This is a HUGE question! For some, it’s a nonsense question as spiritual and spirituality is nonsense from their perspectives. For some of those with atheistic beliefs this will be their strongly held position. Whilst, for others who identify themselves as spiritual, it will be quite a profound and fundamental personal question! It order to start to grasp this problem, I think it’s useful to give you a very brief and grainy personal and professional bio, which can be found by clicking on this link.
For me personally, very much part of the challenge has included attempting to try and remain faithful to the nature of spiritual health, in the process of trying to understand spiritual health! This, of course, creates a paradox. How can I remain faithful to the nature of something when I don’t understand that same something is! I have had and continue to have some experiences, knowledge, observations, reflections, imaginings, contexts, and time, available to me to access. This has led to a dynamic flow series of processes. Reflecting back on these, a useful analogy is that of water interrelating in a catchment basin. Sometimes, the soil is more dominant than the water, others the water is almost pure, gravity and currents drawing the water down to the ocean over time. A myriad of tributaries forming and disappearing again into the soil, pools of standing surface water form, dry, and reform. Surface and subsurface water conjoining and diversifying. Rainfall, evaporation, trans-evaporation, the nature of the soils, rock structures and water table; each active systems playing into this experience. Trickles, eddies, waterfalls, obstructions each interfacing too in a varying range of hydrodynamic and at times, chaotic ways. A highly complex series of interactive and transactive systems. My journey to date through the field of spiritual health, has been rather analogous to walking in a wild area experiencing these different aspects of this substantial catchment basement through a host of seasons, and trying to understand it. And yes. I definitely got very wet, cold, extremely lost and confused at times, almost drowning, wanting to abandon the whole experience; on multiple occasions!
However, I am at a point where I feel still uncertain but confident enough to attempt to sketch out map of this massive water catchment basin I have experienced and deliberated on. This tentative sketch map I’ve tested often in a variety of ways, means, situations, and over time. Doing so, still leaving me with a great deal of uncertainty but with enough confidence to start to rely on it. And from here, evolve it further. I have reached a point in time where I recognise although I still a great deal of uncertainty, that is fine. I confidence enough to start sharing publicaly here emerging spiritual health, as I understand it to be. I am not claiming it’s universal, neither am I claiming it’s the only way or means to relate to spiritual health. My claim I make is that, based on my informed learning, knowledge, experiences, and praxis, I am now in a position to commence a public emergence here of a unique and relatively reliable model of spiritual health.
This model of spiritual health I opt to continue to present using a First Person Action Research approach, with an emphasis on both Reflection and Action. A significant part of my actions being, my attempts at crafting my model of spiritual health into this digital form of communications, known as a website. I aim to do so in such a way to make it accessible to a wide audience, whilst also re-enforcing confidence in it for those considering it from academic perspectives. After all, a model of spiritual health has an untapped potential for further challenges, growth, evolution and diversification if it is remains heavily contained within a highly rarefied environment and ecology which is; intentionally restricted to just myself alone. If I continue it only in this way it will never have an opportunity to move out and start to realise it’s potential, as such, it will inevitably become extinct. To see if my model is indeed fit enough for the environment and ecology it is synthesised from and for; born to survive and thrive in, it needs to be introduced first to it. This is what this section of the Inspire Spiritual Health website and my First Person Action Research is intended to do.
Inspire Spiritual Health 