or measure.

We may describe our own, or someone else’s, experience but we do not make the rules. Spiritual life is outside our control.

It is not as if we can earn our way into either health or spiritual life. There may be things which increase our chances of living into them. We may be able to follow practices which open us and strengthen us. There is nothing which can guarantee our health or our experience of spiritual life.

Experiencing Spiritual Life

How do we recognize the power of spiritual life if it is more than we can understand?

We can practice opening ourselves to spiritual life. Like physical exercise, our practice prepares us to notice and appreciate spiritual life within us.

There was a time when I was more religious than spiritual. I searched for the right answers and, when I thought I had found them, held on tight. I believed, and depended on the accuracy and strength of what I believed.

My struggles were when what I believed did not seem to hold up to real challenges. I found myself painted into a corner.

My numbers measuring spiritual life were good. I had pushed the bad numbers down and pumped up the good numbers. Despite how my numbers looked, I was not healthy.

The challenge for me was facing the deeper truth of what I believed. Spiritual life was not having a good set of numbers, being in a good percentile. Spiritual life is about the deep truth underneath the numbers.

It has taken me a long, painful time to peel off the layers which obscured that truth. There are layers on which I am still working.

Healthy Spiritual Life

Spiritual life draws us in to continue seeking, continue exploring. There is no location where we can stop and know we have grasped spiritual life.

Like our physical health, we do not reach success. We grow healthy by not becoming complacent, not allowing ourselves to think we have arrived. Our health grows for the rest of our lives.

It is the same with spiritual life. Life fills us and pours out of us for as long as we live. We do not get to the place where we are finished, where we can stop.

Healthy spiritual life is growing ever deeper.

Questions

How are you growing more open to spiritual life this week?

Where has your health grown over the past year?

[Image by allenallen1910]

Greg Richardson is a spiritual life mentor and leadership coach in Southern California. He is a recovering attorney and university professor, and a lay Oblate with New Camaldoli Hermitage near Big Sur, California. Greg’s website is StrategicMonk.com, and his email address is [email protected].

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