Spiritual Health doesn’t have to be rocket science. However, it can get complicated. To simplify your life, we’ve put together some “signs” of spiritual health. Chances are if you are doing these things, you’re on your way. Much of
At our core, we approach spirituality from a Christian perspective. Ultimately, we believe, you are Spiritually Healthy when you can live in the sacredness of all that God has made. Put differently, it’s about finding meaning in the mundane. Read below for our top 25 signs for how to tell if you are Spiritually Healthy.
1. You employ your anger to positive ends
Anger is a natural human feeling that everyone experiences. Anger is your way of saying “no” to that which opposes
A spiritually healthy
Try exercising more “true anger” and avoid drama which erodes your connection with the divine and others. Click here for helpful strategies on integrating your anger.
2. You’ve given up trying to predict the future and you’re living on the edge of the unknown.
Perhaps all fear is the result of facing the unknown. Whether it’s death (the ultimate unknown) or the thoughts of your intimate partner (the tricky contingency), we’re often faced with uncertainty.
Within the spiritual traditions, there can be a kind of rattling of the human soul.
Spiritual healthy people strive to sit at the edge of the unknown without trying run away from it, deny it, or make choices based upon the fear it induces (see #25).
In fact, our spiritual work is largely about facing uncertainty.
Secondly, sit at the edge. I see this experience most often when people are in crisis in my hospital work in palliative care. They face cancer or a chronic illness as an existential crisis.
This anxiety is what Yvonne Agazarian called, “turbulence at the edge of the unknown.”
Fear is just negative excitement. Where there is excitement there lies your power.
It’s at the edge of the unknown (not
Be wild and claim the edge.
3. You’re not stuck in the “ought’ nor are you “shoulding” all over yourself
Some faith traditions have taught us about the importance of a four fold story.
From the Judeo-Christian tradition (Joseph Campbell’s narrative structure and Jung’s archetypes also bare some similarity), history unfolds in four major stages:
Creation – the Way Things Ought to be
Fall – What is
Redemption – What can be
Consum
The spiritual life is about integration. We integrate something by going through these four stages from ought, is, can be, and will be.
Germane to the human experience is to stay in our inner critic, the one who says what “should be” and “ought to be” but really isn’t. For this person they need to move to what is, otherwise they’ll be stuck in the past.
Whenever you find yourself stuck in ought you’ll hear yourself say “should.” Shoulding on yourself and on others is a sure way to get stuck. Whenever I hear myself or others say it I’ll respond “you’re shoulding all over yourself.”
We usually have a good laugh.
4. You live in what “is” as a step to what can be
Similar to #3.
The task of our spiritual work is to integrate the data from the world of “oughts” to the world of “is.” Going through this process by camping out in the world of “is” we integrate – or update our shoulds into “choices”. As David Richo says, “I stop shoulding. I make choices.”
Once we move into choices and take action our ought can transform into the redemptive moment of “can be.”
A spiritually healthy sign is when you can move from ought to is as essential steps to “what can be.”
[Sometimes we have to do violence to English Grammar to make a point]
5. What you believe lines up with what you do
This sign refers to the ethical or moral competent to spirituality. In a sense, are you congruent? Is there integration between head heart and hand?
Confucius once said, “The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.” This quote serves us here too. When we have a continuity between our private and public selves, we have a sense of strength in our personhood.
Nothing may be worse than a “spiritual person” whose beliefs, doctrine, or religion is higher than their simple commitment to act charitably with their fellow man.
You may not be the most enlightened or spiritually awakened, but if this sign is present, then you are whole in the ways that matter most – when who you are at work is because of who you are at home.
6. You treat others as you want to be treated
This saying also fits under the category of ethics. To be spiritual is to be moral. Treating others with the respect or kindness you would like to receive is a common principle throughout most faith traditions.
The golden rule is simple to consider but profound and rather challenging to execute. The individual nature of spirituality requires that we look directly at ourselves. It’s a courageous and mature outlook on life – to look at oneself for the change we want to see before kneeling in powerless victim hood to the injustices around us.
Spiritual health is about taking seriously the treatment of others if want our own needs met.
7. Hopeful Resilience
Spirituality can also create a deep sense of hope which in turn pays a full reward of resilience.
When facing crisis in the hospital setting, I’ve noticed people have a way of enduring nearly every form of bad news, because of their belief and trust in the future – that all this will “work out.”
Hope for a spiritual person is not “wishing.” It’s more sure, more trusting than that and much more active.
In wishing, we remain uncommitted and passive in our future.
When hoping, we give ourselves to a vision of human flourishing, to an actuality that we are willing to commit to and if necessary sacrifice our comfort to see it happen.
Hope involves the reality of suffering, wishing avoids it.
Hope embraces the unknown while supplying another story – a counter-narrative to the dismal circumstance or a new angle on a disruptive moment.
Wishing at best can only give us a desire for better outcomes, without the willingness to make choices for a better future.
In this sense, hope, not wishing makes you a resilient spiritualist.
8. You see despair as an expansion of consciousness
It was CG Jung who once said, “darkness and upheaval always precede an expansion of consciousness.”
When we sense our own negative emotions rising like a flood, it may be an invitation to a higher level of awareness bubbling up, if we’ll only listen.
Spirituality has always included a embrace of the awkward, the dark, the shadow as a means to greater inner unity.
As written on in other places, one quality of spiritual health is its ability to bring us unity. Spirituality has a way of gathering ourselves and making us of one mind.
The path to integration requires we face our shadows, those un-owned sides of ourselves.
9. You meditate as a means not an ends
If anyone has practiced meditation has noticed, there’s a place in your practice where you can almost get attached or entitled to the sense of calm you feel.
Meditation can bring up strong feelings but it can also be a place of comfort, ease, and even pleasure.
Spiritually healthy people don’t get attached to meditation as an end.
But see it as a means to an end. Different traditions will have different ends or goals for meditation.
It’s actually a sign of spiritual illness if you meditate and try to stay there always.
This has sometimes been referred to as “spiritual bypassing” where you use spirituality to avoid the harder realities in your life.
Spiritual bypassing in meditation avoids the psychological work and the day to day duties required of you as an adult.
See mindfulness and reflection as a tool to play with and camp by, but don’t make it your home.
10. You do what you need to do and trust that Grace will carry you through.
This is a great mantra for those with strong phobias around decision making.
Within various religious traditions, they have noted when followers overlly strive for “liberation” (muksha – Vedanta) or enlightenment (Buddhism).
A strong sign of spiritual health here is when you can grasp the grit, the grind, and the grace.
In your spiritual life, you work hard to cultivate disciplines, read sacred texts, meditation or pray, fight for justice where you can.
That’s the grit.
As you consistently do this for years that’s the grind. Not giving up on your spiritual vision of human flourishing.
But then there’s the grace. In Vedanta and in Christianity, there’s a trust that the divine will grace you, that is, give you a gift of liberation or conversion. That God will shift your perspective and bless you beyond your hard work to give you something you could have never earned.
The lesson here: don’t worry. Trust that which is Bigger than you to bring you where you need to go on your own journey.
11. You own your power and let go of the need to control
From Ignatius spirituality (a patron Catholic saint and contemplative 16th century from Spain), we learn the principle of FACE.
In the contemplative Catholic tradition, forgiveness includes letting go of the four major obstructions to our relationship with the divine:
Fear
Attachments
Control
Entitlements
Our need for control in particular steams from our capacity for power. Some are passive with their power (they give it to others), some are aggressive (they make efforts to take other’s power from them). The goal is to be assertive as a spiritually healthy person by owning your power while letting the chips fall where they may.
- What does owning your power look like?
- Showing your real feelings
- Giving and receiving openingly
- Asking for things directly
- Telling your opinions and owning your right to think
- Taking care of your interests
- Saying No to what you do not want
- Acting as if you deserved abundance [ref] Richo, David, How to be an Adult, 22. [/ref]
Spiritually Healthy people are in touch with their own power and check-in with whether control is something they really want in the first place.
12. You feel close to your divine Source without allowing your guilt, shame, or fear take over your relationship with your ultimate power
If we were to think of spiritual health as consisting of three major domains, the affective (feelings, thoughts, and sensations), the existential (“being with” oneself and one’s environment/ meaning-making), and transcendence (connection with a higher power or truth), then maintaining your relationship with the divine is a priority.
Finding a meaningful transcendent Source may not come naturally to everyone, but it is an essential key to determining spiritual wellness.
The litmus test for meeting your need for transcendence is how near or far you feel to the divine. How is your relationship doing with your Spiritual Center? Are you at odds with “God?” Do you feel fate or Destiny is against you (I.e. Dread)? Are you connected and celebrating or are you feeling distant and ambivalent.
These are great questions to use when checking with your spiritual zest.
13. You Parent yourself
Every person has unfinished business with their parents and their past. We were all children once, and those younger parts don’t go away. Often wounds of the soul still fester. We didn’t choose these wounds but inherited them from broken parents.
As one author put it, “none of us leave childhood unscathed.”
With that there’s a natural grief process we all must undergo on our journey to adulthood.
Before we can manifest our spiritual Self, we need to pass through the journey of adulthood. Whatever the spiritual life is, it isn’t less than a healthy psychology for the soul.
That involves, as I said earlier, grieving our childhood, facing the shadows and trauma when we were most vulnerable and afraid.
We discover that the journey to parent ourselves is also the journey of a hero. Every hero departs from the known (neurotic and inflamed ego), we struggle and face the unknown (grieving our childhood and taking responsibility for the life as we now have it) so that we can return to our lives transformed (a healthy ego that manifests the spiritual Self).
Spiritual People who don’t parent themselves are robbing themselves of their richest transformation by avoiding the responsibility that our lives are ultimately the way they are because of us and no other. That’s because our life is how we respond to what’s given to us.
14. You transform every defect into a capacity.
This too is part of the hero journey. When you can look at your defects with curiosity, compassion, and self-acceptance.
In this way, we are not denying, repressing, or just introjecting our personality problems, but we are acknowledging they are real.
Transformation is like “conversion” of the mind and soul. When we can have a shift in perspective on our shortcoming, there in that moment, we have changed in some degree.
Whether that sustains into a new character is different question.
But transformation is no less than a shift in perspective.
“ The great change never does occur, only matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Here was one.”
Virginia Wolf
The other piece to this sign of spiritual health is seeing your defects as a hidden potential or capacity.
Think about the next time you really admire, adore, or even worship a quality in another. According to Jung, this is your positive shadow. Your soul has found what you have not loved about yourself in another.
As Emerson has stated, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
A strong sign of spiritual health involves integrating this truth in every aspect of living – “everything belongs” and “the Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.”
15. You practice a moral code while allowing yourself to make mistakes
Perhaps this was my biggest insight of 2018. The reality that as an adult I make mistakes and that spiritually healthy people accept both the freedom and responsibility of this truth.
Spiritually healthy people are human people.
Living assertively with your relationships and choices allows you to maintain a moral clarity.
Moving from passive to assertive presence, you can employ your power in service of your ethics.
16. Choices and perceptions in your life are flexible, not rigid or absolute
I love this one! Spirituality is fluid and dynamic. Often this understanding of spirituality as such is contrasted with “religion and dogma” which are more often seen as hard and inflexible.
If we are looking for signs of spiritual health, it makes sense that are choices would agree with our outlook.
Rigid perspectives and absolute choices are usually signs of early childhood when the world was black or white.
Spiritual awakening is the movement from childhood worldview to Self worldview. When you are in Self you have the capacity of choice always available to you and with it the “inner witness” who can see more options.
Spiritual health involves an openness to options, an assessment of which you want or need to take and the courage to follow through when life changes (as it often does).
You remain flexible as the wind to shift with your inner power to a new direction and new normal.
17. You can drop poses and let your every word and deed reveal what you are really like.
For some people this comes easier than others. For the artistic types (I’m thinking of the Sexual 4 in the Enneagram), maintaining authenticity is a supreme value for you.
For others, you’ve seen how radical honesty has hurt feelings or perhaps you’ve seen how a need to be “authentic” turned out selfish and self-serving.
That’s not what this sign is about.
Dropping poses is closer to what Carl Rogers talked about in his client-centred therapy practice, namely “Congruence.”
When he commented on this “caring condition” to the relationship, he noted that most therapists were not practicing this or at least were taught this.
Congruence, if practiced tactfully can be a liberating art for you interpersonally.
With Rogers, whenever a client said something potentially shocking or irritating he would give his immediate reaction for the sake of truth in the relationship.
Think for yourself. What would it be like to be honest in your relationships like that?
To allow within your relationship (friend, family, or foe), the respect they are due and give them yourself as you really are.
We are more likely to accept positive emotions and their expression in our interpersonal spheres. But what about irritation, anger, shame, and guilt?
What would it be like for you today to be just a little more honest with your partner? What is something that you withhold that creates a sense of resentment (withheld anger) for fear that they will abandon you if you told them?
When you can be congruent (when feelings thoughts and behaviors align) you are displaying strong signs of spiritual health.
18. You acknowledge that every human power is accessible to you.
Often in childhood we learned about our limitations. I’m thinking of my 3 year old son who constantly wants to “be seen” and to “be taller.”
Or perhaps through some faulty parenting we were told we were weak, small, of lacking in our personhood.
The spiritual Self does not feel those things. Rather the neurotic ego does.
A strong sign you are improving in your spiritual health is when you accept that all powers of humanity are available to you as you need them.
Perhaps not all at the same moment, but you are a powerful being.
Power in this sense here does not absolutely corrupt, but not using it and even denying your power may be a sign you are still in the neurotic ego.
Powers of intellect, of virtue, or effort and productivity are all accessible to you by the mere fact you are an adult.
If psychological work is about changing our personality, then spiritual work is about manifesting who we already are.
Spiritual heath makes us look at what is already present. In our Spiritual Self, we have everything we need.
19. You love unconditionally and set sane conditions on your self-giving.
Unconditional love is the paramount feature of spiritual health.
The women in my life tend to be wonderful at giving this love to others, but struggle to give it to themselves.
The men in my life are great at sacrificing themselves in working for their families to have what they need.
How are you doing with giving unconditional love to yourself?
When you think about putting limits on your self-giving, what feelings come up? Relief? Anxiety? Anger? Sometimes there are thoughts associated with this to, like, “I love that word ‘sane!’” Or. “You can’t be serious, loving others is my passion.”
The key word here is “sane.” Sane conditions on your self-giving implies objective realities you need to keep for your own mental health.
Say it with me, “there is goodness to my human limitations.”
20. You accept that it is normal to feel that you do not always measure up.
How can you? You’re human and I’m human. Good enough is spiritual in that you accept mindfully your current condition as it really is as a step to what can be.
Like a big slice of German chocolate cake with a cold glass of milk (or whatever does it for you), take a moment today and gorge yourself on this reality….you won’t always measure up and that’s a good thing.
If anyone else says differently, they’re lying to you. Or worse, lying to themselves.
21. You grant yourself a margin of error in your work and relationships. You release yourself from the pain of having to be right or competent all the time.
What a burden it is to be right all the time. (Am I right? Say I’m right…)
Sure I love being right just as much as the next person (especially when in a robust argument with my wife), but if we were to be honest, it’s plain impossible.
You can’t know every contingency. You can’t be everywhere. You don’t have enough time.
This again goes back to my earlier comment. Spiritual health is about being with what is as a step to what can be.
The other key here is granting yourself the permission to make an error in your relationships. We make errors. We acknowledge what happened. We name it.
Then we make amends.
That’s it.
Spiritually Healthy people don’t get tripped up on perfections because they’re into meditation and a Higher Self.
Their realism is spiritual and that realism must include errors and incompetence.
22. You lean into your circumstances with wholehearted engagement knowing this “leaning into” releases your irrepressible liveliness.
Some personalities remain in the past with regret and others go to the future in fantasies.
The Spiritual person remains childlike…in the moment with you and me and the tree.
It is actually in leaning into the moment we find what Freud called, the Id.
Most Depressed people I’ve met have lost touch with their Id, the irrepressible desires.
Granted we want to ride these desires and not let them ride us, but without them we face a crushing experience of surprising what makes us youthful.
By denying our “animal wisdom” we deny our liveliness.
I may not always like the duties in front of me, but one thing we do know is this…when I give my self wholehearted to what’s in front of me, the spiritual Self finds the moment of the now.
I also know that when I can be totally present to something, that task or relationship is far better than if I was stuck in the past or the future.
23. You reject whining and complaining as useless distractions from direct action on or withdrawal from unacceptable situations.
According to Billy Corgan, “We’ve turned into a whining society.” Whining is something children do, not adults and certainty not the Spiritual Self.
But more than that, what has whining contributed to the situation?
In most faith traditions, complaint to “g-d” is considered within faith practice. It’s when we get stuck there that it becomes a problem.
This sign of spiritual health reminds us that in the time we are whining we lose exposure to our solution.
24. You overcome the urge to retreat on the brink of discovery.
I love this one.
It’s at the edge of the unknown, where the hero finds the strongest winds and toughest foes.
There’s always turbulence at the edge of the unknown. This turbulence is the experience of coming up to the edge of your power.
Jung said that our Shadow is the “parts of us we deemed inferior.”
Facing those parts is the core struggle of your own hero journey.
Likely you will face anxiety, threat, and coping mechanisms as your internal psyche is fighting to keep a hold on what has worked for so many years.
When you are on the brink of a discovery, it’s because something has been gestating for years in the unconscious.
At some point, our old patterns don’t work anymore. We need a change.
The Spiritually Healthy person accepts the resistance as a sign of a big discovery and overcomes that urge, pushes through and finds the truth hidden within.
25. When change and growth scare you, you still choose them. You may act with fear, but never because of it.
Similar to number 24, but with a particular focus on fear.
Fear, Guilt, and Anger are the three most common challenges to adulthood and the eventual formation of the Self (Our Spiritual “I”)..
It was Govinda who once said, “the certainty that nothing can happen to us that does not in our innermost being belong to us is the foundation of fearlessness.”
Richo sees this as all fear is really
Our neurotic ego does not choose growth because it fears YOU.
It fears the real True Self emerging and dethroning your old patterns of security.
However, the way out is the way through. If we are judgmental of our ego and not grateful for how it has supported us through the years we may remain in our Superego which is still not the Self (our Spiritual Center).
This sign of spiritual health is about choosing the growth and the change, despite the fact fear is present with us. We make choices with the feeling but not on the basis of it.
Fear is the opposite of our Spiritual Self, because fear is totally conditional. By its nature it excludes whereas love includes.
Thus, this final sign of spiritual health reminds us that at the very core of spirituality is love and at the very core of our struggle and suffering is fear.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading through this long list of signs for your Spiritual Health. I really enjoyed putting them together and hope that at least one of the points guides you in your self-reflection and Self-revelation.
Spiritually Healthy You seeks to empower your capacity for meaning-making in all areas of life so you can be more Present, more Resilient, with more Common Sense. Please comment below on your favorite number from this list and we’ll see you in the next post!
