Examining my motivations for attempting to develop Inspire Spiritual Health, I identified my autistic nature as playing a role. The extent of this I don’t know, nor do I think I ever will. This is not a problem as I see it, this is a supercharged engine as far as motivation is concerned; driving me forward when it comes to Inspire Spiritual Health!
Motivating factors also include the long term goals I’ve set for myself when it comes to Inspire Spiritual Health. The goals emerging from:
our vision of Inspire Spiritual Health, mission, purposes, values, methods, and message!
Further, but by no means all of my motivators because they are too numerous to mention, include:
My finding it exciting, trying to identify to the best, most realistic ways and means I can, for conceiving and nurturing this initiative. It is challenging, as it forces me to have to make and stick with decisions. I am acutely aware that my sticking with decisions must be tempered with my need to recognise and be open to better ways forward. As, from experience and my understanding or theories in Complexity philosophies, I recognise situations are in degrees of constant relative flux. What I may have previously been working with and on, changes over time and with different influences. I find my taking this combination of approaches from within a Complexity philosophical framework, helps alleviate many of my concerns relating to uncertainties. Such concerns feeding into my insecurities, resulting in paralysis, when it comes to commitments. By taking the approaches I am, this combination overcomes a lot of the uncertainties and insecurities I experience when it comes to my making decisions, and committing to them. It gives me confidence; that I have enough detail, understand it well enough and am applying it correctly. I suspect my autism may have a role to play here, where I have a correlation between anxiety and loss of confidence. My experiences of anxiety and loss of confidence has resulted in the past, in uncertainties over:
Where and how I place the right boundaries around my work
Directions I opt to follow
Analytical methods I engage
Tentative conclusions I reach.
My obsession keeps me searching and driving on with my search for more information. I have been doing this subconsciously I think, in order to have as robust an understanding as I possibly can. I do it so that I can move on and set boundaries, commit to possible solutions, and act accordingly. By undertaking these actions I increase my confidence in what I am doing, whilst trying to offset my private uncertainties in my work, that are highly likely to be exposed and make me feel vulnerable, should I go public with what I have. My experiences of the anxieties associated with this have been crippling. Extremely more so, when it comes to presenting my work or work I have been involved in, publicly in person. My drifting in searches for and exploration of further information in private, is all too easy. When I do this, it alleviates anxiety and avoids having to commit too strongly to anything privately or publicly. I thus am continually able to dance around all the anxieties I don’t want to experience that are associated with committing too early to something that turns out to be incorrect and/or harmful. What this drifting and dancing does do however is reward me with intellectual knowledge, distractions, senses of partly fulfilled curiosity, and inevitably, further questions. However, that is at the cost of having nothing obvious to share with others; no way of working alongside others to share our learning, development or actions together. My not being able to share has stifled some of my major personal needs, and quite possibly, hindered my advancement of Spiritual Health. It seems to me now, I have reached a point in time, knowledge, experience and personal growth whereby, I am now able to take this website approach and develop it as a catalyst, to advance Spiritual Health. By trying this method, I hope to be able to share and engage with others in what we already have and are yet to discover, thus advance Spiritual Health. I am also hopeful that this apparent solution is and remains effective when it comes to mitigating some of the personal hurdles I’ve already mentioned.
Being an activist has and continues to remain very much who I am and what I do. This takes form from what I recognise to be the right actions to take, having identified the right, most valiant, priority causes to get behind and lend my life to. This certainly does make me appear self-righteous to those who are agnostic or oppositional to the causes I champion, and even for some within those same causes I champion. How much of this is down to autism, I don’t know. But, I am aware there are people with autism online, who are asking this same question about themselves too. Such drive combined with obstinacy, communications differences, and restrictive personal flexibility, and repressed immediate self-awareness/reflectiveness can and does add to the challenges of ‘playing nicely with others’. Especially so when it comes to the causes I’m passionate about! Rigidity of mind, being an experience of high functioning autistic spectrum – Asperger’s Syndrome Individuals (https://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/asperger.aspx).
I have a drive not to waste all of the energy I’ve invested into the field of Spiritual Health over the decades. Instead, I am trying to realise some of the potential my experiences may hold. Doing so, through the processes that will animate this emergent field of Spiritual Health, using this technological website approach.
My ties throughout my life to different aspects of what could be referred to as environmental movements; whether directly lived experiences with wildlife in South Africa, or a host of different ecosystems and landscapes across South Africa and the UK, have been hugely significant motivators in my life. The pets in my childhood from a very early age included dogs. Our dogs being just one of many other species, which included a monkey during my pre-teen years and disabled crows during my early to mid teens. Each, shaping my love and respect toward the animal kingdom. My special interests throughout my childhood as far back as I can remember involved animals; pets, books, films, zoos, safari parks, game reserves, nature reserves. My having the huge privilege of being able to experience a of host of natural landscapes, environments and ecosystems has, and continues to enormously influence my life. My experiences with animals and with a wide range of natural landscapes heavily influence my passion and devotion to the natural world. These heavy influences continuing now as one of the motivators for this study; to power human flourishing now and into the future. I am acutely aware that without the natural world humanity cannot flourish into the future. However, the natural world can and will continue to evolve and diversify without humanity.
Being cast as an outsider during encounters with people, has often been a position I find myself in. I have found myself in such positions from a very young age and it continued on throughout my life to date. By the age of 13 I had attended 13 different schools across southern England and South Africa. Given the dynamics of the relationships my parents had, within family settings I could also find myself being an outsider. When I started my professional career in the mid 1980s in the UK, as a male general nurse not working in a casualty unit or psychiatry, led to the then generally held stereo-type, that I was by default homosexual. I didn’t meet that stereo-type either, which placed me further outside many peoples expectations at the time, and for some time to come. I professionally continued my journey further into that of outsider, with my movement into Health Visiting. Relocating across southern England, Wales and Scotland further replicated these experiences as outsider. Thus, my normal state has been and continues to be, one of an outsider. With this has come tremendous experiences and insights. Such experiences and insights, from a diverse range of location and situations, which have provided me with opportunities to compare very different political systems at work. These merging and inciting my interests in power, politics, morality and ethics.
My faith in Christianity waxes and wanes but has still remained mostly present, re-enforced by my love and admiration of my Grandmother, through some extremely turbulent times in my childhood. She was my light and her faith was hers. In honour and memory of her, I continue to try to live a form of Christian life that is true to both myself and her. This has been extremely difficult at times, sometimes impossible, whilst at others, it has been as easy as breathing.
The experiences I have with general nursing in a host of setting and situations, gave rise to numerous encounters with an extensive range of people and situations. Generally, my encounters related to an extremely broad range of health-affiliated situations, in a professional career spanning over twenty years. My general interest in the field of spirituality was further shaped by my professional and personal journeys , into a specific interest in Spiritual Health. I increasingly and more intensely found myself asking myself, ‘maybe spiritual health has the potential to promote, sustain and advance health?’ I use of the word health, in a wider sense; one which includes chronology, environment, and power.
As a healthcare professional for a number of decades, I functioned in the grey areas between illness and wellness professionally and personally. I did so until I moved firmly over into illness and disability myself. I retired early on the grounds of ill-health and disability. These decades, continually shaping me as a healthcare professional and veteran. Very real personal experiences carving, entwining and shaping. Ongoing vulnerabilities to unpredictable periods of severe chronic and enduring relapses, interspersed with spells of remission, continue some of these processes. I also have lived insight into what it is to be a healthcare veteran much earlier in life than I and others would normally anticipate. I won’t go into detail of my illnesses and disability here, in order to care and protect myself to a degree. Doing so, in order to try and reduce the high risks and hazards for my illness and disability associated with more detailed information being in the public arena. I venture so far as to say that these are most definitely part of my lived experience of autism to date. These combinations of experiences do, however, place me in a position with insight. This insight, sense of loyalty and belonging to both healthcare professionals once and vulnerably disabled now, fire me up to still want to contribute, as best as I am able. Within the bounds of my very real limitations, contributing to healthcare professionals, vulnerable disabled, those living in poverty, and those who want to try and sustain a healthy life. Through my active participation this way, I find myself with new sense of purpose; evolving from old. This newly evolving sense of purpose renewing my values, enabling them to be expressed through the Inspire Spiritual Health initiative. So, at some levels, this Inspire Spiritual Health initiative, is very much therapeutic in value and nature for me personally. My hope here is that it will also become so for others, too.
I’ve had a fascination of philosophy for as long as I can remember; albeit very much an amateur one. This fascination was re-enforced, once I started to become acquainted with and practiced in critical thinking styles. My determination to find the solid answers in an unquestioning factual world view, soon came under my own scrutiny. Even more so when I started to become introduced to research techniques and strategies. It wasn’t long before I found myself in the currents; where research and philosophy meet. The rapids these meetings produce were and continue to this day, for me at least, to be at times simultaneously exhilarating and extremely scary! Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by it all and struggle to surface, and at others, propelled along in completely unpredictable speeds and directions. These currents and their rapids continue to act as massive motivational draws for me. Particularly now, when directly relate to spiritual health, reflection, action research, praxis, power and complexity theories. Can these be applied in such ways and means to adventurously advance spiritual health? Can a technological approach that uses an online presence for communication effectively act as a catalyst for this attempt at adventurously advancing spiritual health? The aforementioned are some of my own research-orientated motivators for how I myself want to try and adventurously advance spiritual health. As such, I recognise other people may equally have their own research approaches they want to bring to Inspire Spiritual Health. I see such diverse attempts as potentially increasing the growth and evolution of spiritual health and as such, I actively encourage it. Curiosity also drives me. I want to see just how deep, broad and numerous the different elements and systems dawning from such a diverse complex approach would evolve.
I am wanting to ensure the creation and sustainability of a dedicated protected space to nurture and grow spiritual health. Albeit, via a virtual world, to really attempt to realise spiritual health in praxis. I am aware online virtual worlds have varyingly designed features to try and reach out into the viewer’s personal real world. Here, Inspire Spiritual Health is no different. In so doing, my aim is to try and extend the range of such a dedicated protective space into my own real life and viewers real lives.
By recognising the inherent values in diverse methodologies (and epistemologies) and encouraging their inclusions within Inspire Spiritual Health, I’m endeavouring to enable research into spiritual health to flourish. Hoping, that by so doing, experiences will emerge and evolve which be can shared and actioned in practice by others. Their experiences in turn, also being shared here; further informing and inspiring people involved with our Inspire Spiritual Health Initiative. In effect, I’m trying to put in place anticipated key initial conditions that could possibly promote complex ecosystems and forms of spiritual health; evolving, enhancing one another, and diversifying.
I have ‘Beta Tested’ my ability to communicate online with hot potato issues, such as politics, on Facebook, as a member of a range of political Facebook groups and pages. In so doing I’ve discovered that it doesn’t have the same negative emotional impacts on me as I experience with face-to-face communications. This may be to do with the high degree of anonymity online writing and posting allows. Also, the security of being able to choose personally the nature of the physical space one is writing from, plays a positive significant role for me. Furthermore, I also have a high degree of control through the online method in the form of being able to physically close down communications whenever one wants or needs to. Another advantage for me is, it reduces the stress of being in real-world social situations. Such stresses emerge, for instance, as people react to my missing some of their body language, facial cues and/or verbal cues which include tones and intonations. These missed responses and anxieties about my missing them or misreading them, act as further stressors on already stressful situations; distracting energies from other tasks at hand. Online writing is by no means perfect, as we can and I have witnessed others inadvertently inserting their own emotional misinterpretations into what is written. A cascading of emotionally charged written interactions then ensuing, when the intent of the initial statement was not intended to and should not have warranted such an initial emotional response. In some ways online communications levels the playing field for me, as others also cannot pick up the tones, vocals or body language used either. This all acts as motivators for wanting to further try and test this out in practice; having an outlet for my need to offer what I can, potentially benefiting both myself and others.
To ensure I am able to financially survive I have been forced to accept an obligation. My obligation comes with my being in receipt of a state benefit which compels me to ‘expect to’ get paid for work. I have no problems personally with working and recognise it takes many forms and with myriad values. Given ISH is my work, I need to ensure I have are and means in place to be able to receive payment; in order to my being able to continue with it. I’m aware I cannot continue the growth of ISH without the necessary evil of some form of financial payment. It causes me huge discomfort, as this particular obligation is one I would very much rather not have. Seeking financial reparations makes me feel greatly embarrassed, uneasy and distressed. But, nevertheless, it is there. To try and mitigate some of my discomfort, any financial income that ISH raises, I will be dividing it up to allow for the growth and evolution of ISH. The divisions are: 25% staff costs, 25% administration, 50% grants (including research). To try and cut down as much as possible on the number of different charges and the ensuing charge rates, I have set up a simple dedicated separate personal bank account. I am self-employed and as such ISH is my business; a social enterprise, based here in Thurso, in the northern Highlands of Scotland. I will be pointing any financial contributions to that bank account alone, until such time as a dedicated business account, with all the resources needed to establish and sustain it, are in place. To do so requires enough interest and support, to be able to move myself from being a self-employed service provider using a social enterprise ethos, to an employee of a ISH dedicated social enterprise business. “Social enterprises are innovative, independent businesses that exist to deliver a specific social and/or environmental mission. All their profits go towards their mission. Social enterprise is a dynamic, ethical and more sustainable way of doing business.” (Source – https://www.socialenterprisescotland.org.uk/our-story/what-is-social-enterprise/).
None of the above motivators are in any particular priority order. I list them pretty much as they occurred to me and then I grouped them together in an order that’s thematic and progressive. Each of the above play their own unique, vital and major roles in my drive to engage with, experience and understand spiritual health. These each, leading me to form this initiative at this point in time.
Inspire Spiritual Health 
You must be logged in to post a comment.